DOCUMENT STRATEGY Spring 2015

DOCUMENTmedia.com | spring.15

DSF THOUGHT LEADER 2 015

Advisory Board

leaders of the DOCUMENT Strategy Forum share their thoughts on the future.

THE NEW REALM OF CUSTOMER

COMMUNICATIONS

PUTTING THE “ENGAGEMENT” IN YOUR CONTENT MARKETING

2015

DOCUMENT STRATEGY FORUM PREVIEW

DIGITAL MARKETING NEEDS THE PRAGMATISTS AS

MUCH AS THE EARLY ADOPTERS

volume 22 issue 1

Spring.15

DOCUMENTmedia.com

Features

Content 22 Enterprise Management Is a

Competitive Differentiator

By Mark Blazek

20 Paradigm shift: Leveraging next-generation CCM & ECM Leader Viewpoint

strategies to deliver superior customer experiences DOCUMENT Strategy Forum Preview

Departments

Columns

06 06 What’s New 08 Editor’s View 10 Contributors

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Masthead

Putting the “Engagement” in Your Content Marketing

24 Knowledge Is Power

By Michele Flanagan

New World 26 Technology’s Order: Not Creative

Destruction but the Path into the Future

By Gerald Edwards

Is at Hand: What Will 28 Change You Do About It?

By Fred Kam

By Bryant Duhon

New Realm 14 The of Customer

Communications

By Kaspar Roos

Marketing 16 Digital Needs the Pragmatists as much as the Early Adopters

By Matt Mullen

SPECIAL PREVIEW Don’t miss our annual event on May 12-14 in Greenwich, CT. Register by April 22 and save $100!

Visit documentstrategyforum.com

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in a Professional 30 What’s Network?

By Chris Cotteleer

in a Value 32 What’s Defining information management’s value to the business

By Allison Lloyd

APPLICATION ARTICLE

Customer Relationships: Unlocking the Value of Customer Communications Many organizations in mature industries such as telecom, insurance, finance, banking and print-for-pay service bureaus often don’t recognize the value inherent in their communications with customers. Mature industries expand via mergers and acquisitions, resulting in bolted-on business applications that complicate the communication and marketing processes.

These bolt-ons exist within business silos, and have disparate communication infrastructure and approaches, none of which are harmonized to give customers a sense that their business is important to the organization. Now, organizations can use enterprise output management (EOM) solutions to unlock the once-hidden value in consistent, personalized communications to help retain customers and increase customer lifetime value.

For the past 20 years or so, organizations looked to enterprise asset management (EAM) tools, like SAP, to account for and manage physical assets. This approach centered on design, construction, commissioning, operations, maintenance and replacement of plant, equipment and facility assets. EAM solutions reduced labor, cost and time to market for global changes; decreased redundant processes; and brought visibility and agility to asset management.

Next, organizations looked to enterprise content management (ECM) tools to centrally organize and store data, documents and other content, which helped support customer communications and customer relationship management. ECM solutions unified access to content previously stored in disparate systems and reduced labor costs while allowing organizations to quickly implement global changes. They could then also access and leverage data formerly unavailable—providing visibility to their customers, and increased awareness of their needs and the services they receive.

Today, due to increasing competitive pressures, organizations must centrally manage customer communications to effectively deliver messages to multiple channels such as web, email, and mobile devices. The answer is to use enterprise output management tools to manage the creation and distribution of both physical and electronic communications. EOM solutions maximize the value and content of each communication, ensure delivery to the desired channel, and enable faster time to market. It also is the most cost-effective way to implement global communication changes across the organization. Done correctly, organizations gain a single view and control point for all outbound communications while significantly reducing labor, cost and time to market for marketing, personalization and migration to digital presentment

alternatives. More importantly, organizations satisfy customers by engaging with them wherever and whenever they choose.

EOM tools, such as Bell and Howell’s software and workflow suites, use a centralized utility that allows multiple business lines, regardless of the legacy system they are created in, to apply channel-specific formatting parameters after the messages are created. This greatly reduces ongoing support and implementation costs, significantly reduces the time to transition business applications to modern distribution channels, and provides a platform to cross sell and upsell to customers. Most importantly, EOM solutions provide a consolidated view of the end-to-end customer communication process—allowing transaction-level visibility within business lines and customer service organizations.

The primary components of EOM solutions—workflow automation and post-composition tools—enable just-in-time application of common formatting and distribution requirements, which help ensure compliance and consistency across applications and delivery channels. EOM solutions can enhance legacy application documents to insert color, electronic onserts, inserts and forms overlays, as well as marketing messages and personalized information to increase customer satisfaction and retention. Once assembled, the communication can be custom formatted, optimally packaged and then guided to the appropriate distribution channel. Centralizing the communication distribution process gives organizations an enterprise dashboard, enabling real-time visibility and reporting on all aspects of the physical and electronic distribution processes.

In addition, EOM solutions can catapult mature organizations’ disorganized communication silos into nimble, customerfocused operations that attract new customers, retain customers and increase their lifetime value. Presenting the right content over the right channel consistently across all business lines will positively impact customers’ overall impression of your organization. As technology continues to evolve and channels of communications expand, EOM tools will position your organization to continue to quickly adapt to these changes.

Unlocking the Value of Customer Communications Mike Lambert, VP/GM Bell and Howell Enterprise Software Group

www.bellhowell.net marketing@bhemail.com 1-800-220-3030

president

Chad Griepentrog

publisher

Ken Waddell

editor

Allison Lloyd

contributors

advertising

audience development

[ allison.l@rbpub.com ]

Mark Blazek Chris Cotteleer Bryant Duhon Gerald Edwards Michele Flanagan Fred Kam Matt Mullen Kaspar Roos Ken Waddell

[ ken.w@rbpub.com ] [ 608.442.5064 ]

Rachel Chapman [ rachel@rbpub.com ]

manager marketing creative director

Cierra Bauer Kelli Cooke

DOCUMENT Strategy Media (ISSN 1081-4078) is published on a daily basis via its online portal and produces special print editions by RB Publishing Inc., 2901 International Lane, Madison, WI 53704-3128. All material in this magazine is copyrighted Š 2015 by RB Publishing Inc. All rights reserved. Nothing may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher. Any correspondence sent to DOCUMENT Strategy Media, RB Publishing Inc. or its staff becomes the property of RB Publishing Inc. The articles in this magazine represent the views of the authors and not those of RB Publishing Inc. or DOCUMENT Strategy Media. RB Publishing Inc. and/or DOCUMENT Strategy Media expressly disclaim any liability for the products or services sold or otherwise endorsed by advertisers or authors included in this magazine.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: DOCUMENT Strategy Media is the essential publication for executives, directors and managers involved with enterprise document, content and information strategies. Free to qualified recipients; subscribe at www.documentmedia.com/subscribe.

