One of Australia’s leading grains commodity managers, the Emerald Group, has transformed the way it communicates with its customers via an outsourced document generation and content management solution from Computershare Communication Services.

Headquartered in Melbourne and with 80 employees, Emerald Group is a key player in Australia’s export of wheat, barley and other grains. Represented in all grain regions with 15 offices in regional Australia, it is a wheat exporter and also provides financial products for growers and buyers of grain.

It has a massive job in creating transactional documents for its clients that include Payment Advices, Harvest Loan Statements, Tax Invoices and Delivery Statements. There are over 32,000 mail packs sent out annually, that’s approximately 2,600 per month involving 150,000 images. Traditionally these have all been produced and mailed in-house.

Due to increasing time and resource demands, Emerald Group needed to improve the way it communicated with its customer base.

Preparing 1,000 of these mail packs alone could take up to a week and was heavily dependent on staff to manually coordinate all printing, insertion and mailing.
“The process was not streamlined and therefore a waste of time, money and resources in producing the required volumes,” said Ayhan Oguzhan, Commodity Administration Coordinator, Emerald Group.

“The print quality and paper differences from using multiple suppliers were also starting to impact our brand.”

In addition, Emerald Group felt the overall presentation of the grower communications did not reflect the professionalism of the company. To reinforce this feeling, Emerald Group’s Call Centre operators had been receiving numerous calls from the growers explaining their dissatisfaction with the correspondence document layout in that it was difficult to read and understand.

It was also important for the Call Centre staff to have improved access to grower information to respond to queries efficiently. On the flip side, the growers themselves needed to have access to their own information held by Emerald Group - if they did, the number of queries coming into the Call Centre would diminish.

As a result, Emerald Group identified that they needed to: improve the professional look and feel of their grower communications for clarity and greatest impact to reduce Call Centre enquiries and grower dissatisfaction; streamline print and mail costs for efficiency and cost savings that can be better spent elsewhere; and improve the way grower information was provided to Call Centre staff and to the growers to ensure both parties were equipped to win in a competitive marketplace.

Mark MacLeod, Computershare Communication Services’ National Solutions Manager, said “The way they were doing it previously was a manual process that was taking a lot of time and was onerous on people. We provided an automated process where we receive a data file from their  core back office system; compose a more functional and engaging document that is easy for customers to understand, and then deliver the documents in print and online through our hosted enterprise content management  (ECM) system.”

Computershare Communication Services has its origins in providing shareholder communications for companies on the Australian stock market, but now has over 1,000 commercial clients using its hosted ECM solutions, including major insurers, banks, superannuation providers, and utilities.

All of the documents generated for the Emerald Group are placed in a hosted ECM so they can be accessed online by the buyers and growers as well as Emerald Group’s call centre staff.

“Emerald Group customers have a complete electronic archive of all their documents, and will soon be able to download transactional data directly into their systems, such as Agrimaster  and manage log-ins for their advisors, such as accountants. The platform we have provided to the Emerald Group not only streamlines their operations, but also the operations of their growers,” said MacLeod.

Now, when growers contact the Call Centre, the operators can easily retrieve the exact document the grower is calling about to effectively respond to queries. On the other hand, the growers can retrieve documentation relevant for them at any time from the ECM without having to contact the Call Centre. Prior to this capability, Call Centre operators had to work across numerous systems and databases to retrieve information about any given grower.

Since the solution was implemented, the time to process 1,000 pieces of communication has shrunk from a week to a day, and there has been a 30% reduction in printing and stock costs.