On-line Communications Management
Begbies Traynor’s local network of offices in Scotland provide advice and a range of services mainly dealing with personal bankruptcy and insolvency. The service requires them to send out claim forms and protection, fee and annual circulars over the statutory three-year period on behalf of debtors to their various different creditors. At any point in time, this process involves preparing and mailing hundreds or thousands of items of correspondence, including enclosures.
Before Virtual Mail Room
Gillian Botfield, Senior Insolvency Manager at the Glasgow office describes how time‐ consuming their insolvency process used to be before they started working with Virtual Mail Room (VMR):
“In the Trustee Department we have about fifteen standard letters which need to be sent out at one point or another during the insolvency process. We used to have to photocopy all the relevant information, print out all the letters ourselves, collate them and put them in envelopes. At the beginning of an insolvency process, we only have 7 days to send out the initial letter to creditors informing them that someone has signed a Trust Deed. Given the high volumes of new cases we may have to handle, we would have problems meeting deadlines if one our machines broke down. We have about 30 people in the Glasgow office most of whom, at one time or another, would be stuffing up to a hundred envelopes each, so we would often need to bring in extra members of staff just to cope with the demand.”
After Virtual Mail Room
“We still undertake the preparatory work, such as scanning in circulars and attachments, and preparing the content of letters and enclosures. However, the mailing has now been automated for us, through the VMR system using the web interface they have set up. Each member of staff has a separate log‐in so we know who is responsible for sending out which circulars. Our staff simply provide the VMR system with the relevant details for each case, including whether or not a standard or individual attachment is required.
The standard claim forms for creditors are then populated with the relevant information for each case by the VMR system. It also identifies the appropriate attachments and provides proxy forms where necessary for the meetings of creditors.
Each new case is given a case code/reference number on this web-based system so that we can track what has been sent out over time via VMR across all the different cases. We can therefore check the status of a case at any given point in time, including checking the last activity. Senior managers and partners can review the status of different cases via the system, including routing through remote access. We are also able to prove when information was uploaded to the system.
Data which comes back from the VMR mailings, including, for example, completed claim forms from creditors with copies of loan agreements, credit card statements and so on, is entered by staff into our main IPS practice management system.”
What are the benefits of using the Virtual Mail Room?
“We are required to have a Certificate of Posting for each circular that is sent out, so we can prove the letters have been sent to all of the relevant creditors. In the past we would have had to do this ourselves which was really time consuming – VMR now does all of this for us and the system also provides us with a more objectively valid audit trail.
Thanks to the VMR system, our staff can now concentrate on more productive lines of work when they would previously have been stuffing envelopes. This is a real benefit to the business as having a more efficient system means that we can work on more cases without having to increase the number of staff. As you can imagine, introducing the VMR system has had a very positive effect on staff morale. Other benefits include not having to hold as much paper stock which saves considerable office space and our photocopying machines are obviously now freed up for other tasks.”
How was the implementation managed?
“Adopting the system was very straightforward indeed. The VMR team quickly understood our business process requirements and this has been reflected in the way the system has worked so effectively for us. We started with a small team of users including myself and added new users each week. Initially, I managed the set-up process and staff required minimal training once they had a username and password to log in to the VMR system. Any occasional issues are dealt with directly by staff, using VMR’s email support. To be honest, problems are few and far between and tend to be issues of our own making! We now have about 50 staff using the system across all of our offices in Scotland."
Get in touch
Email Tina Moloney - tmoloney@vmailroom.co.uk
Email Mickel Bak - mbak@vmailroom.co.uk
Or call us on +44 (0)20 8898 6565
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