REPRINTS: For high-quality reprints, please contact our exclusive reprint provider, ReprintPros, 949-702-5390, www.ReprintPros.com.

2901 International Drive Madison WI 53704-3128 p: 608-241-8777 f: 608-241-8666 email: rbpub@rbpub.com

What’s New The Convergence of IT, Legal and Records Managers to Address Unstructured Data

By Rob Hamilton www.documentmedia.com/Main/ articles/The-Convergence-of-IT-Legal-andRecords-Managers-t-1600.aspx

Implementing a Team Approach to Attracting and Retaining Customers

By Nick Romano www.documentmedia.com/Main/articles/ Implementing-a-Team-Approach-to-Attractingand-Ret-1597.aspx

Reducing the Burden of Proofing in the Age of Multichannel and Omni-channel

By Scott Draeger www.documentmedia.com/Main/articles/ Reducing-the-Burden-of-Proofing-in-theAge-of-Mult-1592.aspx

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In Information Management, Only the Penthouse Is Sexy

By Joao Penha-Lopes www.documentmedia.com/Main/articles/ In-Information-Management-Only-thePenthouse-Is-Se-1591.aspx

APPLICATION ARTICLE

Will Inkjet Really Save Us Money in Print and Mail?

Saving money isn’t always about trimming five dollars here or two dollars there; sometimes it is about gaining efficiencies and productivity. This was the challenge laid down by the COO to Ron, the Operations Manager for MI Insurance’s in-plant print and mail operation. And the big question Ron now had to answer: Will Inkjet really save us money in our print and mail operations?

As Ron looked at his print and mail operation and the customer communications strategy there were a number of areas where he believed MII could see significant bottom line savings and process optimization. Ron understood that changing the way his organization approached the production and delivery of its standard printed and mailed communications, these efficiencies and savings goals would be realized.

While doing research, Ron discovered an article by a Subject Matter Expert from Crawford Technologies on 8 Sure Ways Leveraging Inkjet Will Save You Money. The article explains that when your operation moves to digital inkjet production printing, the way you approach your workflow and evaluate your print organization’s print jobs should evolve accordingly. The key point of the article was that you could continue to run your workflow almost the same way with your inkjet as you have with your legacy monochrome cut sheet processes, but you will be leaving a lot of money on the table. This seemed to get right to the heart of the COO’s question (and might convince the CFO and CIO as well).

Ron was intrigued. According to his research, when you add inkjet presses, a thorough analysis of your workflow and job mix should be conducted; the goal of this analysis is to uncover these potential operational improvements: • Balancing of your print to minimize roll changeover • Concatenation of small jobs for greater throughput and less wastage • Managing jobs to optimize post-printing operations • Maximizing your postal discounts • Utilizing full color printing for more effective customer communications • Minimizing complex changes to your legacy applications • Taking advantage of postal discounts for use of color • Reduction of costly inventory through adoption of white paper workflows For Ron, the challenge became, “How do I monetize the benefits of inkjet to my organization?”

The answer is that, using the right workflow solution, optimized for digital inkjet presses, you can achieve many cost reductions.

You can adjust your print jobs to match printer capabilities to gain production and quality improvements. You can optimize your print job sizes to match your roll sizes to eliminate frequent stopping and starting of the printer. By combining print jobs for optimal print runs and then break them into smaller jobs for postproduction, you can achieve better throughput in both the print room and post-processing. By leveraging inkjet to run a plain paper or white paper factory you can reduce pre-printed forms and the costs associated with purchasing, storing and managing them. If you pass larger print runs to your postal optimization software you can yield greater mail densities and less postal costs, even without sending you mailings to a pre-sort house.

Before reporting back to the COO, Ron decided to attend an educational on-demand webinar developed by the subject matter experts at Crawford Technologies. If the benefits aligned with MII’s goals, the next step would be to book a meeting with them to determine the real impact that a Crawford solution could have on MII’s inkjet investment and customer communications workflow.

If the above sounds like something you are experiencing in your organization, we invite you to, book a meeting with one of our subject matter experts at www.crawfordtech.com today.

By: David Day, EDP, Product Marketing Manager, Crawford Technologies

sales@crawfordtech.com www.crawfordtech.com

EDITOR’S VIEW

IT’S NOT THE DESTINATION BUT THE JOURNEY: HOW EXPERIENCES CAN DELIVER CAREER SUCCESS @DOCUMENTmedia

by Allison Lloyd

merican poet Ralph Waldo Emerson has been attributed to the well-known saying, “Life is a journey, not a destination,” a phrase summarizing one of his famous, longer essays. Too often in our business lives, we are only focused on the end objective or end state of our strategies, rarely looking back at the steps that led us there, whether the results were positive or negative. In fact, many times when I talk to business leaders, they are very eager to share the glowing numbers from cost savings and throughput, but the reality is that the real value of their success lies in the how—how does an organization align its business and its people to the goals of the strategy? This idea that we are so hyper-focused on the end state is very apparent when I hear from many business users that “they’re not ready to share their story since they haven’t reached their goal.” They don’t put enough importance on what they’re accomplishing right at that moment or the challenges they’re facing and/or overcoming in a particular step of their strategic journey.

As I mention in our special “Leader Viewpoint” (on page 20), change is rapidly sweeping through our industry, bringing with it a whole new set of opportunities. According to Martin Reeves and Mike Deimlerin, in their 2011 Harvard Business Review article, “In order to adapt, a company must have its antennae tuned to signals of change from the external environment, decode them, and quickly act to refine or reinvent its business model and even reshape the information landscape of its industry.”

However, for many setting enterprise-wide strategies, the path to adaptability is an unfamiliar one. So, where does that leave so many of us on this journey? Perhaps this is why we see a growing frustration building among business leaders in our industry. There is a lot of talk about disruptive forces but very little on the strategies being employed at high-performing organizations. When strategic management firms and analysts talk about maturity models, they provide a way for organizations to measure themselves against their competitors and peers, but what is lacking is how to break through these levels. What exactly is Competitor

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A doing to reach the next level? How exactly are these organizations empowering workers inside their organization to unlock skillsets needed to adapt? Wouldn’t you love to know?

This is exactly the problem with an enterprise’s document and content strategy. This is why you see very little on this subject—hence, the frustration. I’ve spent the last 11 months with a group of 10 business leaders, members of our advisory board for our conference, the DOCUMENT Strategy Forum, to finally build a place to address this gap in building strategies.

