A Next Generation Platform for Archiving and Electronic Presentment of Customer Communications

So, your customer communications archive is old, obsolete, costly, and complex to maintain. It is for those reasons, along with the desire to boost information governance and compliance and to enable better business process management that organizations decide to make the move to a next-generation document archive. In this blog, we look at what makes an ideal next-generation customer communication archiving platform.

Many modern enterprise content management (ECM) systems re-imagine the traditional architecture for content management and business process automation, combined into a digital business platform. That means that they include the concepts and features required to both manage content and the business processes that interact in a highly integrated fashion. A feature set that makes modern ECM systems an ideal target for archiving customer communications.

Customer communications archives need to store 100’s of millions and even billions of documents. The challenge is making an ECM platform perform at scale and be capable of servicing mission-critical archiving and electronic presentment of customer communications. Having an ECM system optimized for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure helps scale it with effectively unlimited storage capabilities by using hierarchical storage systems. Customer communication archives and electronic presentment systems can now benefit from the cost efficiencies and scaling of cloud services.

Customer communication types can be varied and complex and it is not unusual to find archives containing 100’s if not thousands of different record types. A document typing model that can cope with these requirements (and any migration) usually presents an opportunity to rationalize content into a simpler domain model that allows knowledge workers to be more efficient

Support for the Content Management Interoperability Standard (CMIS) as well as modern RESTful APIs means that the integration of content services with other business systems and business processes is consistent and well-defined.  This makes content an enabling technology for many business systems, including self-service web portals.

Ingestion is a crucial part of the process for loading high-volume customer communications archives. Large organizations need to load millions of documents each day which means that ensuring the ingestion pipeline is as efficient and fast as possible is essential to maintain services to customers.

One of the critical parts of any system is the use of a high-volume ingestion engine to manage the transformation, indexing, and loading of documents. Crawford Technologies’ core platform is widely deployed with customer communications archives as well as cloud-first ECM systems, which gives the added reassurance that new systems can support the same features found in traditional archives.