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Customer communications are fundamental to organisations of all sizes. They provide a critical means of communicating money owed, account history, case updates, policy details, and many other kinds of marketing and transactional detail to consumers.
Without transactional documents like invoices, statements, and acknowledgements, most businesses would simply not operate. And for those organisations in particularly document-intensive industries like financial services, healthcare, or insurance, the critical nature of customer communications underpins regulatory compliance, financial disclosure, and legal discovery (Source: Alfresco – A NextGeneration Platform for Customer Communication Archiving and e-Presentment).
Storing and presenting transactional customer communications may be a necessity, but effectiveness in doing so varies wide.
First of all, why do organisations choose to archive their outbound customer communications? As reported in the AIIM report, 56% of the companies, citing historical record-keeping as a key reason for archiving customer communications, find value in keeping this information for future reference or research purposes as opposed to information that is archived to maintain legal and regulatory compliance.
According to the report, 54% of respondents indicate they do not have a dedicated archive solution. Of those who did indicate they have one, 57% cite that it is an in-house or custom archive solution. 38% of respondents indicate they have plans to replace their current solution within the next 5 years while 41% hope they never have to.
Last month, we hosted a webinar together with Crawford Technologies and Alfresco, discussing how to create an efficient pipeline to migrate and ingest millions of documents from your legacy system to Alfresco. A specific solution that Crawford Technologies has created is called CCM-Gateway, to manage the transformation, indexing, and loading of documents into Alfresco. The Crawford Technologies’ core platform is widely deployed with legacy customer communications archives, which gives the added reassurance that Alfresco can directly support the same features found in legacy archives.
Aside from technological solutions, Alfresco has accumulated some fundamental best practice over the years that will successfully transfer your customer communications archiving workloads to our platform. Alfresco’s experience combines with that of our partner Crawford Technologies to establish a methodology to successfully migrate legacy systems and set up day-forward archiving.
In the next article, we'll discuss more about Alfred Inflow, as our tool to ingest and migrate documents in high volume production environment. In the meantime, our team is always available to answer any of your questions.