This time, for me personally, has been one of the most rewarding of my career. Why? The value and insights I’ve learned through our collaboration and ongoing discussions for almost a year has been some of the most enlightening conversations during my 10-year tenure as editor. I really hope you will take the time to read our featured letters from these individuals, on pages 22 to 31, to you—their peers. They wanted to let you know that this is a time of change, but as one unified peer group, the lessons they and you have learned along the way might pave the way for so many other struggling business leaders out there. I hope you will join us in Greenwich, CT this May 12-14 to join our community as we tackle the document strategy for delivering superior customer experiences.

Until next time,

APPLICATION ARTICLE

Customer Communications for the Digital Age

Organizations are attempting to implement a customer-centric communication pattern while continuing to struggle with growing volumes of content and documents and are drowning in systems to manage and deliver that content. Analysts estimate that large document-intensive organizations have between five and eight document automation solutions, sometimes running multiple systems within each business unit that drive different application types (claims, batch core system generated documents, correspondence or contracts) and separate mobile delivery and social media systems with duplicate content.

Shifting to a digital world to capture the hearts and minds of the digital natives calls for taking a holistic approach to customer centricity, technology, and processes. When planning to go digital, companies should:

means updating legacy systems to ensure the organization can access data as necessary to present a single view of the customer across all channels and lines of business.

1. Develop a 360-degree view of the customer. In order to “know” their customers, organizations must understand the total relationship that the customer has, or could have, with the company and then present that back to the customer on his or her terms (for example, via mobile devices and the internet)—in real time.

To address these questions, organizations must look at creating a cohesive, enterprise-wide strategy toward managing customercentric and omni-channel communications. This strategy should be built upon an adaptive document automation and content management platform to support execution today and as requirements expand and change in the future.

2. Embrace an omni-channel approach. To empower existing and prospective customers and deliver an improved customer experience, companies must adopt an omni-channel approach. This means enabling consumers to research, review, and interact on their terms. No longer is it sufficient to have a consumer complete a paper form and wait days or weeks for a response. With the use of mobile document management and customer communication technologies, organizations can provide their customers with the ability to complete forms online via their mobile device, chat with a representative via online chat, and have that chat transferred to an immediate phone call if needed.

Oracle Documaker provides a comprehensive omni-channel customer engagement platform that modernizes and transforms core legacy systems. Omni-channel communications systems enable organizations to stay relevant amidst rapid innovation in the technological sector. Oracle Documaker is also a rulesdriven system, which allows companies to dynamically create, manage, and deliver enterprise communications to customers and stakeholders, when and how they want them — whether by print, email, mobile, or any other format. Implementing Oracle Documaker eliminates disruptive business challenges that impede customer satisfaction while simultaneously producing numerous benefits, including expedited time for product launches and the reduction both cost and risk.

3. Reevaluate core systems and processes. Much less appealing but even more important than having a holistic customer view and multiple new digital channels on which consumers can interact with their insurers are the underlying core systems that support the business processes. To effectively support an omni-channel approach that meets the needs of millennials, organizations need to modernize their technical “spine.” This

800-735-6620 oracle.com/goto/documaker

CONTRIBUTORS

Mark Blazek Mr. Blazek is an assistant vice president of applications development at USAA and is responsible for enterprise document management and content management. He joined USAA in 2004 as a technical architect. Prior to USAA, Mr. Blazek spent 10 years providing information technology (IT) systems management consulting and training to Fortune 500 companies. He began his IT career in Houston where he held various technical and leadership positions with Texaco, IBM and Compaq.

Chris Cotteleer Mr. Cotteleer is a seasoned and successful healthcare information technology professional. He has over two decades of experience making high-impact business decisions through the use of pragmatic and innovative systems and solutions in the information technology sector. Mr. Cotteleer has worked with numerous healthcare and financial services organizations and specializes in information management and governance and performance improvement.

Gerald Edwards Mr. Edwards is director of information technology for a large New York City-based health insurer. He manages electronic data interchange (EDI), content and document management teams that deal in diverse aspects of EDI, document composition, document management, imaging, optical character recognition/intelligent character recognition, business process management and web-based applications. He has over 30 years of experience as a consultant and employee across numerous industries.

Fred Kam Mr. Kam is the information technology (IT) director of client reporting with UBS Financial Services, Inc. He is responsible for the monthly statements and daily confirms for all Wealth Management Americas’ clients. He has been with the firm for 20 years. Previously, Mr. Kam was part of the management team supporting the mutual fund business in a prior role.

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PUTTING THE

“ENGAGEMENT” IN YOUR CONTENT MARKETING

F

or those of you in marketing, you’ve no doubt seen the deluge of ideas, opinions, tips, strategies and advice for content marketing. Content marketing works as a way to increase leads, trust and sales (in roughly that order). What’s needed in our attention-deficit world is just that: attention and patience—and engagement.

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Recent research from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs shows that 86% of business-to-business (B2B) respondents are using content marketing, but only 38% consider themselves effective. The ancient (in Internet years) “blog” is the basis for many content marketing efforts.

HubSpot, a marketing automation company, research shows that an increase

in blogging frequency leads to an increase in leads and return on investment (ROI)—companies that focus on blogging experience 13 times the ROI of those that don’t. So, more content leads to more search engine optimization (SEO) that leads to your company being found more frequently, which leads to more leads—if your content is useful for your audience.

BY BRYANT DUHON

Content marketing works. It just doesn’t work overnight. Impatience and confusion around how to measure the impact of content marketing are two reasons only 38% consider themselves effective.

So, what do you measure then? Engagement and trust—these two are tied together, and I’m not sure if the chicken or the egg comes first— can lead to sales. “Engagement” is everywhere and ill-defined, because there isn’t an exact definition, sorry. It’s the content part of content marketing that creates the engagement opportunity with your customers/potential customers. Increasing brand awareness and leads are numbers one and two for content marketing goals. A close number three, at 81%, is to increase engagement. Engagement is a great word to use in a meeting. Throw it out there, and heads will nod sagely, “Yes, absolutely. We must increase engagement.”

A few more valuable metrics that indicate engagement with your content are time on site, time on page, number of pages visited, inbound links and return visits, which are more reliable indicators of an engaged audience than a bunch of likes—or thousands of visitors who never return. Number of comments is another good metric, as is number of social shares (though people often share without reading, so take this one with a grain of salt).

Metrics for engagement should focus on retention, renewals and repeat purchases and identifying the content that contributes to those three things. The Economist says it perfectly, “An engaged customer is one who sticks around” and that buys what you sell.

What’s a simple way to engage with your audience? Email. Contently makes an astute observation about why content marketing and thinking like a publisher are relevant for brands: “They [brands] realize that if they own the relationship, they can eventually speak to the audience much more often and for less money than if they have to pay to play [buy an ad] every time.” What’s one way to measure this level of “ownership” and engagement? Email subscribers.

