DOCCM (Document Output for Customer Communications Management)

Operators have such term — "solutions of the last mile". It means the technologies and the equipment used for connection of subscribers to nodes of access of providers. It is possible to draw an analogy to document flow: here too solutions of "the last mile" are necessary to give to users an information access.^[1]

An ECM system plays a role rather trunk lines of communication, organizing flows of documents between the enterprises, divisions and individual employees. And what convenient and rich it is functional it was, all the same as a result the user should or study contents of the document, or create new. And it does not belong directly to functionality actually of ECM any more.

And one more very important point. Actually consumers of documents are not users of ECM, and those who receive the documents, with its help created, approved and claimed: citizens — answers to the letters, clients of the companies — accounts for payment, readers — articles in newspapers, the whole country — federal laws and decrees of the president. And so on.

Therefore the companies and the state organizations which implement at themselves ECM (or EDMS) should pay more attention to different instruments of work with documents. The circle of tasks which at the same time arise is much wider, than it can seem at first sight, and all of them do not become covered by opportunities only Microsoft Office.

Automatic creation of documents

If to speak about office correspondence and organizational and administrative documents, then for their creation there is really enough MS Office (or Open Office for those who prefer Open Source). And if addressees of documents tens, and even hundreds of thousands? Here not to do without specialized solutions.

This perspective is relevant for many sectors — finance, insurance, retail, a telecom, housing and public utilities, the pension funds and so forth. In other words, any industries where there is a big flow of the transaction documents used for customer interaction and where the number of customers is great.

Actually it is about production of documents in industrial quantities, here normal office solutions are not considered. First, because the problem of cost reduction on transaction is at the head of a corner, and the cost of printing of accounts can be quite notable value. Secondly, there is a number of specific tasks as, for example, use of payment documents in the marketing purposes. It is logical that clients study accounts more attentively, than promotion leaflets most of which often without reading fly to a recycle bin. Therefore the companies working with the mass consumer guessed to place offers on additional products and services directly on accounts.

Naturally, the IT industry reacted to a call from business, and in the market there was a class of the products DOCCM - Document Output for Customer Communications Management — the solution for creation, formatting, personalisation and content distribution for the purpose of customer interaction and improvement of service quality. Customer interaction can take place as by means of paper documents, and electronically, it not essentially.

In more advanced industries, in banks and in a telecom (apart from MGTS and other operators of fixed connection) many companies already passed to electronic payment documents to cut down even more the expenses on transaction.

In the conservative industries, for example, in housing and public utilities, payment documents are still sent on paper. The inefficiency of housing and public utilities in general became long ago the talk of the town and when clients have a possibility of the choice — to receive accounts in electronic or in paper form, it can be considered the indicator of the beginning of changes.

What content DOCCM manage

As most often it is about transaction documents (accounts, etc.), the DOCCM systems should be able to work with the structured content, to receive it from ERP, CRM, from billing systems of telecom operators, from banking and other applications and to create electronic or paper documents in a type, convenient for perception.

It is obvious that any ERP itself is able to issue accounts. Why in that case one more solution? Of course, if your customer interaction is performed by means of the unique system, no DCOCM is necessary to you. However when there is a lot of these systems, communication with clients should taking under uniform control: it will allow to avoid situations at which each division will use the data.

Content can be also to customers, interactive, for example, at mailing of correspondence, or preparation of contractual documents. Usually in this case participation of the person who usually enters some variable data is required. At the same time it is necessary to manage templates, structure of documents and to provide assembly of their prepared fragments. Theoretically everything can be made through MS Office. However in reality for industrial solutions after all software needs another. The third case - content on demand. A typical situation — initiation of mailing of call center clicking of the button.

If business process means creation of documents and concerns mass customer service, then use industrial solutions DOCCM allows to achieve required performance measures. Typical values — production of 100 thousand documents per hour, and about 1000 active users.

The Mnogokanalnost is also the mandatory requirement. In other words, to put equality sign between DOCCM and management systems for printing would be too courageous assumption. Today customers need not only hard copies, but also electronic documents in various formats which can be delivered to clients by different methods: by e-mail (that already looks quite archaically), in the form of web pages, through mobile applications. At the same time a system should provide consistency of data regardless of how information gets to it.

Notes