Articles

In most workplaces, you hear the term “effective customer communication” thrown around as one of the most important aspects of how organizations deal with their clients. However, despite the perceived importance of this concept, most organizations still don’t execute effective customer communication techniques. This often results in misunderstanding, ignored messages, and in extreme cases, loss of customers.

Every organization faces strict legal and corporate branding guidelines. As the organization grows, adhering to these guidelines start to become more and more difficult to manage. In addition, corporate documents volumes also grow exponentially, potentially resulting in “document chaos”. The growing volumes will also become increasingly difficult for business manager to handle, thus starting the proliferation of a “digital landfill”.

The handling of the creation of mass communication documents is a key issue which businesses must address. Often times, this process is handled by the IT department, who gets requests from business managers. Once communications documents are created, they get sent back to the business manager for approval before publication. While this process can work, it poses a lot of limitations and often becomes too complex, time-consuming and labor intensive. The back and forth correspondence between the IT department and the business managers can lead to delays in the business process and information being unintentionally mishandled. In a highly competitive industry, where there are quick turn-around times and aggressive approaches to market, this is unacceptable. Contracts, regulations, and legislations can change at any time, and any delays in an organization’s business process can result in non-compliance.

Leading analysts say that organizations that don’t have control of the document production and management process faces issues such as “significant business inefficiency and exposure to compliance or disclosure risk”. This is usually rooted in problems with the front end of the entire process – the creation of documents. With the “copy and paste” paradigm deeply ingrained in a lot of organization’s cultures, errors from an old document are easily propagated into new documents. With document generation at the forefront, a lack of control over this process could lead to the issues mentioned earlier.

An organization without a centralized document management system will have multiple repositories in which their corporate content is stored. Most of the time, this would be located in local hard drives and various departmental folders, which will most likely lack any type of integration. As a result, information is highly difficult to locate and eventually leads to users having to recreate documents that they need. This could lead to information loss, as content is recreated manually from one system or folder to another, as well as an increased risk of error.