MarketingSherpa research shows that 72% of people prefer to communicate with companies via email.

Combine useful, trusted content with the basic personalization of simply using someone’s name in an email, and you’ve got a perfect way to begin engaging with your customers. Of course, don’t forget to “engage” (you know, talk) to your customers on all of your social channels—that’s engagement too.

As Captain Picard would say as the Enterprise embarked on another adventure, “Engage.” O

The Economist says it perfectly, “An engaged customer is one who sticks around” and that buys what you sell.

Engagement carries connotations of attachment and/or commitment (and relationship).

How do you measure this online? A Facebook or LinkedIn “like?” That’s a nice vanity stat (who doesn’t like to be “liked”), but does it mean anything? The effort required to hover and click “like” is so minimal as to be nearly effortless.

Online measures often focus on attention, web traffic and leads, for example.

They’re important but are just raw numbers. Engagement implies a level of participation. Plus, a laser focus on the bottom line—and getting more leads—can actually make your content marketing efforts weaker and can lead to impatience and a return to selling rather than educating with content, undercutting the trust and audience engagement you want to build.

BRYANT DUHON is the content conductor for Prospect Builder, a marketing agency dedicated to exceeding the inbound needs of the dealer community.

He was a longtime editor, community manager and marketer at AIIM. Contact him at bduhon@prospectbuilder.net or visit www.prospectbuilder.net.

DOCUMENTmedia.com spring.2015

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THE NEW REALM OF CUSTOMER 14

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C

ustomers are the lifeblood of any business.

If a business fails to serve its customers well, the business itself will ultimately fail. It is this old wisdom that is driving businesses forward to invest in new technology, but the complexities are often enormous.

Many businesses are on a journey to improve the way they engage with their customers. This is primarily driven by changes in consumer behavior (mobile and online), a desire to better control cost and risks, as well as the need to increase business performance. On top of that, successful digital marketing concepts, such as customer advocacy, are beginning to permeate organizations and enforce the belief that every customer communication interaction (even offline) should support the ultimate goal of creating a positive experience of the brand. This customer-centric approach will help marketing with higher retention and offer more up-sell/cross-sell opportunities to existing customers, and it will also attract new customers in a more effective way.

What we are witnessing in today’s market is that companies, especially large enterprises, are moving

rapidly in the direction of orchestrated, multi-channel communications. For them, synchronizing the customer experience between online and offline channels is absolutely crucial. This can be done by giving customer-facing staff in call centers and branches access to customer communication delivery systems; by updating communication templates and processes to ensure that branding, style and messaging is consistent across all channels; or simply by better orchestrating (timing) communications.

Another big trend in the business today is to enable channel preference management (i.e., knowing how customers want to be communicated with but, more importantly, also being able to honor those requests).

Almost 20% of customer delivery requests cannot be honored because of outdated information technology (IT) systems, conflicting data or other technical challenges.

Finally, data analytics is crucial to help organizations better engage with their customers. Through deeper segmentation and better data insights,

SPEAKING AT

organizations can increase the relevancy of their communications and drive behavioral change more effectively. The problem with customer communications management (CCM) is that offline channels are often difficult to track or that metrics that do get collected focus on a distinct area.

This is why we see a need among enterprises to improve customer experience metrics as well as the ways to capture those metrics.

Unfortunately for enterprise communication professionals, the road to better customer engagement is often quite bumpy, full of intersections, conflicting road signs and unclear destinations. When we ask enterprises where they need help, it is often around strategy development, data management insights and understanding/capturing customer experience metrics. O

KASPAR ROOS is a director for InfoTrends production software services group, which focuses on providing technology, business and market insights to clients active in the customer communications management, digital marketing & media and production workflow markets. For more information on InfoTrends’ Customer Engagement Technologies advisory service, visit www.infotrends. com/public/Content/Services/CET/cet.html.

BY KASPAR ROOS

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L A T I I G ING

D ARKET

S T S I E TH GMAT S PRA UCH A AS M EARLY THE PTERS ADO

S D E E N

M

L

ast autumn, Greg Head, chief marketing officer of Infusionsoft, shared with me his concept about many in the digital marketing space. His idea was that these companies had been able to grow to the point that they had thus far with the aid of early adopters—the keen and the tech-savvy. This is true in Infusionsoft’s own market for small, local service providers, as much as it is for those seeking mid-market or enterprise customers. These early adopters will bend over backwards to assist in the adoption of platforms within their own organizations, will be the internal champions for their

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use and will be prepared to pitch in to help improve (or fix) things as those platforms themselves mature.

These are the people who buy the early bird tickets for conferences, queue for keynotes and cheer at product announcements. They’ll be the best advocates in public, provide case studies and turn private dinner parties into product discussions at the drop of a hat. Software vendors should—and for the most part do— love these early adopters, and if you ever wonder why you see big parties with name artists performing at conferences, it’s in no small part due to the desire to reward this valuable group of customers who attend.

The problem is that there’s only a certain amount of these early adopters to go around. For vendors who want to continue to tear up their growth figures year on year, they’ll soon be approaching the next set of prospects: the pragmatists.

Now these guys don’t do things because they want to, but because they have to. They don’t read Seth Godin books on planes or retweet motivational images from a software vendor to their followers. They, instead, work in the way in which they are familiar with until such a point is reached when it is no longer effective. They’re not reluctant to change; they, instead, seek change when they

UL TM T A

BY M

LEN

realize that change is inevitable.

Once that realization has been made, they require considerably more assistance to adopt, not least because it is as much about transformation of their business as it is a technical one. Once aboard, their need for support and guidance is much greater than those first customers.

I don’t want to sound down on pragmatists, because I’m not. We are all capable of being both early adopters and pragmatists simultaneously in our lives for different things. I’ve had a smartphone since 2003 (yes, it was WinMo, and yes that still counts) but still have an analogue watch. I also didn’t drink coffee or eat cheese

“These are the people who buy the early bird tickets for conferences, queue for keynotes and cheer at product announcements.”

until my mid-20s, but that’s just me being typically odd.

Now, of course, to treat the entirety of digital marketing as single market, with uniform trends, is a little misleading. Within 451 Research’s ChangeWave data, we also track the trends for a number of the moving parts within this sector and can see that use of email marketing is clearly beyond that of specialized social media tooling, for example. The movement toward the pragmatists is not uniform: For some parts of the market, that play is well underway; for others, it is not even close to approaching.

What it does mean is that the continued support and retention of

those early adopters to help be the advocates, the references and the enthusiastic supporters is ever more important. Not only are they the core of the commercial side of the business, they are likely to become key in helping advise vendors on how best to scale out their support and services operations to turn the pragmatists into loyalists too. O

MATT MULLEN is a senior analyst of social business for 451 Research, where some of his primary areas of focus are digital marketing and social media technology. Contact him at matt.mullen@451research.com or follow him on Twitter @MattMullenUK.

