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How to Create a Customer Service Competitive Advantage

If you want to differentiate your organization by creating a competitive advantage in customer service, you can do so by managing your incoming content more effectively with document capture, workflow automation and document management. This blog explains how it all works.

Content Ingestion

The first step is to ingest all content related to customer cases and transactions, whether in paper, email, fax, or other form of media. While data entry can cover some information that needs to be captured, it’s also important to capture and retain an image of actual documents. Data entry also isn’t as useful to capture information from email, fax and other forms of correspondence.

Workflow Automation

Once ingested, workflow automatically routes documents and other content to the right person for the most expedient processing possible. As a result, applications can be approved, orders can be processed and change orders made in minutes instead of hours or days. It’s common to cut down document processing time by 50-75% with workflow automation, which can lead to hundreds of productivity hours to be reclaimed each year and blow the doors off of your competitors.

Most questions arise while a new application, order or claim is being processed. Therefore, you want all documents related to these cases and transactions captured and integrated with your customer resource management (CRM) and/or enterprise resource planning (ERP) system so your reps can answer questions from customers and/or prospects in minutes on the first call instead of taking hours, days or weeks. Doing so can make smaller organizations appear much larger because of an increased perception of professionalism.

Workflow automation is a function of document management software and needs to combined with your workflow partner’s ability to re-engineer your processes and integrate capture and workflow with your CRM, ERP and other back-end systems.

Document Management

Your content needs to reside in a secure repository that is accessible by all authorized employees wherever they may be located: at headquarters, at remote offices and while traveling. Cloud file sharing is an option, but organizations typically need to secure access at the document and folder level and need automated retention scheduling to make sure these documents are stored for as long as they need to be – and not a minute longer. These are classic hallmarks of document management software like EMC ApplicationXtender (AX).

The Best Part: document management software today, like AX and especially our cloud version of it called MetaStor, offers these capabilities for a fraction of the cost that they used to be. And being cloud, MetaStor is an expense that requires no IT involvement vs. a capital expense that requires IT support and maintenance.

Next Steps

It’s common for organizations to have some capture and document management pieces in place, but with outdated/homegrown software that doesn’t include workflow automation and is not integrated with CRM, ERP or other systems you use. If this sounds like your situation and you’d like to see dramatic improvements in the quality of your customer service department, let’s talk.

Contact us to learn more about how you can use content management to create a customer service competitive advantage

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