Today customers, partners and internal stakeholders demand web access to accurate, timely, and pertinent business information. Driven by competitive pressure to continually improve the customer experience, organizations are enhancing their online, self-service model of customer interaction. The ability to promote seamless online information availability and react promptly to in-person or telephone customer service requests not only provides a marked competitive advantage, but can dramatically reduce operational costs.
Many organizations that use IDARS/ECM systems to archive their internal operational and customer-facing documents are faced with the following challenges:
1. Strategy
The first thing you need is a strategy, which can eventually boil down into a plan. Pull together the cross-functional team representing all the key aspects to your online presentment. Ask some key questions: What are we hoping to achieve in our presentment strategy? Are there key KPIs for service levels, cross, or up-sells? What are our limitations? Are there competitive aspects to the strategy?
Try not to get bogged down in the technical details of what can or cannot be done, or what has or has not worked in the past. Build out your requirement list at a high level, prioritize based on feedback from the team, and start to move forward. Your presentment strategy is a long-term commitment, and the best advice one can give is to plan ahead, plan for the best, and prepare for the worst.
2. Accessibility
This generally makes us think of physical access to buildings, ramps to doors and automatic openers, but there is quite a bit driving web and document accessibility, particularly the visually impaired. Current and emerging legislative drivers are pushing presentment groups to address the needs of this important and growing customer segment.
Providing websites and statements which can be used by assistive technologies such as screen readers is increasingly becoming a requirement for presentment providers. Often ignored, this segment of your customer base has, and is actively, spending money. They are also quick to praise organizations committed to accessibility, and even quicker to call out those who are not.
3. Multiple Archives
In today’s world of financial services, having a single vendor’s archive system is next to impossible. With the constant stream of mergers and acquisitions, as well as varied silos of the business internally, it’s almost guaranteed we will have many different archives. Whatever system we implement, it needs to be holistic and something which can easily and effectively connect with a wide variety of archive databases. Investigating performance at this level is key. Find out which databases work best and set KPIs, which are reasonable, based on industry norms and organizational metrics.
4. Document Storage
Still saving a separate copy of each individual statement as a PDF for online presentment? Why! The single largest operational cost reduction can be found using single-instance storage, with some clients realizing reductions up to 80% or more.
What is single instance storage? It’s the process by which one separates the “promotional” components of a statement or invoice from the “transactional” ones, then reassembles them on-demand as and when needed for a post or online presentment. Also known as “de-duplication,” this technique creates a single copy of the common resources such as logos, graphics, fonts, and terms and conditions.
It is a process that can be applied to many file systems, email server software, data backup, and storage solutions. It reduces the need to constantly store and present this common information, thereby significantly improving storage and bandwidth costs.
5. Transpromo
You know the word, transpromotional. We all receive statements from one financial institution or another, whether it’s our latest mortgage, credit card, or investment summary. All those advertisements you see are transpromo. What better way to make use of all that empty whitespace.
Did you know only 10% of organizations use transpromo as a delivery vehicle for marketing messages? Recent surveys have shown that typically, statements sent via the post have a readership rate of around 95%. Do you open and read your monthly statements? Most consumers read their statements more than once, and on average, read them for one to three minutes at a time.
6. Unification
Are you providing multiple statements to your clients today? Perhaps you are a financial institution with many flavors or a utility provider such as cable/internet/phone. As a client, why should I have to go through multiple statements or web interfaces just to access all the information for a single provider?
Presenting a unified statement to your clients (if you are not already) is quickly becoming the standard for statements. Pulling statements together into a unified interface can reduce your costs and improve customer experience, as well as provide more opportunities for up and cross-selling within a given interface or statement.
7. Caching
One of the easiest mechanisms to improve performance, caching stores a set of commonly used files on the webserver used for presentment. This means an end-user requesting such files does not have to wait for data to load from an archive or existing database since it is readily available at the presentment layer. This is the same process web browsers use to increase performance for commonly visited sites and services.
8. Dynamic Content Consolidation
With dynamic content consolidation, multiple related pieces of information are merged or linked together to provide an expanded and/or supportive view of a single transaction. An example would be a personal bank statement, where all relevant check images are appended to the end of the statement or hyper-linked within it and then made available online. This translates into significant time savings for end-users who would otherwise have to search for supporting materials. In addition, providing the customer with a consolidated view of all their transactions across multiple lines of business, or over expanded periods of time, enhances the personalization and service experience.