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Data and Documents – Once There and Back Modern document logistics is much more than switching from strictly physical to electronic delivery. Ultimately, it is the direct exchange of raw data via a central output instance.

What does traditional document processing look like nowadays?

The raw data for a process is first converted from the specialized applications into human-readable content (composition), then formatted, e.g., as an A4 document, printed, and sent to the recipient. From there, it follows the entire route back, i.e., scanning, analysis/text recognition via optical character recognition (OCR), “deformatting” the document, and finally extracting the raw data.

Or digital documents that could be read and processed via machine are first converted into analog form, i.e., print, and then into TIF or JPG documents. Content begets “pixel clouds.”

The actual content is initially encrypted (raster images) and then rendered “readable” through OCR. Not only is this cumbersome, but also involves the loss of semantic structural data needed for later reuse.

transfer the raw data only. In other words, document creation and delivery must occur outside of the specific specialist application. Ergo the page size and output channel are not selected in the application, but much later than is generally practiced today.

IS PDF DELIVERY STILL IN KEEPING WITH THE TIMES? Of course the adoption of the now ubiquitous electronic PDF is an important step to shortening the cycle described above. But it is just a beginning. After all, what good is a PDF document if it has no metadata for multi-channel-capable processing?

Technologies like XMP and ZUGFeRD were, in fact, developed specifically for storing metadata in an electronic document for automatic read-out on the recipient side and transfer into the given application (ERP, CRM, etc.). This certainly advances automation in document processing, but it is by no means the end of the road. For one thing, PDF is also A4-based, which means tedious “deformatting” for delivery on mobile end devices (see graphic). The gain is marginal, considering that processes like deformatting and decomposition are complex and usually require expensive tools.

The following graphic illustrates the cycle.

DATA HUB So what does document processing look like in the future? Without a doubt, the most elegant method is to create an interface for the pure data, independent of page format, layout and channel. That is really the only way to efficiently prepare documents of all types and formats for digital and physical communication routes. For companies, this means separating document creation from delivery and setting up a central document and output management instance. This hub uses defined rules and criteria from the different departments (e.g., sales, marketing, service) to determine the data, layout, format and output channel, always tuned, of course, to the recipient.

The problem is that this approach is oriented to the A4 page format, which is fine for a print, fax or archive file, but not for mobile end devices and the Web. It would be much better to

Centralization not only benefits the processor, who is free to concentrate on his or her core business. It also provides

APPLICATION ARTICLE

a reliable overview of which documents left the company in a given time period. Other criteria can also be monitored, of course, an advantage not to be underestimated: many firms lack an accurate picture of just how much is printed, faxed, and sent electronically. What document management lacks is the 360-degree view.

RECIPIENT AND PROCESS DETERMINE THE CHANNEL Strictly speaking, multi-channel communication means breaking away from a specific page format so that every document can be output on any channel without expensive workarounds such as deformatting. Because today customers do communicate with companies via a number of channels.

Mr. X, for example, still wants his insurance policy in hard copy, but would prefer his monthly debit notification as an e-mail attachment, or better yet, sent directly to his smartphone. In other words, a delivery medium is chosen for each and every business process. But that is possible only through central processing where all document-related communication pathways converge, particularly if adding new channels is straightforward.

management cycle in a central system, and specifically for all applications that generate documents. Clearly defined rules for corporate design, output formats, and handling of metadata are stored based on business logic. This makes the question “what is data and what is a document?” even more important. The boundary is not always clear, but one thing is certain. The further downstream in the document logistics process the output channel is chosen and the more strictly the business process remains separate from document creation, the more flexible the company is.

COMPOSITION AND FORMATTING – NOT THE SAME THING • Composition should not be confused with formatting/rendition.

• Composition is an art, formatting is a craft.

• Composition is creating content and layout taking language and business logic into account.

• Formatting (rasterization) means “squeezing” content onto an output device.

• Composition and formatting must be kept separate, because the latter depends on the channel, the former does not.

In this context, HTML5 has certainly paved the way toward modern document processing. The text-based markup language is already setting the tone with mobile platforms such as the iPhone, iPad and Android devices. And it’s no wonder: HTML5 content can be easily processed for any electronic output channel, be it a smartphone or a Web site. And if print is your preference, it’s still an option. Conversion to PDF files is also possible. HTML5 is currently the most intelligent format for the creation and display of documents, regardless of size or output channel. It allows dynamic, size-dependent display, e.g., from A4 to smartphone, conversion from any layout to text-oriented formats, extraction of individual data (including retrieval of invoice items) and building tables of contents and index lists.

WHAT IS DATA, WHAT IS A DOCUMENT? The fact is in these multi-channel times, “painting” an A4 page using page composition tools is the wrong approach, because the target layout can be anything from 2 to 24 inches.

Instead, companies need to invest in document logistics capable of taking data from a given application and preparing it specific to the recipient and output channel. What is needed is information technology that maps the entire document

info@compart.com

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LEADER VIEW POINT Paradigm Shift: Leveraging Next-Generation CCM & ECM Strategies to Deliver Superior Customer Experiences

Change is rapidly sweeping through our industry, bringing with it a whole new set of challenges. The new age of service is here, ushered in by mobile technologies and changing consumer behaviors.

How organizations restructure their business models to be customer-centric will determine competitive differentiation. For many setting enterprise-wide strategies, the path is an unfamiliar one. It will take innovative and forward-thinking leaders to push beyond traditional, siloed approaches to build endto-end document strategies. We are pleased to showcase a few passionate voices in the leadership and strategic space that are leading this charge at the DOCUMENT Strategy Forum this year. This is truly the future of our industry.

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Enterprise Content Management Is a Competitive Differentiator

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Knowledge Is Power

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Technology’s New World Order: Not Creative Destruction but the Path into the Future

By Mark Blazek

By Michele Flanagan

By Gerald Edwards

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Change Is at Hand: What Will You Do About It?

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What’s in a Professional Network?

By Fred Kam

By Chris Cotteleer

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ENTERPRISE

CONTENT

MANAGEMENT IS A COMPETITIVE DIFFERENTIATOR

BY MARK BLAZEK

T

he document management environment seldom gets treated as a core competency or a strategic asset for an organization. Documents are typically required by law to fulfill a transaction, or used as a correspondence medium, but what if a company could turn the large investments in document management into a competitive advantage? In this age of digital communication channels and customer demands of relational integrity by businesses, enterprise content management can be leveraged as strategic differentiators for organizations who believe that superior customer service and retention are strategic capabilities. It only takes reading a few tweets or Facebook messages to recognize that customers today expect excellent service, transparent communication, corporate accountability and stellar reputations. In short, customers want to do business with organizations that align to their own values and lifestyle. When this doesn’t happen, customers respond immediately and harshly.

