1. We’ve been in the document generation business for 25 years and you’ve probably heard of some of our work! Our team consists of some of the creators of JetForm Central, PDF Wizard and Forms Plus/400. So you most likely…
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You may have heard our exciting news…. we now have PDF/A-3 in production environments for DocOrigin, Business Communications Center and Dynamic Business Documents. To read more about that, click here. That being said, we’ve spent some time recently reading up on PDF/A-3 and have come across some pretty helpful articles. We lay the top 7 out here for you. Please let us know of any others we should add. Pdf-tools gives a brief explanation of the formats within PDF/A and their functions. The authorities on PDF, the PDF Association, lay out a great explanation of PDF/A-3, but even better they make an argument for the benefits of using it. 3. PDF/A-3, PDF for Long-term Preservation, Use of ISO 32000-1, With Embedded Files at LOC.GOV This is the Library of Congress Collections’ planning for the sustainability of digital formats. They provide some resources and history behind the format. They also include their notes on the PDF/A-3 and other formats. This is a 23-page document by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, a consortium of institutions that are committed to the long-term preservation of digital information. They provide in depth background on the format along with U.S. National Archives and Records Administration Scenarios and U.S. House Office of the Legislative Counsel Scenarios. Foxit provides a summary of the format, even including drawbacks but also points out the benefit in organizing digital archives and states that, “Pragmatists in companies from various segments, such as the pharmaceutical industry or the banking and financial sector, however, applaud the concept of being able to embed other formats in PDF files, because they have real-world needs to store original file formats alongside their PDF/A file counterparts.” Here Foxit explains the build-up to the development of PDF/A-3 and the 3 types and explanations of files PDF/A-3 can embed: Source, Supplement and Alternative. Prepressure.com outlines the rules and restrictions that PDF/A-3 must meet. We thought these may be helpful in getting a better grasp of PDF/A-3: it’s history, the need for it, benefits of using it and rules and restrictions involved. Happy Reading!
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1. There are just 4 easy steps! Dynamic Business Documents allows you to design, personalize, preview and generate documents and forms with any ERP, CRM, EMR or other enterprise software in just 4 simple steps! 2. It’s not just for Customer Service! Sure, DBD is important in customer service so your team can create personalized communications specific to an exception which triggered the event. But other departments can use it too. Take HR for instance; HR receives all types of documents, employee applications, legal notices and many other forms. When your business software triggers an exception, that’s when DBD takes over. Your team can now review these exceptions and respond to them with specific, personalized information that is relevant to the individual or entity. DBD provides fields so your representative can manually type in the specifics related to the exception, while ensuring that all legal and compliant business information or legal communications are included in the form or document. When exceptions occur in your business software, they will automatically appear in DBD as shown below: 3. Omni-channel presentation and delivery! With DBD, there are so many options to update your documents presentation and delivery methods, and customers want it their way. DBD delivers information when and where your customers and employees want it. Millennials want it on their phone, Baby Boomers want it on their PC or Tablet and the Silent Generation want it printed and mailed to them….I want it sent to my portal and a notice with a link sent to my cell phone! 4. Positive and Simplified User Experience! DBD empowers authorized employees from a single department or the whole enterprise to create personalized, highly professional business correspondence and other personalized documents spontaneously, on an as-needed basis. This is done in real time, using pre-approved document templates and content, which keeps your communications consistent and compliant. Customer service and other departments can set up exceptions that will allow them to provide personalized messaging within an existing compliant document set. If someone places an exceptionally large order from your company, you can now send a personalized message or notification that they have earned extra points, a free widget, etc. –all without making modifications to your existing business software. Click here to set up a demo today so we can show you how Dynamic Business Documents can benefit you.
