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, 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 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 make it an ideal target for customer communications archiving.
Customer communications archives need to store 100’s of millions and evens billions of documents. The challenge is making an ECM platform perform at scale and be capable of servicing mission critical customer communications archiving and e-presentment requirements. Being optimised for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure helps scale systems with effectively unlimited storage capabilities using the hierarchical storage systems available from those Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers . Customer communication archive and e-presentment systems can now benefit from the cost efficiencies and scaling of cloud services instead of tying up expensive mainframe and system resources in on-premises systems.
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 rationalise 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 integration of content services with other business systems and business processes is consistent and well-defined, making 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 organisations 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 legacy customer communications archives as well as modern ECM systems, which gives the added reassurance that new systems can support the same features found in legacy archives.
Next week, in Part 2, we examine how you can turn web-based content services platforms into high-volume customer communications archives.
