Customer communications for most organisations is no longer just about delivering paper to the mailbox and then archiving the files forever. For various reasons, organisations are now actively managing documents and the data they contain during the entire document lifecycle. To illustrate the point, I want to share with you areas that are intersecting in our industries today and why they are important to consider:

Compliance: with new and ever-changing regulations driving firms to re-evaluate how they archive documents and data and also to adopt technologies that will enable them to retrieve and integrate their data into new applications.

Workflow Migrations: formerly paper based workflows such as claims or mortgages application processing are migrating to all-digital or hybrid workflows, and the underlying technology needs to be updated to handle the new workflow requirements and models.

Case management and e-discovery: these are critical activities in most organisations today. The data and documents that support cases reside in different repositories and in different formats. Automating cross-application and cross-platform access to eliminate errors and improve delivery times is essential.

Information Access: The demand from customers for 24x7 access from their mobile devices to information and documents generated by legacy applications has forced companies to deploy and manage solutions to present data immediately and securely in ways that were never anticipated.

Accessibility Regulations: accessibility regulations are forcing companies to create alternate formats of customer communication so that customers who are unable to use visual interfaces can understand and interact with the information that those companies are providing to them. Alternate formats could take the form of Braille, Large Print, Audio, eText or Accessible PDF.

Big Data Initiatives: these activities are combining realtime and historical data in data warehouses and applying analytics tools to gain new customer insights or for ediscovery and compliance reasons. Extracting, validating, and normalizing data from various sources is a huge challenge.

Handling Documents and Data Securely: complying with regulations governing the handling of personal financial and healthcare information to protect customers from data breaches and to avoid the risks and fines is definitely top-of-mind, driven daily by headlines detailing the failures at high profile organisations.

The lines between the technology that creates and distributes customer communications, the technology that stores and retrieves customer communications, and the technology that enables that data to be analysed and redeployed into other applications are being blurred as we move toward cloud and SaaS based computing models.

What do all these things have in common? The need to control and distribute information flows, whether to our end customers or to customers within our businesses.

Crawford Technologies is a global provider of solutions that streamline, improve and manage high-value, high-volume documents. www.crawfordtech.com