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What is omni-channel all about? Omni-channel or multi-channel presentation and/or delivery are the various ways you can get your forms, documents and customer communications to your customers, partners, employees, and vendors. Providing omni-channel delivery gives the receiver the option to select how you communicate with them. With all of the possibilities mobile devices offer and the need to serve people from the Silent Generation to the Post Millennials generation, omni-channel delivery can get complicated. Millennials expect you to communicate with them their way. They also want you to give them the opportunity to make changes to their options without the need to communicate with another human. Today, they may want their information via the portal; tomorrow, they may want to have info sent to the portal and their phone. If you can’t meet these demands and delivery choices, you may lose their business. And as much as we hear about the paper less world, the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers are likely to ask you to print and mail the information to them. Why should you care? Most importantly, to please your customers! They want you to come to them where they want it and when they want it! And so do your partners and employees, by the way! Omni-Channel communication is the most customer-centric way to deliver critical documents and provides you an opportunity to include customer communications for branding, up-sell, cross sell, safety messaging, etc. It also helps save time and money. So now, let’s say you have generated your document, or customer communication – maybe an invoice, health history report or a monthly statement. How should it be delivered? One customer wants you to serve information to their smart device, another wants it mailed and yet another wants it saved in their portal. They also want you to send them a text message with the link so they can view, download and/or print whenever they want. Can you meet the personal needs of every customer? Yes! How can you get to be a fully functioning omni-channel organization? In order to provide this convenience and stay up to date with your industry, you need a system that knows how you want your documents presented/delivered. If you are like many companies, your business software and your forms generation software does not have the ability to provide omni-channel delivery. However, there are customer communication solutions that can provide omni-channel communications without changing your business software. Does your customer communication need to be delivered via one or more channels: FAX, print, portal, text message with links, browser in HTML, PDF, PDF/A, PDF/UA, PDF/A-3? Does your system know if a segment needs to be archived, while the rest doesn’t? Well, if you select an enterprise software solution like DocOrigin, you can present documents by omni-channel options such as on mobile devices, PC, text message, FAX, portal, or print and mail. You don’t have their delivery preference in your current data for their statements, order acknowledgements, invoices? No problem. DocOrigin can use web service calls, APIs or a database lookup to get the delivery preference at delivery time and make sure the information is delivered based on the most up-to-date customer preferences. If you want advanced presentation features, high performance and the same reliability that our Fortune 10 customers demand, give Eclipse or one of our partners a call now and see why companies like AT&T, GE, and Tyler Technologies selected DocOrigin.
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By Kevin Craine Question: What is the one single thing that can stop business cold, yet no one is in charge? Answer: Documents. Pick any key business activity in any organization, in any industry, and you can bet that documents are essential to getting the job done. But while many organizations have a “chief information officer,” few have a “chief document officer,” or a “chief experience officer.” Without this centralized responsibility, how can you design meaningful strategies and spur innovation that will make a difference? For any document, it is possible to identify a “document constituency” – the people who influence the document process. Collectively, these people are in charge. And since we create documents to be used by people, it stands to reason that the people who create, use and care about your documents are the best people to provide the finer points of navigation within your strategy. These same people need to have the ability to control the presentation of the document campaigns without IT involvement, without scripting or modification of the core business software. The Document Constituency The people who make up your document constituency are the people who use your documents, have responsibility for their existence and have a stake in how well they perform. Chances are, you already know many of the people who make up your document constituency. But there may be other people whose membership is not immediately apparent. You can identify members of your document constituency by using these four categories: Each of these people has a different set of needs, expectations and constraints. Document authors are concerned about what a document says and how readers will react. An author could be an individual, a team or an entire department. Corporate documents often contain information from various sources and are authored by several different departments who may, or may not, be working in concert. Regardless, each has a common objective to convert information into action and to ensure that the right message is effectively communicated to a reader. Document producers are the individuals, work groups, departments, or vendors who provide the “output” of your information systems. It is impossible to meet the needs of the other members of your document constituency, if the needs of your producers are not met. Producers need the right information from the right sources at the right time, as well as the right staffing and equipment in order to produce documents with acceptable quality, timeliness and cost. Document stakeholders are customers of document performance. They are concerned with both the strategic and tactical aspects of your documents. Stakeholders might include marketing executives concerned about whether consumers will purchase a product or receive relevant information, financial officers concerned about how quickly they will pay, or divisional vice presidents concerned about the costs involved with document production. Other stakeholders might include government regulators, internal auditors or corporate legal counsel. Document readers are the audience of your documents. They are the people who react and respond to the information contained in your documents. Reader reaction is the litmus test of any document’s performance, so how information is converted into action is high on the list of concerns for both authors and stakeholders. As a result, the expectations and requirements of readers are of top importance. Readers may be internal or external, i.e. communications with customers, partners, employees or vendors. Getting the reaction or response you want from your readers is the primary objective of the document. Know your Document Constituency It is easy to become enamored with technology. But in the end, people are the reason documents are produced. It seems reasonable, therefore, that the people who populate the document process are the best people to improve the process. Knowing your document constituency and understanding their needs and objectives will bring about more meaningful and lasting benefits. Kevin Craine is the author of the book “Designing a Document Strategy” and host of “Everyday MBA “on C-Suite Radio. He was recently named the #1 ECM Influencer to follow on Twitter. For more information, visit CraineGroup.com.
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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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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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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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Companies spend millions to attract new customers with beautifully designed marketing campaigns, but old-school statements typically do very little to reinforce the experience once they’re on board.
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