Wintertime, although joyous, can be stressful. Compound this stress with winter's ability to sully even the most determined worker's plans to produce work and operate a business efficiently (whether due to inclement weather, planned time off, travel, or illness), and making business preparation for this time of year central to your organization's strategic planning seems warranted.
Accounting for these variables is increasingly important, as consumers demand impeccable service and responsiveness from the companies to which they give their business at all times of year, but particularly so during the wintertime and holidays.
Document management solutions (DMS) are some of the simplest, effective ways to give your clients and customers what they need, when they need it, and under a large breadth of otherwise difficult circumstances.
The Adoption Gap
Although there's a large gap between technology available to businesses and effective adoption of said technology, relying on document management solutions to bridge this gap provides users with the simple interface necessary to not only overcome fear of technology adoption, but also potentiate the use of technology in facilitating return on investment.
This is especially true over the Holidays and yearlong, and especially in client-centric industries or small businesses branded by or built upon the personal touch that face-to-face and in-person meetings facilitate: financial services, insurance agencies, small accounting practices, etc.
Although opting in to document management solutions bodes well for small to mid-sized organizations and single departments within larger organizations year-round, the following benefits make document management solutions great tools for producing the following outcomes during the winter and holiday season.
Collaborative Mobility
As families grow increasingly dispersed, and mediums to facilitate travel (lower air fares, etc.) proliferate, so do the demands to keep workers securely connected over long physical distances during the holidays, and mobile document management is one of the untapped mediums for accomplishing this.
Cloud-based mobile document management literally lets workers securely place their o ice in their pockets, letting them be mobile via either Android or iOS mobile phones.
Additionally, when these workers have access to an internet connection, they will be able to securely share files with bank-grade encryption and keep coworkers updated on project progress without succumbing to the myriad problems of unstructured content inherent to email, and this is especially true during wintertime.
Furthermore, the versioning and check-in/checkout feature of document management solutions mitigates the possibility physical distance between workers will result in overwriting or needlessly duplicating documentation, ensuring that both mobility and sophisticated collaboration are enacted.
Accessability
Although mere access to email via mobile phone constituted "accessibility" circa 2010, a lot has changed in 6 years.
In 2016 and beyond, accessibility not only means the ability to receive others' requests, it also means you can provide requestees with everything they may be asking for at the drop of a hat, and these requests, as inconvenient as they may seem during the holidays and winter season, can be made simple through mobile document management solutions:
These subscription-based applications not only store all your o ice's information in one central location, they also make files remarkably easy to find through metadata-driven search architecture, which relies on retrieving files based on their titles and relevant metadata, not where they are stored.
Security
Although some would say accessibility to information via mobile technology compromises security, this depends far more on the technology within the mobile device than it does the mobile device itself.
For instance, MPOPs (multiple points of presence) and data redundancy in document management solutions increase the security of information despite placing the data in more than one place (for backup purposes).
And when it comes to putting the same file in multiple places through a web portal (an encrypted file sharing technology), customers can receive the information they need over the holidays and winter season not only at the drop of a hat, but securely, too.
An encrypted web sharing portal encrypts mobile data in transit and at rest before dispatching it to a highly secure, virtual private cloud (VPC).
The strong draw of this file sharing feature is it enables you to work from anywhere in the world, or simply the confines of your home on the day of a winter storm, while sending sensitive information to customers and clients without worry.
These web sharing portals also strengthen an organization's brand recognition over the holidays and wintertime-when advertising and marketing messages are at their peaks and competition to stay relevant is fierce.
For instance, an encrypted web sharing portal allows any organization to custom brand its URL and color the solution with the company's own design. The unique URL lets customers not only recognize your website, but also brings a greater number of customers to your domain, therein increasing your business's rank in the search engines and increasing visibility.
Essentially, aside from the great security features of a web sharing portal, the branding and custom URL options of an encrypted web sharing portal function secondarily as marketing that pays for itself.
Functionality
Oftentimes prospective document management solution users are concerned with the functionality of the systems they're looking in to. However, with recent updates and optimization, cloud-based mobile applications for document management solutions are closer than ever to the functionality one would have on a personal computer.
This guest post was authored by Jesse Wood
Ms. Career Girl was started in 2008 to help ambitious young professional women figure out who they are, what they want and how to get it.
