Today’s enterprise organizations are tasked with ingesting and distributing incoming mail and documents at an ever-expanding volume and rate. Getting a handle on efficiently managing and processing such information is a critical step toward increasing the productivity of departments, groups and individuals.
Most of us have become accustomed to the near-instant response time of the Internet, the ubiquity of mobile devices and the “always on” connectedness of our modern world. In this context, those businesses who can efficiently and effectively handle incoming documents and information — and mail-based customer engagement — will have distinct competitive advantage.
With that in mind, here are three steps an organization should take to move mailroom automation beyond the traditional digital mailroom. In concert, these steps will help your organization improve visibility into incoming documents, thereby enabling better management of information and, ultimately, customer service.
- Increase responsiveness of customer engagement. Response time is critical: it will reduce the time it takes to accept, process and accept mail and other documents. Don’t force your customers to send that new account application, claims form or other piece of correspondence to a remote paper-based mail center — unless you can promise to show them where the document is located at every stage of its journey through a process. Oh, and if the document is classified or deemed “Not-In-Good-Order” (or NIGO as commonly referred to in many industries), let the customer know its status as quickly as possible.
- Improve productivity of line-of-business (LOB) processes by reducing the number of NIGO documents you send to those processes. Documents classified as NIGO can result in a variety of negative consequences and can be very expensive, both in terms of lost time and resources to fix the problem, and the resulting customer complaints.
- Expand your businesses’ reach. Even though it’s last on the list, the importance of improving reach should not be taken lightly. A business that extends its mail-based customer engagement to a variety of channels and customer touch-points is not only improving its reach, but becoming closer to its customers’ needs and creating more value from each customer transaction.
For example, as your customer, I should have the ability to send you a document as an email attachment, scan it from my home printer, or take a picture of my passport using the camera on my smartphone and send it to you via SMS text. Do all of those methods sound reasonable to you? They should. Today’s customers are looking to conduct business with those organizations that are able engage with them via the channel of their choice.
Mailroom automation is the future of customer engagement by enabling better interaction via multiple touch-points and methods. Customer-facing applications can now be monitored for better control, resulting in increased responsiveness and a better customer experience.
For additional information, download the IDC Workbook Assessing Stakeholder Engagement for Effectiveness & Efficiency, An Insightful Guide to Better Mailrooms.