A virtual address for business is a solution that came around less than 10 years ago and has grown in popularity. As digital solutions evolved, becoming more cost-effective and efficient, businesses implemented them to capitalize on virtual and technological innovations. More recently, the pandemic drove a lot of digital innovation because of lockdowns and remote work.

Considering 26% of US employees work remotely as of 2022, a virtual address for a business may be more relevant today than it was before. By 2025, it's estimated that 36.2 million US employees will be working remotely. With remote and hybrid work increasing, solutions like a virtual business address are an important digital transformation step for businesses to consider.

What is a Virtual Address?

A virtual address is a real street address of an office building or mail center where businesses direct their mail. However, businesses that have a virtual address don’t own or rent any property at that address. You don't need to have a virtual address in the state your business is in. You can have virtual addresses in other locations, which can be a good way to expand your reach.

Companies can obtain a virtual address for business through a digital mail solution platform such as Exela’s Digital Mailroom. These types of solutions are quick and easy to implement. Once you sign up, you select your virtual address, and you decide how you want your mail to be delivered to you, whether it's redirected to another facility or digitized and sent to you and your team online.

Solutions like Exela’s Digital Mailroom often come in many different plans to meet whatever needs you may have, whether you're a small business or an enterprise company. It's a great cost-effective solution that many businesses choose to take advantage of as their first steps in their digital transformation strategy.

The Benefits of a Virtual Address for Business

A virtual address for business is a good idea for businesses of any size due to the many benefits businesses can experience including:

Saving Money

Companies that are considering expanding into new locations no longer need to look into renting new office facilities. Instead, they can build a remote team and have a virtual business address in that location, saving money on rent, utility bills, office supplies, upkeep, and cleaning.

Gaining Consumer Trust

With so many businesses online now, consumers are becoming wary and aware of which companies they choose to make purchases with. Consumers look for aspects of a company that they can trust and one way to show consumers that you are a reputable organization is to provide them with an address. An online website with no address or phone number looks suspicious compared to one that provides an address and phone number.

According to a 2021 study, 67% of buyers trust local businesses more than online-only businesses. Having a virtual address for business lets customers know that your business is trustworthy.

Selecting a Location

Even if your business is located in one area, your virtual business address can be located just about anywhere else. So if you’ve discovered that there's a market for your services in a particular place where your business is not physically located, it may be a good move to purchase a virtual business address in that new location. This will give your business a presence in that location.

At the same time, a virtual business address gives you the opportunity to expand without physically needing to expand. With virtual business addresses, a company can have virtual locations in many different areas around the country. This allows companies to test out the markets in those locations without physically relocating.

Chain of Custody

With a virtual business address comes digital mail. If a company chooses to have its mail digitized and sent to recipients electronically, they will have a complete chain of custody and access to all important mail. There would be no searching for mail in file cabinets or losing important mail because it is all digitized and uploaded into the cloud, allowing companies to easily find and track mail.

What to Consider with a Virtual Address

A virtual address is great for companies that have remote employees because it creates a seamless workflow for employees to still receive important mail securely and directly. For businesses that work entirely onsite, a virtual address for business may not be needed, but may still be worth considering because of the many benefits it brings, including expanding virtually and digitizing mail.

Another aspect to consider is the volume of mail your organization receives. Your company may be entirely onsite and not looking to expand, but if you're receiving hundreds or thousands of mail and packages a day, it may make sense to use a digital mailroom to digitize all the mail you're receiving rather than hiring more personnel to ensure each piece of mail gets to the correct recipient. Not to mention the process of destroying or storing the mail which could be a time-consuming and expensive process. With a virtual business address and digital mail, a third party like Exela, would take care of these more labor-intensive and costly tasks.

Virtual addresses will not be used on Google Maps. According to the guidelines for Google My Business, if the business doesn't operate out of the physical location, then the business is not eligible for a business profile on Google. This is certainly a consideration to keep in mind when looking into a virtual business address, especially if you're considering having a virtual business address in a new location.

Exela's Digital Mailroom Provides a Secure Virtual Experience

A virtual address for business provides many benefits and should be a consideration for any business looking into digital transformation. Exela’s Digital Mailroom offers companies the option for a virtual address for business as well as a secure mail solution. Exela’s Digital Mailroom offers a nationwide network to help securely digitize mail, scan checks, and handle packages, taking the burden off of your company. A virtual business address often costs a fraction of the price of renting an office space and is a viable option for many companies. Consider a virtual business address and digital mailroom for your next digital solution.

What is a Digital Mailroom?

A “digital mailroom” automates the full range of processes that would ordinarily otherwise be performed by your mailroom staff -- except without the need for mailroom staff, or even, for that matter, a mailroom.

Digitizing your incoming mail is an important and reassuringly simple step toward digital transformation, which is where at least 98% of all businesses are heading in any event. It improves workplace efficiency, precision, and transparency, as we explain here. By rendering mail essentially “location-agnostic,” a digital mailroom supports the seemingly inevitable transition to remote work culture, not to mention the culture of corporate sustainability.

How it Works

The process begins with a simple one-time instruction to the United States Postal Service to forward your incoming mail to one of 70 designated Exela processing centers, which instruction can be implemented in as few as 7 to 10 days and is reversible any time at your discretion.

Thereafter, for as long as you wish to continue with the service, Exela receives your mail and uses state-of-the-art technology (including OCR-powered data extraction and proprietary AI-powered scanning for which we were recently awarded a patent) to intelligently digitize, index, and sort the content. The digitized content is then securely e-routed to the intended recipients. At the same time, it is also now immediately available for entry into all your workflows that utilize digital content.

