Relevant, targeted customer communication is an important competitive differentiator for businesses. Letters, newsletters, membership programs, catalogs, even invoices all help companies keep in touch with customers and find out how the business can better serve them.

But despite advances in technology and communications, companies’ interactions with their customers have become more complex and harder to manage over the years. As a result, many organizations are looking to streamline communications to help build customer relationships, boost customer value and more efficiently meet organizational goals.

Document automation could be one answer for those companies. By allowing businesses to tailor their communications, simplify production and maintain high quality, document automation can help enterprises acquire, retain, and grow customer relationships.

Most organizations use a variety of print and electronic communications to keep in touch with their customers and others. This requires that they:

• Adapt to new and evolving communication methods
• Support disparate systems that handle different types of communications
• Enable easy access to relevant, accurate, understandable data
• Provide relevant messaging for each customer

Compounding the challenge are the numerous reasons to communicate with each customer: billing, account summary information, renewal notices, service updates and marketing promotions. Each customer interaction often requires manual intervention, which translates into slower turnaround times, increased risk of error and greater costs.

“Utilizing automation to improve document-related processes can reduce cycle time and the inherent risk of error,” says Jeffrey Doyle, HP Exstream senior product manager. Exstream is HP’s comprehensive document-automation platform. “Automating these processes speeds time-to-market and time-to-customer.” Document automation software can help organizations automate paper flow and improve customer communication because it:

• Provides a comprehensive platform with which to integrate document applications and customer communications, regardless of the document type
• Allows creation of interactive documents that can be streamlined and personalized with logos and branding
• Supports information from diverse data sources, including multiple internal systems, data warehouses and enterprise content management systems
• Creates a collaborative environment to manage content according to organizational requirements
• Empowers business users by giving them control over document edits while freeing IT resources
• Produces personalized and relevant content for each customer

With enterprise document automation software, even mass mailings like monthly invoices and customer statements can be used as vehicles for personalized communications. Because customers are more likely to open and read their monthly bills than any other type of mail, the bill provides a perfect opportunity to provide updates on rates and usage, suggest alternative payment options and address other issues or concerns.

Document automation can also support a transactional promotion strategy—or TransPromo— which combines an organization’s regular transactional documents, such as monthly invoices or quarterly statements, with targeted promotional messages. Direct marketing inserts tend to get thrown away, whereas people spend as much as three minutes reviewing their statements.

“TransPromo can be used most effectively, translating the time and money invested into sales that boost the company’s bottom line,” Doyle says. “With TransPromo, you can promote relevant marketing messages while you have the customer’s attention, and have a better chance of getting your message read.”

And by adding direct marketing messages to statements and other transactional documents, TransPromo also helps reduce paper and postage costs.

In the financial services, telecommunications and utility industries, for example, TransPromo can be used with bank or credit card statements, financial reports, cell phone bills and account summaries. For instance:

• Credit card companies can add relevant information about products and services to the white space of monthly statements.
• Telephone and utility companies can print messages directly on bills for bundled services, or include tips on energy savings on customers’ monthly bills.
• Personalized URLs can be placed on documents to direct customers to survey pages or other informational Web sites.

Enterprise document automation is just one of HP’s Document Workflow Transformation solutions. Find out more.

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