Conversely, they will also be a company’s

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greatest marketing channel if these attributes are managed with care and precision. Enter the new paradigm of content management where organizations can improve customer service and retain their best customers—all by leveraging current investments made in documents and content management. The DOCUMENT Strategy Forum is about changing the paradigm of content management, to recognize its value to any organization and to help conference attendees with content management strategies for their own organizations.

In my opinion, this is a fantastic time to be involved in documents and content management. Seldom does an opportunity to drive such significant business value present itself, especially within a business and information technology (IT) discipline where companies already have millions of dollars invested. Companies brave enough to embrace this paradigm shift have the opportunity to set their organizations apart from competitors in a marketplace that is demanding, ever-changing and socially sensitive.

Communication to and from customers

via the appropriate channel, at the right time, for the right purpose, all based on customer preferences, will be required to make this happen. This is the essence of the next generation of content management, and it is the foundational purpose of this conference.

I joined the DOCUMENT Strategy Forum conference board in 2014 after recognizing the changing landscape in content management. My desire is to influence this capability across the industry, and I believe that the DOCUMENT Strategy Forum has the most effective conference forum in this space. The conference objectives and topics are relevant to my own career and current responsibilities, so I have a vested interest in the success of this event. My hope is that you are able to take away effective strategies and action plans for your own organization. O

MARK BLAZEK sits on the advisory board of the DOCUMENT Strategy Forum. For more information, visit www.documentstrategyforum.com.

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By Michele Flanagan

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

T

his is a new world that we live in, and the pace of business and technology are faster than ever.

Technology provides our customers with information at their fingertips. Companies must have a strong business and technology strategy to compete and must be able to react quickly to changes in the market.

The technology industry is shifting to an Agile or DevOps methodology to improve the speed to market for new capabilities and technologies—in order to assist the business with their need for change. With the ability to deliver faster, the business needs to be in tune with their industry and be able to predict customer expectations. Customer expectations have continued to shift because of the advances of mobile technology and content availability. Also, organizations are expecting the workforce to be able to use self-service tools and adapt quickly to process changes. The value of the DOCUMENT Strategy Forum Conference is the focus on our four pillars of Strategy, Governance, Process and Technology. This conference

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will help participants learn about the document and content industry and will have a virtual track dedicated to strategy.

As we prepared for the conference, we wanted to address the content life cycle through delivery. We have planned seven tracks with multiple sessions to provide participants with options across business and technology topics. The sessions will address pain points, success stories and learning experiences to engage the participants in discussions.

The conference team and advisory board have been dedicated to deliver a program that engages participants to learn, share and network. We understand the importance of learning from others’ experiences, then applying your own twist to implement improvements. Networking is the key to knowledge within your own industry, exposure into new industries and learning about shifting customer expectations and future trends. This year’s conference format is providing the opportunity for engagement. The conference team did not want participants to only listen and observe. We wanted participants to fully engage and become part of the conference with interaction

and participation. Knowledge is power, and we hope the conference will enable participants to walk away with an understanding of how to improve their strategy, processes and technology. O

MICHELE FLANAGAN sits on the advisory board of the DOCUMENT Strategy Forum. For more information, visit www.documentstrategyforum.com.

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TECHNOLOGY’S NEW WORLD ORDER Not Creative Destruction but the Path into the Future

n the 1960s, Bob Dylan wrote that “the times they are a-changin’.” Nowhere is that more true than in today’s technology arena. The state of information technology (IT) is undergoing seismic shifts as economic forces and technical innovation have reshaped the industry and the workforce. Where once our problem was server proliferation, we now have datacenter-in-a-box or collapsed backbones equipped with software for networking, security, storage and provisioning. Virtualization has allowed for rapid provisioning and delivered flexibility in deployment, provisioning on demand, standardization and lower costs of support. The advent of the cloud has done hosting one better by delivering applications off premises, removing the need for internal product infrastructure support specialists and allowing for new pricing models, which give companies low cost of entry. Certain functions, which used to be IT-only, are now moving into business self-service. More and more business partners are looking for people with database skills or modeling skills. They are starting to realize the power that sits in their hands. They can no longer afford

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to wait until something gets on the priority list when they can do it themselves. Just like the Old West, there are the quick and the dead!

As has always been the case, this innovation is accompanied by displacement. Creative destruction is the term used when companies come out with a product that kills an established line of business. It doesn’t mean that this is all one big race to the bottom, but it does require a conscious shift in where we look to do new things. Yes, certain jobs have been left behind in the process, but the New World Order still needs knowledgeable, experienced people who can make all this stuff work better than what we had. The last 25 years has seen technological movements every few years that all held similar promise as well as downsides. If you are keeping score, not all the promise was realized, and the doomsday scenarios never quite materialized either. Minis did not eliminate mainframes; personal computer (PC) networks did not eliminate centralized hosts; and the web did not replace all PCs with smart terminals—just as the cloud will not eliminate the IT

By Gerald Edwards

professional. What we will have is an amalgam of all of it, and how you make sense of it all and plot your strategy is where the Forum will try to help.

We are looking to make this year’s DOCUMENT Strategy Forum a guidepost along the path into the future. That path contains strategies, business processes and technologies associated with the document: capture, intake, workflow, storage, security, design, composition and life cycle management. We have tried to set topics and engage speakers around these areas. We don’t espouse any single vendor or technology, but the vendors and service providers are truly our partners. More than ever, our mutual success is intertwined, and we need to be mindful of the

directions they see and, more importantly, where they are allocating their capital. Invariably, that’s the road we’re heading down sooner or later.

In planning this year’s event, we realize that nobody has “the answer,” but together, we have a bounty of experience and expertise that others can draw upon. Everybody has a different slant on the same problem, and odds are somebody has solved that problem you are facing. So come, enjoy and participate. O

GERALD EDWARDS sits on the advisory board of the DOCUMENT Strategy Forum and has served in this position since 2010. For more information, visit www.documentstrategyforum.com.

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CHANGE IS AT HAND WHAT WILL YOU DO ABOUT IT?

By Fred Kam

was not so long ago that we were excited about metadata and indexing, data capture with optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR) and the integration of document management systems with workflow. Today, we have different driving factors for change in our industry. It may be a sign that the tools have matured. The advent of cloud computing, the integration of mobile devices and the demand for commoditization of services are leading us to review document management solutions in a different way.

The pursuit for efficiency was our primary motivation in the last two decades.

Automating manual processes was the goal. We struggled with proprietary file formats, capturing information from old document images and building rulebased workflow. We wanted the processes to work faster, with fewer errors and at lower costs—and we were willing to invest to achieve that.

