Multi-channel capture to process – Doug Miles at AIIM UK 2015
In a context of digital transformation, organisations invest in four key areas: improving engagement, automating processes, improving insights and reducing risks.
That’s what Atle Sjekkeland said during his presentation at the AIIM Forum UK 2015. We covered the first area of investment (improving customer and employee engagement) on our InformationDynamix blog. The second area of investment – automating processes – is a broad topic, covering many technologies and certainly lots of processes. However, as Doug Miles said at the same event, ‘we see that paper-based processes are still the norm rather than the exception, killing productivity’.
There are many compelling reasons to deal with this challenge, customer service being a key one. Among the ways to get rid off the paper obstacle in process automation: head off paper at the door using a digital mailroom, as Doug said. He summed up some data, mainly regarding the ROI. In this blog post we cover some more.
The rising popularity of the digital mailroom
Traditionally serving as the hub of the internal mail system and the interface with the external mail as Wikipedia defines it, the mailroom is still the centre of paper-based correspondence in many organisations. Others have outsourced it to BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) service providers or embraced a DPO (Document Process Outsourcing, which is not the same) model.
While the image of the clerk delivering and picking up the post is still seen in several organisations, it is becoming an image of the past, something you see in old movies. The digital mailroom is picking up speed. Of course, digitisation in a mailroom context isn’t new and digitisation in the mailroom doesn’t totally equal the concept of the digital mailroom is we know it today.
From powerful document scanners and capture solutions to digital hubs
The first wave of digitisation and automation in the mailroom was strongly related with the rise of powerful document scanners and document capture solutions, leading to the mixed, yet often centralised mailroom we often still see and in several circumstances does make sense.
In recent years, among others driven by the need for speed, this centralised model has been under pressure as the need to capture documents and mail at the earliest point of entry in the organisation, leads to more hybrid and decentralised models. Central mailrooms mainly exist in very large organisations while smaller companies and branch offices often have hybrid approaches. As always, it’s not a “this versus that” story and as the ideal solution doesn’t exist and, among others, depends on the industry and business (and customer) needs.
Firms have become very aware of the cost of getting new customers, very aware of how important customer experience is to retaining customers, and therefore closely examine traditional mailroom applications and the way they manage receiving complaints. The need to serve customers more quickly and more effectively has become really, really important to the long term viability of the firm – “Unleashing information intelligence with Info Insight“.
Large BPOs or service bureaux who specialize in mailrooms, today de facto often are document capturing and processing hubs where digital is a key part of the equation. This isn’t new either. In fact, a big part of document imaging and capturing and related digitisation processes today still happens in mailrooms. When we first started talking about digital mailrooms, it was essentially in this context of digitisation and the automation of incoming mail processes.
Benefits of implementing a digital mailroom
In “Winning the Paper Wars”, AIIM summarizes the key benefits of implementing a digital mailroom, according to respondents:
- Mail traceability and compliance much better.
- Considerably improved customer service.
- Quality of data capture into downstream processes enhanced.
- Mail is immediately available for the remote staff.
- Ability to consolidate several separate scanning operations.
- Payback based on labour and space savings alone.
Reported benefits of digital mailroom implementations – source AIIM research paper Winning the Paper Wars
Digital mailrooms in a multi-channel customer context
Get rid of paper – Atle Sjekkeland at the AIIM Forum UK 2015
On top of these benefits, the central place of the customer and efficiency/costs, it’s important to look at the digital mailroom from the mentioned perspective of the steep increase of multi-channel inbound communications we’ve been witnessing for many years now.
As we covered in our Capture 2.0 webinar series, capturing (incoming) data and correspondence today is about much more than paper and includes email and many more information channels, sources and formats, mainly unstructured.
For most organisations, dealing with such multi-channel inbound communications (and the resulting unstructured data) de facto mostly happens in an ad hoc way. Another important number of organisations work in separate ways, depending on the nature of the inbound communications. A typical example is how routing and handling for paper, electronic and social communications are isolated in many cases.
It’s in the multi-channel customer (service and experience) context that the core evolutions in the digital mailroom occur with value as a key differentiator.
Der Beitrag The compelling case for the digital mailroom erschien zuerst auf KnowledgeShare by Kodak Alaris Information Management.