A United Messaging Environment
How do companies address the challenges of improving communication with customers, enhancing internal business processes (i.e. becoming paper-free) and delivering compliance with regulations such as SOX and other measures? If it sounds like an impossible dream, the reality is that it is possible right now. It is possible to handle all types of incoming and outgoing correspondence and getting payback in service and customer perception.
The impetus behind the theory comes from a number of origins, including industry requirements for increased transparency and accountability across the business. The drive towards integrated, unified handling of business correspondence is growing, as companies seek to capture and index all forms of business data electronically, to meet mandatory compliance rules, as well as speed up correspondence with customers, improve customer service and overall business processes.
It could be argued that this is an extension of the digital mailroom. Many organisations are already moving toward this by implementing document scanning in their mailrooms to make document delivery and processing faster. But scanning is only the first step of the journey.
The critical step is what happens after the scanning phase – the classification of all scanned documents and application of auto-indexing techniques via optical character recognition (OCR) or intelligent character recognition (ICR) technologies.
It is this step that allocates each document to a specific workflow path, with recipient details extracted so that documents can be automatically routed to the right destination: purchase orders to the sales and manufacturing departments, invoices to finance, and so on. If the document management system can link to core business systems such as ERP or CRM, so much the better, as this can further automate and enhance processes. Without automated indexing and classification, companies are still simply moving paper around – albeit in a digitised format.
So why stop at simply scanning and indexing incoming paper-based mail? The digital mailroom should evolve into a unified messaging centre for all business communications that need to be traced within an organisation.
With communication methods becoming increasingly varied, it surely makes good business sense to go beyond a digital mailroom to a messaging centre capable of capturing everything from paper-based mail to fax, email and voicemail.
Most mailroom automation focuses on processing inbound correspondence and mail, but the benefits don’t have to stop there. As corporate mailrooms handle both inward and outward mail, the next phase of automation will deliver further major benefits through response automation.
Extending the intelligence used to route incoming mail into the corporate workflow, certain types of incoming documents can trigger automated responses – such as acknowledgements of receipt of payment, or a customer letter without manual intervention. This further boosts efficiency and raises the return on investment of automation, and enables staff to be reassigned to more strategic tasks.
Greater communications automation, from closing off a contract, to acknowledgement of the receipt of signed documentation, or confirming that a client instruction left on voicemail has been received and actioned, will provide valuable reassurance to customers that their requirements are being listened to and fulfilled.
A united messaging system can be a real benefit in personalised automated response. Every business has some incoming communications that are far more important than others and yet these may often be treated no differently from normal communications and sometimes can even be ignored.
For example, service businesses often need a mechanism for reminding people of appointments or acknowledging receipt of letters, contracts or goods, whether these people are customers, suppliers or employees. Without automation, this process demands constant special attention to ensure the response is delivered swiftly, and is vital to the perception of service, yet in itself is not a task that requires skilled human input. In other words, it’s a high value task that is ideal for automation.
In appointment-intensive business areas such as law, medicine and management consultancy, an automated SMS reminder sent to the appointment holder the week or even one day before could help ensure appointments are honoured, or allow for slots to be re-filled in the event of a cancellation – optimising utilisation of time.
As an example of how streamlining messaging could deliver benefit, think how many calls call centres receive to ‘see if the letter arrived’? This is an example of ‘failure demand’, an issue that needs to be designed out of a system, if companies are to improve their perceived customer service.
Take the banking industry, for example. Simply by adding a mobile number or email address field and checkbox on an authority to switch mandate, banks could significantly improve their account switching process and customer communication by setting up an automatic email or SMS based progress update for customers to ensure they are informed at all stages of the process.
Streamlined messaging can be deployed to acknowledge receipt of a fax automatically by SMS or email and, if appropriate, prompt the customer to resend in the event that the customer has sent a blank or unreadable fax. Thereby simultaneously streamlining admin and becoming more paperlight through the use of SMS and e-based communication, while also significantly boosting customer service delivery.
There are some fairly compelling business drivers for corporates to streamline the way they interact with their customers and internally. First, it’s good business sense – united messaging cuts transaction costs across the organisation. Second, it improves relationships with customers, accelerating financial transactions. Finally, it also addresses expanding information management legislation, which specifies the need for companies to capture, track and control information – especially financial information – as soon as it touches them. That’s the kind of mail merge that can deliver benefits to users.