Why Exela’s Digital Mailroom?

Exela’s Digital Mailroom happens to feature one of the world’s fastest scanning platforms. In fact, there’s virtually no faster way to digitize and route incoming documents. With 70 Exela processing centers around the world that support Exela’s Digital Mailroom activities, you can choose a center that’s convenient in case you ever want to pop in to pay your paper mail a visit.

In addition to digitizing your incoming mail, Exela’s Digital Mailroom can be used to digitize, index, and route paper records, including backlog, into the appropriate hands, as well any number of automated workflows (for example, medical records management).

Here’s a quick video tour through Exela’s Digital Mailroom.

Why it’s Right for Your Law Firm

A crown jewel in the Exela Smart Office suite of solutions, Exela’s Digital Mailroom has been particularly helpful to our law firm customers. Some reasons why include:

• Automatic digitization of content that for use in drafting.
• Establishing a firmwide source of truth about a particular client or matter.
• Entry of digitized content into legal industry-specific automated work flows such as these four you definitely want to know about.
• Supports faster response times to conflict-of-interest inquiries.
• Supports firmwide search capabilities for fast and informed answers to queries.
• Automated redaction commands, including batch redaction for enhanced security requirements, including “Chinese Walls.”

Learn how Exela’s Digital Mailroom was a game-changer for this large L.A.-based law firm during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There's no doubt that technology has and continues to alter the work environment in both small and large ways, creating, what we call today, an intelligent workplace. While technology can be implemented in a variety of ways within the business, one very important area to focus on is the workplace itself and how employees interact with it. People use technology to keep themselves productive, remind themselves of appointments, and do other various tasks from deciding what to have for dinner to helping them improve their mental health.

With this in mind, it's ideal to create an intelligent workplace that offers employees the same conveniences through technology that they’re accustomed to outside of the workplace. It's also imperative to take a critical look at how useful the various applications and devices are and how they work together. For example, using a variety of different programs that fail to connect to one another or that may be used by some members of the team but not others could cause confusion and take even more time away from employees as they navigate through the diverse technologies that are provided.

How Would You Describe an Intelligent Workplace?

Whether discussing a virtual workplace or a physical one, technology remains an integral part of it to the point where employees rely on different technologies to complete their work. While technology is necessary for an intelligent workplace, not every business that implements technology has an intelligent workplace.

An intelligent workplace optimizes diverse technologies to increase employee productivity, promote employee collaboration, and enhance employee experience typically using artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and other business automation tools. Essentially, an intelligent office is meant to simplify and connect, creating a seamless work environment regardless of whether employees are working on site, working remotely, or working in a hybrid environment.

Optimizing the Office with Intelligent Technology 

When considering ways to optimize the office, ask what could increase employee productivity and enhance employee experiences. These answers are major keys to creating an intelligent workplace. If the technology you're considering is simply another program to increase productivity when you already have two productivity applications, then the office is not optimized and the employees may become confused as to how to use these multiple applications effectively.

One important tip to remember to create an optimized intelligent workplace is to ensure that any technology implemented can connect with other technologies that are being used. For example, having a communication channel that can connect to a scheduling program is often very useful among employees.

Below is a list of different areas to focus on and different technologies to implement that can optimize the work environment and turn it into an intelligent workplace.

Document Management System

As the cost of paper rises, many companies are transitioning to digital documents which is a great first step in digital transformation. Digital documents are more secure, take up no physical space, and are easier to share. Some companies choose to use high-speed scanners in-house to digitize their documents or outsource to a document digitization service.

However, optimizing the workplace requires more innovation than just digitizing documents - companies need a digital repository to house them. With a document management system, employees can easily organize, retrieve, search for, and share documents. Management can also assign clearance to certain employees to keep classified documents secure.

A fundamental step for an intelligent office, a document management system cuts down on paper usage, makes document sharing easy, and makes finding documents faster and more efficient.

Work From Anywhere (WFA) Solutions

With more employees working remotely, whether fully remote or in a hybrid environment, a lack of workplace innovation often creates a barrier to remaining productive off-site. It's estimated that by 2024 81% of business leadersbelieve the hybrid strategy will be the default working model with 56% of work being done off-site.

Despite this projection, only 28% of businesses have implemented a clear hybrid strategy. In order to ensure collaboration and efficiency in a remote world, businesses need to execute strategies for employees working off-site. This includes building a remote culture, using different applications and technologies to enhance workflows, and staying in tune with employee needs.

Workflow Improvements

Information and tasks are frequently scattered across different applications and systems, creating a complex and confusing situation for employees. Between project management systems, calendars, and other platforms, employees may find they are consistently switching between applications without a seamless connection between them.

Digital transformation and technologies including cloud storage, augmented analytics, and business automation benefit workflows greatly. An optimized workflow determines how efficient your intelligent workplace is. Using a critical eye is necessary to determine where improvements can be made to increase workflow efficiency.

Conclusion - The Workplace is Evolving

An intelligent workplace is not meant to be built and forgotten, but rather something that is constantly evolving as technology and the needs of employees evolve. In order to thrive, organizations need to find and execute innovative ways to encourage creativity, productivity, efficiency, and collaboration in the workplace. Creating an environment where employees feel engaged and satisfied is a key goal of an intelligent workplace.

With Exela’s digital transformation services, organizations can discover innovative ways to optimize and implement workplace technology. Each organization has its own needs which is why Exela offers various solutions and services to meet any requirements.