Automate Capture For Incoming Mail & Reduce Processing Costs
If your business receives high volumes of incoming mail, both electronic and paper, consider automating your data capture and work flow processes to save valuable time and money. Many companies automate their capture processes for structured forms or documents, however, only a small percentage are aware that this process can be replicated for unstructured documents. These can include letters or general correspondence from customers or suppliers that arrive in a variety of formats, on a daily basis.
Capturing and processing unstructured documents can be expensive to manually process, you may have a team of people currently completing this task. If you’re looking to reduce costs, streamline processes or move staff into more profitable activities within the business, then read on!
What is an unstructured document?
A good example of an unstructured document is a letter returning from a client e.g. for an insurance claim.
- The client has already sent in their insurance claim form, but is later asked to send in further evidence in support the claim, with a covering letter.
- The cover letter is not a structured document, however the customer may have quoted the claim ID along with the words evidence.
- To manually process this, your team will open the letter, read it, check your database and talk to someone else in your team to try and match the claim and manually send to the right person in your business. This can be slow and labour intensive.

So how can intelligent data capture help?
- Utilising specialised data capture software, unstructured documents can be classified, based on keywords within them, as mentioned above e.g. claim ID, client reference number, together with the customer name, address and contact details.
- Data can then be routed to the correct person in your organisation utilising automatic workflow. Our team can set up a data feed from your existing back office database or system, to enable incoming mail to be validated or matched to the relevant department or employee. If the document arrives with only a claim number, and your database contains the number, case handler reference, customer name and address, this can be instantly associated and forwarded for processing.
- Validation can also be provided for captured data, for example, it can ensure that the document matches the correct claim ID for that customer, and that the claim is still open on your system.
- The software can be set up to look for number patterns and intelligently learns the documents as they are being processed. By learning the different document types the software will automatically recognise the particular style next time it is received.
- Using our cloud document management system, we can integrate the capture and routing steps so that the documents can be made available to your staff quickly. This provides a cost effective process and improved customer satisfaction.
For further details on Cleardata’s automated data capture solutions call our team on 0800 046 8083 or contact us. Alternatively try our quick quote tool.