by editor on March 8, 2010
Author: Victor Bensusan, Managing Director
The Situation
For enterprises, the ability to retain their most valuable customers is sometimes more important even than their ability to attract and find new ones. Numerous studies have shown that, for companies, the cost of acquiring new customers can be magnitudes higher than the cost of retaining an existing one.
The enterprises which are most successful at building customer loyalty are those that not only meet customer needs and expectations but consistently anticipate requirements and exceed them. It is a competency that depends heavily on the ready availability of extensive information on all aspects of a customer relationship, from purchase and transaction histories to service and support issues.
Too often, paper-intensive processes that were designed for traditional brick-and-mortar business environments are wholly inadequate for true customer relationship management purposes these days. Increasingly, customers have begun interacting with businesses through various touch points including the Web and via mobile technologies and they expect consistent levels of support and service regardless of the interface.
The trend has put increasing pressure on companies to enable a sort of collective view of customer transactions and communications that is simply not supported by paper-intensive work-flow processes or CRM systems. For many companies, the consequences of this inefficiency have been troubling.
A report released in 2008 by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, showed that nearly one out of two companies are unable to fully monetize key account relationships because of a lack of adequate customer data.
The study of 450 CMOs showed that companies are increasingly struggling to attain a holistic and timely view of their customers because of siloed data, inadequate data-sharing policies and incompatible IT systems and databases. Not surprisingly, about 31 percent of those surveyed had customer attrition rates of 10 percent or more.
The Role ECM can play
The ability of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems to manage vast amounts of unstructured data makes the technology ideal for enabling a centralized view of customer data. ECM tools are designed to let enterprises collect, manage, view and share content generated at different locations in different formats and by different applications.
By using ECM tools, a company can create a common data repository for collecting customer data from multiple sources and applications. Many current generation ECM systems use Web technologies to enable different applications, such as CRM to then easily access and use this centralized data store.
ECM systems can therefore allow enterprises to more fully leverage their investments in Customer Relationship Management technologies. According to the CMO study, many companies currently are unable to take full advantage of their CRM tools because of inadequately integrated customer data. ECM systems address this deficiency by allowing companies to bring all of their customer data to one central location from where it can be more easily managed, analyzed and shared.
by editor on February 24, 2010
Author: Alfredo DeVanna, Senior Technical Director
The Situation
The need to comply with a slew of state, federal and industry-specific regulatory requirements is forcing many companies to re-evaluate their processes for managing enterprise content.
Over the past several years, mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the Gramm- Leach Bliley Act (GLBA), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Patriot Act and the FDA’s 21 CFR 11 rules have all imposed strict reporting requirements on enterprises.
Traditional records management systems that are focused largely on physical documents such as paper and tape have proven to be largely inadequate to meet the requirements imposed by such mandates. As a result, there has been a growing interest in applying enterprise content management technologies (ECM) and principles to address the compliance challenge.
ECM can help
ECM systems, by definition are designed to help companies manage vast amounts of unstructured data scattered about in distributed data stores, e-mail, word processing documents, spreadsheets and numerous other file formats.
The technology can help companies achieve centralized control of enterprise content and greatly improve the manner in which content is produced stored, archived, distributed, reproduced, shared and destroyed. From a compliance standpoint such attributes are crucial.
ECM tools allow companies to quickly discover, retrieve and compile the information they need to meet their compliance reporting obligations. ECM systems can help enterprises track and control document access and revisions and enable them to adhere to prescribed document retention, archiving and destruction schedules.
Perhaps most importantly, ECM tools can help business sift through enterprise content and identify only the data that needs to be protected from a compliance standpoint, thereby eliminating costs involved in managing too much information.
A good content management system can enable better e-discovery processes, and help companies build efficient digital content inventories over which they can exercise centralized control.
ECM for Health Care
The advantages of such control are enormous. With a regulation such as HIPAA for instance, all entities that maintain or transmit protected health information are required to implement strict security and privacy controls around the data.
Implementing an ECM suite can help covered entities exercise greater control over user access to protected health information (PHI) as they are required to under HIPAA. ECM systems can also help healthcare entities track all disclosures of PHI and establish the needed audit trails for tracking document history and document revisions.
ECM for Financial Services Companies
ECM systems can similarly help financial services companies comply with the requirements of GLBA. Under the Act’s financial privacy rule, all covered entities are required to provide customers with a notice detailing their privacy policies.
In this case, ECM tools can simplify the document distribution process, and log every customer notice that is sent for reporting and auditing purposes.
ECM for Publicly Traded Companies
Few regulations however, exemplify the need for enterprise content management techniques more than the SOX act. Under SOX, all publicly traded corporations above a certain size are required to establish and maintain tight control over financial documents.
They are also required to show how financial reports were created, and who accessed and modified those reports. As part of their SOX compliance requirements, enterprises need to be able to identify where errors or fraud could arise as a result of their accounting practices and requires executives to sign off on all financial reports.
The extensive document management requirements that are inherently built into the rule make ECM a no-brainer as far as SOX compliance is concerned.
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