Correspondence Management Solutions to improve efficiency, reduce costs and enhance services
Expert Opinion
Government agencies face many challenges related to efficiency, consistency, accuracy and increased workloads, while providing timely and quality responses to the public… These organizations need to establish common approaches to moving the correspondence to the appropriate subject matter expert in order to summarize, draft and approve responses. A constant approach to the capture, task assignment and response process must be put in place regardless of the format of the original inquiry. The various sources and formats of correspondences, the increasing volumes of information and the difficulty in respecting the deadlines related to assembling the various documents of an incoming request or outgoing response make this procedure even more complex and more likely to contain errors.
Organizations that manually process incoming and outgoing correspondence face increased costs related to higher processing time and inefficient information worker allocation. In addition, the following challenges are identified:
- Increased cost of operation with the assembly of multiple documents.
- Increase time to process a request efficiently and consistently.
- Maintaining and preserving data for a long period of time.
- Difficulty in accessing and re-using existing information.
- Difficulty in protecting government information, and preventing unwanted access.
- Difficulty in complying with industry regulations Etc...
Lost and misfiled documents, increased physical storage space and paper archives, and increased difficulties in finding and retrieving the right information whenever needed, timely and securely, are additional reasons why Correspondence Management solutions are a must. These allow organizations to electronically capture, dispatch, track, validate, approve and archive correspondences and have proven to be much more proficient through enhanced efficiencies, reduced costs and increased service quality. In fact, Correspondence Management presents an innovative way of dealing with corporate communications, allowing information workers to revise, validate and respond to incoming correspondence on the fly, while enabling tracking and auditing through the entire cycle. In addition, these systems have the ability to automatically capture and import information from different sources in a standardized approach, dramatically reducing time spent on manually filing and updating correspondence templates.
Correspondence Management Solutions provide organizations of various sectors, various benefits and added value, related to reduced paper usage, information duplication and distribution, as well as increased electronic delivery. in addition to the following benefits:
- Reduced information loss with the reduction of paper usage.
- Reduced physical storage and materials costs.
- Faster and more accurate correspondence management.
- Improved information accessibility and re-use.
- Improved employee efficiency.
- Improved services and quality responses.
- Most importantly, Increased Return on Investment.
In a Forrester study on “The ROI of correspondence Management” issued on February 13, 2009, evaluating the ROI of correspondence management proved that organizations can realize a return within a year by optimizing content production, consolidating vendors and systems, as well as reducing paper usage. In that study, Sheri McLeish proves that correspondence management has increased an organization’s benefits from $2,369,184 in year 1 to $7,107,551 in year 2 and decreased the associated costs from $2,323,667 in year 1 to $620,000 in year 2, to achieve a cash flow of $5,662,447 in one year; that is a ROI of 216% payback in one year.
With over 20 years of expertise and innovation in the ECM field, EVER TEAM provides EverSuite Correspondence Management Solutions, based on the state of the art EverSuite Case Management engine. EverSuite Correspondence Management solutions offer organizations solutions to manage business communications, linking people, processes and information together. EverSuite Correspondence Management captures, tracks and manages correspondences with the public, customers, suppliers, legislators, government agencies and others, in a variety of sources, formats and channels including scanned letters, emails, faxes electronic documents and others… it allows organizations to manage correspondence and automate their processing to ensure the proper handling of incoming requests and a timely outgoing response. With this solution, organizations are able to:
- Set up and maintain a secure, manageable and indexed repository of all incoming and outgoing correspondence
- Monitor correspondence and generated tasks in a controlled and efficient manner
- Integrate all forms of customer communications into the organization’s business processes (routing and traceability)
- Increase responsiveness
- Manage and archive of all types of correspondence for legal and compliance obligations
- Reduce costs and increase returns
Based on the Microsoft SharePoint platform, EverSuite Correspondence Management Solutions are quick to deploy, helping organizations reduce development time providing fast and efficient ROI.
By Elie KASH, VP Expertise & Solutions EVER TEAM MEA