History often illuminates the future for us. On a recent chaperone trip for my daughter’s high school sophomore class to Lowell, Massachusetts,

it struck me how history is repeating itself. The 32-foot drop of the Merrimack River through Lowell, which provided energy for the textile mills, gave way to electricity and newer forms of transportation.

Factories can now be situated anywhere in the country with lower labor costs. Almost 100 years later, most of our garment industry is overseas.

We are following a similar trend with information technology (IT) solutions and services. Many argue that quality will suffer. We will see. It is important to note that sometimes we complain about the quality of our clothing, but very few of us would want to pay a higher price.

Commoditization implies a standard way of producing software products.

Many IT professionals believe that software engineering is still part art and part science, which is where it distinguishes itself from manufacturing. However, it is almost impossible to clearly define where the science ends and the art begins. Consequently, many of us, and rightfully so, are feeling that we are wandering into unchartered territories, but keep in mind that uncertainty often leads to opportunities.

With commoditization, we move into the world of a global workforce and managed services where corporations can offer 24/7 services with no interruption.

There are many implications for this new world. For document management, it will require that all documents be stored electronically with good metadata so that they can be retrieved from the cloud anywhere in the world for review and processing. The lower cost of storage and the consolidation of major providers are helping us to get there. Advanced privacy measures will make sure that US client confidentiality is maintained around the world—imagine the healthcare industry.

I encourage you to acknowledge the change at hand and take advantage of the DOCUMENT Strategy Forum to share your views and challenges with your peers, to evaluate solutions from a different perspective and to reassess how you can make contributions to your organization. Change can be unsettling and uncomfortable, but I am sure you will make the best of it. O

FRED KAM sits on the advisory board of the DOCUMENT Strategy Forum. For more information, visit www.documentstrategyforum.com.

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What’s in a

PROFESSIONAL NETWORK?

By Chris Cotteleer

AS

a chief information officer, I don’t have difficulty getting information from vendors. If there’s a product or service I need to learn more about, it is easy to pick up the phone and call their sales organization, and voilà—I have the best and the brightest to let me know all about their product, what they do and for how much, but when I want to get information from my peers, i.e., leaders at other heavily regulated organizations, the task is not so simple.

Like everyone who’s been in the business for a significant amount of time, I have my personal network, of course. Admittedly, that’s a select group of folks, dependent on where I’ve worked and who I’ve managed to meet personally. Then there’s my extended network, the people who are connections of the people I know. This is a bigger group to be sure but a group still reliant on who I have proximity to.

If I want to go beyond this group to find a wider set of leaders (1) in my industry, or (2) with similar challenges to me, or (3) with similar technologies to mine or (4) who have tried things I’m considering trying (or some combination of all four), my options are few.

Certainly, I attend industry events to meet leaders in my vertical as well as vendor events to meet technology

leaders; I can even go to analyst shows to meet leaders who have challenges similar to mine or who are trying similar initiatives.

As useful as these can be, they have one big limitation: almost all the speakers are vendors or analysts—very few of them are actually operators of the business. So, I end up learning what vendors are doing and what they say my peers are doing or what analysts say about my industry, my challenges and my initiatives. All of which are fine, to a point, but it’s a lot like reading a restaurant review rather than actually eating there: you have a sense for what it’s all about but not a direct experience.

With this in mind, I’m excited to be a part of the DOCUMENT Strategy Forum, which brings together real-world

leaders and practitioners from organizations across all industries, from financial services and insurance, oil and gas, utilities and manufacturing and life sciences, to healthcare, government and retail. They’ll be sharing their own experiences trying to build and execute strategies for improving document and information management at their firms.

My panel, “The Path to an Effective Information Strategy,” has me partnering with executives from OwensIllinois, Fidelity Investments and Salt River Project to share how we each approach information management strategy, from building it, to executing and evolving it. Other panels, on topics as diverse as governance, risk management, process improvement and building the business case, bring together similarly diverse sets of leaders to address these important issues.

I hope you take the time to learn more about this event and hope to see you in Greenwich in May. O

CHRIS COTTELEER serves on the advisory board of the DOCUMENT Strategy Forum and will be speaking on information management strategies. For more information, visit www.documentstrategyforum.com.

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WHAT’S IN A VALUE?

Defining information management’s value to the business The power that information holds over an organization can be one of transformation as well as one of stagnation. How companies use and leverage their information assets can set them apart from their competitors. Yet, when we discuss quantifying the value of such information or data, things become complicated real quickly. So, can we truly define the value of enterprise information management in a way that speaks to the bottom line?

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By Allison Lloyd

SPEAKING AT

W

hen speaking to a group of information management professionals recently, they unanimously agreed that you could, in fact, prove the value of an information management program. However, when I asked, “How so?” the response was ambiguous in nature, with, “It depends.” Certainly, it does— depending on whom you are talking to.

Information managers have a very unique opportunity at this very moment to learn from the lessons of the document and content management industry—an industry that is being revolutionized by service-based business strategies. C-suite leaders are recognizing that customer service and experiences are competitive differentiators, taking the organization’s document management investments from the back office to where the business makes its money. Can information management do the same? The shift in customer preferences and the increasing control in which they dictate how they want to interact with a company effectively connected document and content management to a core competency of the business—marketing and sales. Linking content management to the complete customer journey proved its business value. Where the difference lies is that information managers should be much more proactive in finding as much value from their information assets as they can, without relying on an external catalyst to do it for them.

The trick is to define value from a 10,000-foot strategic perspective.

When you do so, you shake off siloed priorities and goals. Today, companies care about profit margins, competitive positioning and speed to market and, increasingly, corporate social responsibility. So, in this light, what is “value?” According to Michael Porter in his book Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, “In competitive terms,

value is the amount buyers are willing to pay for what a firm provides them.

Value is measured by total revenue, a reflection of the price a firm’s product commands and the units it can sell.”

So, if value is based on revenue, what is an organization’s value chain?

According to Porter’s concept, “The relevant level for constructing a value chain is a firm’s activities. The value chain displays total value and consists of value activities and margin. Each value activity also uses and creates information.” Here is why information is a powerful asset. If you can calculate a numerical value to show how an activity is performing, via information assets, then you can show “whether a firm is high or low cost compared to competitors.” Yet, it’s not just about these raw numbers. If you can’t create context around the data on how it improves your processes, technologies and business goals, you’re just an organization with a lot of information but not much else.

“The speed with which you can convert data into insight and that insight into action is now the defining characteristic of competition,” says Tony Costa, senior analyst serving customer experience professionals at Forrester Research.

