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Customer Communication Management

Standard Customer Communications are an Overlooked Advantage

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For years, routine customer communications like invoices, statements and order confirmations have been regarded as a back office burden. Printing and mailing these documents, often by the tens of thousands, happens every day at the expense of hundreds of thousands of dollars each year… and it’s all regarded as a “sunk cost” of doing business. But today, organizations are recognizing that standard, daily business communications offer a unique opportunity to connect with customers in new and more profitable ways. But harnessing the promotional and marketing power requires a new mindset; one that embraces the tremendous opportunity routine customer communications provide to communicate, cross-sell and reinforce brand experience. Here are a few factors to consider: Stand Out How can you stand out in a media-saturated world? One way is with your routine customer communications. Think about it: Consumers are bombarded with thousands of marketing messages each day, and we’re actively blocking out most of them. But studies show that 98% of consumers pick up their mail the day it’s delivered and spend on average 1 to 3 minutes viewing the contents. This is your opportunity to leverage each “monthly appointment” with your customers. Business communications that are relevant to the consumer and boosted by targeted content will connect with customers and generate new revenue. Get Noticed Unlike the majority of advertising competing for our attention, routine customer communications get noticed. This is because statements, invoices and the like have an already existing relationship with each customer. We trust and attend to the content. As a result, you have a unique and often overlooked opportunity for marketers to connect within that trusted relationship to extend the brand experience and leverage untapped up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Since it can cost six to seven times more to acquire a new customer than it does to sell to an existing one, customer communications surface as important revenue-generating tools. The Power of Paper Despite the desire to go “paperless,” the truth is that a majority of customers still prefer to receive their correspondence on paper. Analysts estimate that in 2017 approximately 65% of customer communications still remain in print. Indeed, despite what you might expect, response rates for direct mail have been on the rise and have surged past response rates for e-mail marketing. Companies find that well-designed and fully integrated printed correspondence is indeed an important and vital opportunity for marketers to connect with customers and overcome the electronic clutter. Take Action In today’s info-intense world, standard business communications and routine customer correspondence are an overlooked advantage. But it takes the right approach and the right technology to get it done. That’s where we come in. Our flagship solution, DocOrigin, is an innovative and affordable way to take advantage of business correspondence in new and more profitable ways. Want to find out more about how DocOrigin can help your company? Just call 678.408.1245 or click here to schedule a free consultation.

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Six Myths Busted Regarding Section 508 PDF/UA Compliance and Production Generation of PDF/UA Documents

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Myth #1:  Section 508 compliance doesn’t apply to PDF documents. FACT:  Since June 2001, the law has required all content on government hosted or contractor hosted websites and intranet sites to be 508 compliant. PDF files tend to be produced by someone other than the website developers or administrators. This content often goes overlooked with respect to accessibility – even though PDF files represent a huge volume of the documents that site visitors use every day. SOLUTION: DocOrigin has advanced PDF/UA preprocessing capability. Myth #2:  Good assistive technology can solve all accessibility problems. FACT:  However advanced, Assistive Technology (or AT) can’t follow the continuation of an article split through multiple pages or guess what is meant by a particular graphic. That information has to be provided within the document structure. AT can only work with the information provided. Accessibility is nothing more than providing the information in a format that is easily understood. SOLUTION: DocOrigin provides the capability of creating business forms and document templates in the correct logical document structure for AT to provide the highest level of positive user experience. Myth #3:  A document is fully 508-compliant if it has passed Acrobat’s Accessibility Checker. FACT:  Adobe Acrobat’s Accessibility Checker cannot verify compliance with Section 508 since, among other limitations, it is incapable of verifying correct logical reading order. A combination of automated and manual checks are required to test a document for 508 compliance. SOLUTION: DocOrigin is capable of establishing the correct “logical” order for the reader to follow. This is done once at composition time using DocOrigin Design. In production, DocOrigin merges data (CSV, FRL, XML) from the line of business software without requiring changes to the data being generated today. The logic in the form design software dynamically structures the PDF/UA, so no post-processing step is required to produce the PDF/UA. This makes it possible to generate thousands of PDF/UA documents per minute. Myth #4:  Section 508 compliance means it will read well in JAWS. FACT:  It’s possible to tag a PDF to be compliant with Section 508 and still deliver a negative experience in JAWS or other screen-readers. The current Section 508 regulation permits, for example, a 100-page document to include nothing but paragraph tags, offering no navigational accommodations to AT users. SOLUTION: DocOrigin will assist in providing a positive user experience in accessing the information contained in the PDF document using pre-document generation sequencing and tagging. Myth #5:  A PDF is accessible if it can be read using Adobe’s Read Out Loud feature. FACT:  Adobe’s Read Out Loud feature is not considered assistive technology and cannot be used to verify compliance with Section 508. This is because the Read Out Loud feature cannot represent the document’s logical structure (tags). SOLUTION: With DocOrigin, the logical flow can be designed into the document. Myth #6:  I can tag my PDF file to be 508 compliant by using the Advanced > Accessibility > Add Tags to Document function in Adobe Acrobat Professional. FACT:  This is only the first step to creating a 508 compliant PDF file. Formerly, no software could achieve full accessibility and usability without human assistance. SOLUTION: With DocOrigin’s advanced PDF/UA composition capability, the user is able to create a fully compliant PDF/UA document or form that can generate high volume production PDF/UA documents. The design of the PDF/UA is created in the composition software and once completed, it can be run in production without user intervention.  No post-processes software or PDF to PDF/UA conversion is required. Finally, you can generate production PDF/UA statements, invoices, and order acknowledgements with a Design Once, Generate Many process you can rely on. Learn more about DocOrigin’s PDF/UA capability here or contact us for more information here.

