Post will remain key to customer communication say UK businesses

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According to a surveyaround a quarter of UK businesses handle more than 5,000 items of inbound mail every month.  The same number receive between 2,000 and 5,000 items and month while 35 per cent get less than 2,000 items a month.

However, the survey also found that just one in five companies operate fully automated digital mailrooms, with just three per cent of companies using them across all locations and the remainder using them in some locations only.  Digital mailrooms allow businesses to digitise post on entry and can radically improve data and information management and processes.

In addition, the research found that more than half of senior personnel at UK companies believe the ‘paperless office’ is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.  And despite these volumes of mail and post, only a quarter of companies are currently running paperless office initiatives.

Almost a third said they had never run a paperless office initiative within their companies while 20 per cent had discussed the option but never put it into action.

Spencer Wyer, Group CTO at EDM Group, commented on the findings: “The death of physical mail has been much discussed over many years.  The nirvana of a truly paperless office is unlikely to arrive in the near future because so many customer communications still need to be exchanged in paper form for legal or other regulatory reasons.

“In our view organisations can achieve enormous cost-savings and business process improvements by digitising their inbound mail operations with a digital mailroom, eliminating paper at source and incorporating it into a single, smart platform that can automate routing and decision-making using robotics and artificial intelligence.  Paper may never truly disappear, but using the right technologies it can be easily absorbed into digitised processes alongside email, web forms and other communications formats – enabling organisations to reduce the risk of non-compliance through lost or misplaced documents.”