If you have spent any time looking at paperless solutions for your office, you have probably found that vendors love to talk about all the cool features of their product. They talk about OCR, ease of scanning, searching, and so on. But you probably are thinking, “Why should I care about this? What’s in it for me?”
I recently have the good fortune to talk to a user group of our community action agencies who use our paperless solution and asked them about their outcomes. Here is what they said:
- Spending Less Time on Paperwork – One person said the best outcome for her was that she was spending less time on paperwork and more time helping her clients. And helping clients was the reason she had this job.
- Less Stress – One user said she felt less stress because her desk was not cluttered with paper. And another one said she felt less stressed because she did not have to worry about which case file should she work on. Laserfiche Workflow automatically found the file that needed to be worked on next.
- Better Customer Service – A user said that when a customer called to about the status of her application, she could find the application in seconds and give the client an answer immediately. She said in the past a call like this could result in a series of phone calls, taking several days to complete.
- Reduced Labor Costs – One director said that the paperless system saved them hours and reduced the number of temporary workers they needed to hire. The result was that they had more money to help clients.
- HIPPA Compliance – One energy assistance director said that she used to worry every night when she left the office knowing that there were client files all over the office that had confidential information that anyone could see. Now with their Laserfiche paperless solution, this is not a problem anymore.
- Better Audits – Several users told us that a well-defined approval process combined with the Laserfiche workflow process for each application has made their audits much easier.
- Better Management Insight – Several managers said that when they were operating in an all-paper environment, it was difficult to know how their department was doing. Now, they can instantly know how many applications are being processed and the stage of the process they are at. Monthly management reports used to take hours and now are done in minutes.
If you are looking to implement a paperless solution in your office, I hope the product you pick will help you get the benefits these community action agency workers received.