Dec 6, 2002
By Pat McGrew, EDP
Welcome to the HVCO Data Management Pavilion of OutputLinks.com!
We are all heading into the holiday season, which for many HVCO professionals means ramping up for quarter-end
and year-end reports, tax forms, and other extraordinary print volumes. Peppered among those mailings are all types
of customer communications. Most have some segment that invites the recipient to let you know if their address has
changed or to update account profiles in some other way.
The normal procedure is that the customer updates the information and returns it in the mail, usually in the same
envelope that contains the payment. That mean that it goes to a lockbox, where it may be forwarded to the appropriate
folks, or it may simply be tossed away unnoticed. If it was an address change it may take until the forwarding order
is in play before you know that there is a requirement to update your database. If it is a change in employer, phone
number, or part of the general profile, your database may never be updated.
What if you could encourage your customers to stay in closer contact? What if you could build the infrastructure
that allowed your customers to participate in keeping their account profiles up to date?
That is some what you can do when you begin to implement integrated customer messaging. There are a variety of
ways you can build these types of systems, from purchasing systems from vendors who specialize in them to buying
components and building your own customized environment. Regardless of how you approach it, there are some real
benefits for an HVCO print environment.
The basic components are:
- Your database or databases
- A way to permit your customers to interact with your databases.
- An audit process
Each of these components may have a few opportunities associated with them. We?re using the term ?opportunities?
to mean ?problems?. Consider how many databases you have in place today. In many companies it takes many database
queries to feed the variable data into the customer-facing statements, letters, and bills that are mailed. When a
customer update comes in, which database is the actual mailing address, daytime phone number, or current employer is
drawn from? When a customer service representative takes a phone call from a customer who is updating their personal
information, is every database updated, or only a subset?
That brings us to the second component: the ability to allow the customer to update their own personal profile.
Clearly, you want to have a security environment built to meet your needs. Beyond the ability to log in, you have to
be able to not only present the information to the customer and allow them to update it, you need to build in the
mechanisms that ensure that you update all of your databases with the new information.
If you want to get a bit more adventurous, you might add bar codes or special URLs that customers can use to
interact with you. For example, you might add a special URL that they can type in that takes them to a special area
in your web environment set aside for live customer interaction. Or, you might have a barcode that they could scan
with a hand scanner attached to their PC that would take them to a special website. This is still a new way of interacting
with customers over the web, but it has the potential to grow.
And, finally, you need an audit environment. You will need to build into your existing audit environment the checks
that cover customer interaction with their own data.
Does all of this have some cost associated with it? Absolutely. But, if you check your current costs associated with
your customer interactions today you may find that there is money available if you can demonstrate a quick return. Vendors
who have been working at building these integrated environments can often help provide those types of numbers to help you
build your case.
Continue stopping here as we explore more ideas in the HVCO world! If this is valuable,
drop us a line at pm@outputlinks.com!