Is Your Transactional Document Process Flawed?
By Kurt Konow
Data Center Segment Marketing Manager
Ricoh Americas' Production Printing Business Group (PPBG)
You’ve heard it before, and you’ll continue to hear it – the transactional document is your guaranteed monthly appointment with your customer. It’s an appointment that you can’t afford to miss, be late to, or present anything except your best work. In fact, you should be planning perfect execution of the appointment with “Best-In-Class” transactional document practices.
Transactional documents are the ultimate expression of a valued customer relationship. From financial statements listing account balances, to explanation of benefits containing personal health history, to credit card statements listing detailed transactions – these documents feature highly sensitive, private customer information. To be considered “Best-In-Class” by your customers, you must ensure that your document preparation efforts include a focus on address hygiene, quality, integrity, security, and regulatory compliance to provide accurate, safe document delivery each and every time.
Transactional Documents – Here to Stay!
It’s a fact - consumers still like mail. Despite the various e-delivery methods available, consumers still want a paper copy of their documents. Think about when an email is received, the recipient will print the email to review it in closer detail, highlight important sections, or file it for future reference. Yes, consumers like mail and many prefer paper-based transactional communications over electronic distribution. The USPS delivers the mail, but it’s up to your company to ensure that every piece meets the highest standards. It’s also up to your company to ensure that your transactional documents include the right information, at the right time, and most importantly, are delivered to the right person. What are we really talking about? We’re talking about “Best-In-Class” transactional documents.
Address Hygiene
Can you imagine planning an important event, such as a graduation celebration or a wedding, but forgetting to send the invitations? “Unheard of” you exclaim! Indirectly, a multitude of companies forget to send out their “monthly appointments” by sending out mail that does not meet address hygiene standards and doesn’t get to their customer – or is caught up in address correction services that the USPS provides, for a fee, and delivery is dramatically delayed. The customer name and address are the most vital components of the transactional document. If either is inaccurate the document creation, production and delivery process yields little-to-no value. When was the last time you took a peek at the USPS website and read about the severe return mail problem? Millions of mail pieces are deemed undeliverable each year because the address block is in error. Therefore, it is imperative that every document that leaves your company incorporates a stringent address hygiene process to ensure on-time delivery.
Document Quality
Clear, precise print quality is critical when presenting transactional information for review and response. Transactional documents can include rows and rows of transactions and multiple columns of data and numbers. It is essential that your documents are prepared on printers that produce premier, error free printing in black, highlight or full color to produce the best documents on the market. While address hygiene is crucial to enable successful document delivery, equally important is the document presentation. Your corporate image is immediately expressed on the pages of the transactional document. Is the print quality pristine? Is the document clean and simple to understand with the call to action clearly recognizable? When was the last time you took a serious look at the documents leaving your data center? What are your transactional documents saying to your customers? Remember, if the transactional document is the ultimate expression of a valued customer relationship, then document quality should be of utmost importance.
Document Integrity
Frequently, a transactional document consists of more than a single page. Most customer’s transactional document mail pieces contain several document pages, a few inserts, and possibly more. Each and every document package was designed and selected with the customer in mind. At minimum, the transactional document portion should be whole. Specifically, if the complete transactional document consists of five pages, all five pages should be created, printed, and delivered to the recipient. Additionally, if marketing inserts were earmarked for the customer, or a special newsletter, or a regulatory document was required, then all components should be created, produced and delivered to the customer. Document integrity ensures that each and every piece of the document package makes it safely into the customer’s transactional document mail piece.
Document Security
How many times have you heard the story of a customer who opens up their transactional document to find that the back side of their document is actually the front side of another customer’s document? While the scenario seems far-fetched, the reality of its occurrence is more frequent than companies care to admit. Documents containing sensitive customer information bear a high degree of risk during the document creation, production, and delivery process. Imagine a bank statement or a health care document being opened by the wrong recipient. Customer privacy would be violated and that all-important customer relationship would be at risk. It is absolutely imperative that mission-critical transactional document processes include stringent document security checks and measures. The document security part of “Best-In-Class” transactional document practices could very well be the most difficult step to implement. However, without it, this may be the missing component that puts your company in the most difficult situation if in-secure processes fail.
Regulatory Compliance
Over the last few years, businesses have faced stringent national statutory laws and regulations that changed the nature of document production. HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley are two well-known laws that have dramatically impacted transactional document processes. Generally, companies are managing to adhere to the requirements, but much pain, duct-tape and glue accompany the conformity. Let’s face it, many data centers have several hard-wired systems in place and inserting a compliance step, or new process, is not easy. When the next regulatory requirement hits, call in a trusted business partner to create a structured and repeatable process for rule implementations that will keep your data center up and running without missing a beat.
Best-In-Class Transactional Documents
Transactional documents are a core output in most data centers. For businesses to succeed and stay competitive, “Best-In-Class” transactional document practices must be implemented. As the marketplace evolves and new trends and technological advancements are born, your data center must change to keep up. Change can be hard, or change can be easy. If your data center operates within a “Best-In-Class” model, then change is simple and your company will thrive.
Kurt Konow
Data Center Segment Marketing Manager
Ricoh Americas' Production Printing Business Group (PPBG)
A veteran to the high-volume transactional print market, Kurt Konow is responsible for Data Center marketing for Ricoh Americas' Production Printing Business Group. Kurt brings many years of hardware and software solution experience to his appointment as Data Center Segment Marketing Manager for PPBG. Kurt can be reached at kurt.konow@ricoh-usa.com or at 630-335-4453. |
