As of March 12, 2020, a novel form of coronavirus known as COVID-19 has infected at least 118,000 people and killed more than 4,000 worldwide. Yet up until that date, many businesses the world over had not yet put business continuity plans into place. Concerned this stemmed from an “infodemic” of not-quite-accurate information, the World Health Organization (WHO) has stepped in to clarify that COVID-19 is, in fact, contagious but also capable of containment if the right measures are taken. Therefore, in an effort to galvanize action to fight the further spread of illness, the WHO has declared the outbreak a “pandemic.” And with that, businesses the world over found themselves doing the thing many had fervently hoped to avoid: sending their employees home with instructions to work remotely.
Why so much resistance to remote work?
With more and more companies deploying digital transformation initiatives, remote work has increasingly become a topic of interest, both to businesses and to their employees. Nevertheless, a surprising number of businesses do not yet have in place the infrastructure necessary to offer remote work as an option--even under the best of circumstances, let alone in times like these, where an unexpected turn of events has mandated remote work for the sake of public health. Of the businesses already up-and-running with remote employees, many presumed that even with some employees working remotely, others would be in the office holding down the fort--answering phones, making copies, opening mail, etc. What no one could have fathomed (outside of a dystopian novel) was a situation like the one at hand--one which transformed offices into veritable ghost-towns, even as business was meant to continue as usual.
But, hey, you’ve got this
That being said, once you realize “this is actually happening,” certain things will just naturally fall into place. For example, it’s easy enough to equip employees with laptops. It’s probably even comforting to schedule daily check-ins with your working group, whether via phone, text, or one of the more modern communication tools you’ve already been using. And email, well, thank goodness for email--because everyone uses email. Right? And nothing can fall through the cracks when you’re conducting business on email. Right?
Except...what about mail?
Not e-mail. Real mail. Mail-mail. Snail mail. Post office mail - not to mention FedEx, UPS, and the like. What we’re talking about here is all the mail that is not electronically delivered, and, now that we’re thinking about it, there is quite a lot of it. And we’re not talking about junk mail here. We’re talking important mail. Mail that’s critical to your core business. Tax bills. Tax refunds. Certified mail. Notarized documents. A notice your property is subject to a zoning dispute. A request to appear at an administrative proceeding. Subpoenas and other time-sensitive legal requests and correspondence. For that matter, any time-sensitive correspondence that the sender chose to send the old-fashioned way. Because it happens, and it happens a lot.
But there’s a solution. A simple and rapidly deployable solution, in fact.
Digital Mailroom keeps you in business even with no one in the office
Simply put,Exela’s Digital Mailroom seamlessly automates the full range of processes otherwise performed by your mailroom staff. When you sign up for Digital Mailroom, your incoming paper documentation is automatically re-routed1 to a designated Exela processing center, where our highly trained professionals scan and transform it into a digital format. Using state-of-the-art technology, including OCR-powered data extraction and our proprietary AI-powered scanning solutions, Digital Mailroom then goes to work, intelligently extracting, indexing, and sorting the digitized contents of your incoming mail, and routing it securely to the intended recipients.
Digital Mailroom isn’t new here at Exela. Businesses of all sizes around the world are already successfully using Digital Mailroom to transform incoming paper into secure, searchable, workflow-ready, actionable digital assets. A crown jewel in the Exela Smart Office suite of solutions, Exela’s Digital Mailroom makes remote work both possible and profitable--not only in extreme circumstances such as these, but in all circumstances.
[1] Re-routing is accomplished via the USPS within 7-10 days and is terminable upon request to the USPS
