Managing incoming correspondence efficiently is crucial for businesses seeking to reduce costs, improve the accuracy of mail correspondence, and even to enhance compliance. A digital mailroom solution offers a transformative approach to document handling, combining advanced technologies like machine learning and automation to streamline processes. Let’s explore how a digital mailroom can revolutionize your document management system.

Maximizing Mailroom Efficiency

The traditional mailroom process often involves manual sorting and processing, leading to inefficiencies and increased operational costs. By transitioning to a intelligent mailroom, businesses can automate these tasks, reducing reliance on manual labor and accelerating document processing speed. Advanced mailroom machines equipped with optical character recognition (OCR) and AI-powered algorithms can extract key information from incoming mail, enhancing the accuracy of sorting emails and ensuring no email gets sent inappropriately to the wrong contact person.

Benefits of Digital Mailroom Solutions

Besides the reduced operational costs, your business will also experience enhanced compliance. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, businesses can categorize and prioritize incoming documents based on predefined rules, ensuring that critical information reaches the right individuals promptly. Additionally, digital mailroom solutions provide real-time visibility into document status, facilitating seamless stakeholder collaboration.

Scenario 1: defining your mailroom rules

Digital mailrooms usually sort documents and incoming client communications according to rules. First, the business defines a set of document types, ranging from complaints and contracts to more complex files such as medical documents and European Accident Statements.

Next, the business is asked to develop typical phrases or words that might identify the file type, and rules are defined based on this user input.

But this manual process is not only time-consuming; it also turns out it’s not that easy for users to come up with these typical words and phrases on the spot—especially since there’s so much variety in language. Moreover, as the number of document types increases, so does the difficulty of manually selecting keywords.

Machine learning can help by completely taking over this process. Classification algorithms sift through heaps of files to create initial categories and the characteristics that identify them.

Business and IT can then label these documents and judge whether the sorting is accurate, enabling the algorithms to be trained further with additional data in a supervised learning process – with users validating the choices made by AI, so the algorithm knows whether it’s on the right track or needs adjusting. 

Employing machine learning improves the accuracy of your classification and extraction processes over time, whereas the accuracy decreases if you stick to the manual approach.

Streamlining Document Management with Machine Learning

Machine learning is pivotal in optimizing document sorting and extraction within a digital mailroom. Machine learning algorithms continuously improve their accuracy by analyzing document patterns and user feedback, ensuring consistent and reliable document classification. This self-learning capability reduces the need for manual intervention, freeing up resources for more strategic tasks.

Scenario 2: consolidating multiple mailrooms

When companies merge into one, administrative processes and mailrooms also need to be consolidated. Each of these digital mailrooms usually has several defined document types and a set of rules for labeling them.

Lumping them all together would create excess, overlapping categories, and sifting and adjusting them manually is virtually impossible. For machine learning, however, this is just regular business.

It starts by visualizing the output of your classification and extraction algorithm. The results of this matrix can then be used to identify similar classifications, a lack of data, and other possible issues. In essence, it gives you insights into your classification that you wouldn’t be able to gain using a manual process.

Based on the conclusions you draw from the matrix, you can then fine-tune the sorting further, combine document types, and ultimately narrow down your categories, so you’re eventually left with fewer distinctly different document types and a streamlined mailroom.

Choosing the Right Digital Mailroom Solution

Businesses should prioritize scalability, integration capabilities, and vendor support when selecting a digital mailroom solution. Look for solutions that offer robust document scanning technology, AI-driven classification algorithms, and seamless integration with existing IT infrastructure. 

Scenario 3: fine-tuning sorting rules

A final scenario is a combination of the first two. As companies grow, products are added, and communications and terms change. Your initial mailroom rules will eventually no longer suffice. Therefore, they need constant adjustment, with new document types added to keep up with the changing business.

This often results in a company having more categories than it needs and a lot of work every month to adjust the sorting criteria. Classification and extraction with machine learning can kill two birds with one stone here. A confusion matrix analyzes document classes and identifies potential problems. It can then narrow down the number of document types by looking for categories without clear distinction.

Sorting algorithms are self-learning and can be continuously updated behind the scenes with minimal effort to account for slight shifts in communications and products.

Adding machine learning shouldn’t be a hassle

Embracing a digital mailroom is a strategic investment, and many companies already have one, but often without artificial intelligence. At Docbyte, however, we believe that adding these classification and extraction algorithms doesn’t have to mean implementing an entirely new mailroom – a costly and time-consuming affair.

So, we’ve included AI in our mailroom software and packaged it in a module that you can easily add to your current solution using REST APIs. With our module, you’ll add innovative artificial intelligence techniques such as natural language processing to your mailroom, ensuring high accuracy, accelerating your business digitally, and more—all in the blink of an eye.

Want to find out what our classification and extraction module could mean for your organization? Contact our experts now. We’ll be more than happy to help!

WHITEPAPER – INTELLIGENT MAILROOM
An Intelligent Mailroom (IM) is a technology that quickly processes all inbound documents in any format and then distributes them to the relevant departments across your organization. It supports operations, saves time, and prevents errors and losses. Moving to an Intelligent Mailroom will improve your operational excellence, increasing your responsiveness.

Download