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DocOrigin Business Communications Center Removes Barriers to Personalization

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Everybody talks about the advantages that personalized business communications documents can bring to a business. Stacks of statistics point to the dramatic benefits that companies from all industries can achieve by creating personalized, relevant and targeted customer communications. But reaching that goal is difficult when you depend on complex technology, cumbersome systems and specialized expertise. DocOrigin BCC Brings New Life to Customer Experience Management At Eclipse, we pioneered the way to more agile, more responsive, and more beneficial customer communications. Now we’ve taken things a step further with the new DocOrigin Business Communications Center, a robust software solution which allows you to create campaigns, messaging, and manage legal T&Cs without engaging IT for ongoing projects. Now, the design and delivery of important business communications that serve as a vehicle for custom marketing and messaging are put in the hands of the stakeholders within the business and are fueled by the data generated by any business software.  Take the Wheel of Superior Business Communications As many users will tell you, making even the simplest change to a legacy document, like an invoice or a statement, can take weeks or months and cost thousands. And making significant changes or improvements is often out of reach of the typical business user. We remove that roadblock by letting you create personalized messages and customized content using text and graphics without requiring IT. Line-of-business users control the entire development life cycle for all customer communications and more easily manage variations and versions in even the most complex enterprise environment. Make it Mobile and Social Whether you want to communicate in print, or use online, mobile or social media, it is important to adopt systems and solutions that make it easy – not more difficult – to reach customers with multi-channel communications. The DocOrigin Business Communications Center enables business users and marketing specialists with the ability to easily set up personalized and targeted messaging for use across multiple communications and channels. And once the content has been created, front-line knowledge workers can deliver messages to your customers based on their behaviors, preferences, or demographics with business rules in plain language. In short, you don’t have to be a programmer to deliver the right message to the right customer, in the right media. Next Steps Now you can more effectively compete in a world awash in multi-media marketing messages with highly targeted, relevant and personalized customer communications that cut through the clutter of competing campaigns. You can improve your outreach to new customers and boost your relationship with existing customers with more personal, relevant and targeted communications. DocOrigin’s Business Communications Center is the solution for designing, generating and delivering dynamic business documents and a secret weapon to level the playing field with your competition. Click here to learn more today, or call 678.408.1245.

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Automate workflows to handle complicated exceptions, reduce costs

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A content / document management strategy has many considerations for any company. Automating workflows is the most popular and effective way to reduce cost, reduce errors and handle complex exceptions. Documents that you create from your ERP system such as purchase orders, AP checks, shipping documents and customer invoices, need to be filed and retained for future reference. Using DocOrigin, those documents can be created, formatted and output based on your specific requirements. These are all questions to ask yourself related to the filing, storage and retrieval of mission critical documents. However, the considerations don’t stop there! Which of these captured/filed documents needs to be reviewed, approved, and further processed?  If the routing of these documents within your organization is being managed via paper, interoffice mail, or even email, then there is a lack of control, visibility, and certainly a lack of automation. Leveraging a workflow solution to facilitate the routing of these documents through your business processes, whether for invoice approvals or processing customer orders, will allow you to ensure timely and accurate processing while enforcing all your routing rules and procedures. And with the control of workflow comes the visibility to report on the flow of information so you can make more timely and informed decisions related to your business. IntelliChief is an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution that can be leveraged throughout your back office and line of business functions that are very document centric and manual in their processing. Purchasing, Accounts Payable, Order Processing, Customer Service, Accounts Receivable, Shipping, and Human Resources, are all very common target areas for an ECM strategy. When integrated with your key business applications (ERP, CRM, HRIS, etc.), you are providing seamless instant access to information for your key knowledge workers. IntelliChief, LLC and Eclipse have paired together to bring you a solution that can manage your entire document life cycle, from document creation to document processing to document management.  To learn more about the IntelliChief solution, visit us at http://www.intellichief.com/intellichief-docorigin-enterprise-content-management/ Brian Spiro,Senior Director, Enterprise SalesIntelliChief 508-594-2800 x423 bspiro@intellichief.com

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How Loyal Are Your Customers?

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Companies spend millions to attract new customers. After all, every company must continually gain new customers and expand market share. But gaining new customers is only part of the equation for long-term success; organizations must also retain repeat customers in order to survive.

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BCC Software to host Steve Dearing on monthly webcast, Lien In

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We are pleased to share some exciting news about one of our partners, BCC Software. They will be hosting a special edition of their monthly webcast, “Lien In,” on Tuesday, April 4, at 11 a.m. EST. Steve Dearing, Director of Corporate Reporting at the United States Postal Service will join host Chris Lien, President of BCC Software.

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Improve customer experience with personalization

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Make it Personal It seems like everyone is talking about customer experience these days… and for good reason. A 2% improvement in the retention of your existing customers can equate to a 10% reduction in operating expenses. A 5% reduction in the customer defection rate can increase profits by as much as 95%. Clearly, retaining customers can pay, but how do you do it?

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