In reality, this is a tall order. While business leaders might account for their information assets in rigorous fashion, are they really assessing the “value” of those assets? So, going back to Porter’s concept, is the data used to measure revenue? According to Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst Doug Laney, he believes that “less than five percent of enterprises accurately calculate the value of their data, measure its benefits or properly inventory their information.”

The problem with information is that it’s not an end in itself. It supports actions or decisions within an organization. Perhaps, this is why we see risk as the biggest motivating factor for information management programs.

There is a consequence for non-action or indecisiveness in funding a program.

That’s concrete. However, we need to focus more on “value” and the value activities that create competitive differentiation. It’s not just about consequences—but benefits.

That’s where we’re stuck. We know that we need data to support value propositions to corporate strategies and competitive positioning—in order to sell your programs. Information managers need to (a) understand the business value (i.e., how you make money as a company), (b) how information feeds the value activities to create said value and (c) how to present those values to the C-suite, creating business context around data. It’s no surprise that these calculations are hard to find. It will require innovative and brave information managers to take this step into the future. We believe so strongly in this mission that we are hosting an exclusive working group at the DOCUMENT Strategy Forum to create these valuations. No more, “What if? The time is now to show what the value of information management is to the business. We hope to see you there. O

ALLISON LLOYD serves as the editor of DOCUMENT Strategy Media. She delivers thought leadership on strategic and plan-based solutions for managing the entire document, communication and information process. Contact her at allison.l@rbpub.com or follow her on Twitter @DOCUMENTmedia.

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APPLICATION ARTICLE

Big Content Classification Myths Debunked

Gaining insights from big content has been overhyped and under delivered. On this, almost everyone agrees. The paradox is big content is only getting bigger and promises substantial potential in driving revenue, cost savings, and innovation. Taking advantage of the “big content promise” first requires its classification for retrieval and analysis. Only a few top organizations and industry leaders feel that they have successfully accomplished this to date. Taking full advantage of the potential requires an entirely new approach to big content classification and dispelling the many myths that surround it:

Myth: Organizations can rely on their end users to organize their documents.

It is unrealistic to expect end users to methodically create standardized metadata (e.g., naming conventions, document descriptions and type, etc.) for organizing all their documents. End users must understand the benefits to make the effort. Without proper training, enforcing standardized business rules and mandatory document tagging, relying on end users will lead to failure from the get-go.

Myth: Classification is an IT problem and best left to the techies. IT may be responsible for automated classification tools, but Subject Matter Experts know the business concepts, context, and rules necessary for meaningful information-sharing and searching. A librarian or knowledgebase custodian ensures a logical framework to develop a well-organized system and consistent information retrieval. Together, these groups can build a classification system that ensures enterprise-wide data dissemination.

Myth: All that automated classification requires is a button click to organize all the data. Classification cannot be a blackbox to the organization. Insights into big content are possible by honing and iterating on data classification to easily search and find it. Attempting to auto-classify everything all at once would be a disaster. Focus on a small project initially that

addresses a certain problem domain and specific information needs. Apply a constrained scope and then explore how best to retrieve or organize those documents. Metadata (such as group name, document type, and date) needs to be standardized before taking on the next big project.

Myth: One classification method fits all. It’s a common misconception that choosing one classification technique solves everything. Different document types require different classification methods. One technique may be good for visual classification to determine differences between invoices and table data and the position of certain elements, but another technique may be better for text-heavy content.

Myth: Classification is impossible without tons of resources and time. With the availability of clustering algorithms and technologies that take small sample sets to train the system, classification of data is manageable. An organization can be set up and running auto-classification software within a week, not months.

Succeeding in Big Content Classification Successful classification that leads to deriving business value from big content requires a joint effort by IT and the business to leverage the necessary software and business knowhow for a complete classification solution. It requires carefully selecting the right classification software that provides a combination of methods that best fit different types of documents. Lastly, it requires starting small and thinking big for consistent success, early and often.

For more on classification—white papers, case studies, and software options—go to www.parascript.com.

www.parascript.com.

APPLICATION ARTICLE

Creating a Competitive Customer Experience: Flexibility and Compliance without Complexity Today’s service-oriented organizations need innovative solutions for e-delivery that add personalized output and channel flexibility to the customer experience. But technology that will support continued growth and change for governments, utilities and service providers must also help them manage regulatory, industry and even competitive factors by enabling accessible, accountable and transparent customer service operations.

Cyta is a semi-government organization focused on providing, maintaining and developing a comprehensive global telecommunications service via voice and data applications in both fixed and mobile telephony. As the top provider of total electronic communications in Cyprus and a Papyrus customer since 2006, Cyta strategically invests in cutting-edge technology, customer service enhancements and the provision of modern services. Important in this strategy was fully implementing e-communication for customer communications — to improve customer service and satisfaction, respond to customer preferences and leverage reduced printing and mailing costs.

With approximately 800,000 invoices monthly, Cyta had both a large volume of data-driven documents to produce and distribute and more than 50 million invoices archived for customer service access, Web site self-service and 12-year retention requirements.

Cyta expanded its use of the powerful Papyrus Platform for full document management and multichannel delivery, extending their existing print and archiving solution and enabling e-delivery and e-communications with a just few powerful components: WebRepository for full-color, multichannel document design, production and delivery; Papyrus Typemanager for a native interface capability to facilitate data and document imports from a Microsoft SQL Server database; Papyrus Server to enable electronic delivery and high-volume printing; and Papyrus Adapters for user authentication and invoice retrieval without APIs. Customer Experience Enhanced — Customer Operations Improved Today, Cyta is making use of the full print and e-delivery and archiving solution frameworks from Papyrus, which not only improves the customer experience but brings numerous operational benefits for more than 500 business users. Highquality documents are now delivered to the customer’s choice of channels for secure, convenient access — via e-mail, Web portal or paper — incorporating color, graphics and URLs for engaging, interactive communication with relevant, accurate and clear data and messages. Cyta even rewards customers for using electronic invoicing.

Updated document design and delivery improve customer response and satisfaction, with new user-friendly bills arriving faster so payments are received sooner. Documents with better content and quality are better understood and lead to fewer, faster customer service inquiries. Incorporating color for the new electronic documents costs nothing extra, but reduced printing has minimized production costs and waste. Extending the existing software and integrating with other operational tools paves the way for continued and faster improvements that keep Cyta on the leading edge of the industry.

For the future, Cyta plans to implement a Targeted Messaging framework solution for seasonal campaigning and the Correspondence Framework solution for empowering business departments to create their own mailings and templates with building blocks. These additional solutions will run on the Repository and use the Papyrus tools they already have, making them easy extensions to the current setup.

Visit isis-papyrus.com/solutionscatalog to review the Cyta case study with full details.

www.isis-papyrus.com/solutionscatalog