Cold Comfort
- Article 8 of 26
- M-iD, July 2004
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For companies pursuing best-practice customer service, the ability to retrieve and view invoices, bills or statements while the customer is actually on the phone is a major goal.
The reason is simple: if a customer service representative has the document (or at least an electronic image of it) in front of them when responding to an enquiry, then the time it takes to complete that transaction is shortened. Customers can point out problems with the document to the employee and he or she will be able to see exactly what they're talking about. The customer is happier, retention rates improve, and ultimately, costs can be minimised.
Unfortunately, few organisations have that kind of document access in place. As a result, customer queries cannot be answered easily, leading to longer call times with customers and expensive call-backs. In many cases, the employee does not have permission to access the data that the customer is enquiring about and must request it from the IT department - a process that can take days.
How does COLD/ERM work?
On the face of it, computer output to laser disk (COLD) and enterprise report management (ERM) sound like two completely different things. Closer examination reveals the similarities between the two.
COLD involves capturing print streams in order to get a digital version of the printed form of a document - in effect, cutting out the step of scanning a printed document to get it into a system.
ERM involves the capturing, indexing, storing and retrieving of reports - another branch of document management. Yet in the context of ERM, the term 'report' refers to things such as invoices, bills, statements, credit notes and other records of transactions sent to customers, clients, and business partners.
In other words, it is only after they have been printed that they exist as a document that can be put into a document management system and handled, and then only once they have been put into a digital form. This means, without COLD there would be no ERM.
Similarly, time and technology have given a different meaning to COLD. Laser disk is rarely, if ever, the intended destination of a report, since far cheaper mass storage solutions, such as hard drives, RAID arrays, NAS and SANs, now exist that have better price points, storage capabilities and performance than optical disks.
Tape drives have also improved enough to exceed optical as a medium of greater reliability, performance and capacity.
Many organisations may instead prefer to output directly to an ECM, rather than any other storage medium, instantly creating documents for handling in an ERM system.
Where an optical medium is used, it is typically as a result of legacy operations, or more likely over the last two years, compliance issues, since its write-once, read-many capabilities are still a 'safe bet' for any organisation not wishing to argue with regulatory authorities over which medium is best.
COLD typically captures print streams in one of several ways: by taking the raw output and converting it into another format, such as PDF or PNG; or by taking the output directly and storing it; or by intercepting the output further up the line so that only the position on the paper, the type of form used and the content of the text are captured.
While the first two options have the virtue of higher regulatory compliance, since they better reflect the document that customers would have received, and easier deployment to customers over the web, the latter option can save on the amount of storage space used - as little as a few bytes of data might be used per report - and also make it easier to take the text of the document and incorporate it into other documents or systems. Most COLD/ERM applications can integrate with one or more CRM systems, particularly those applications available from ECM vendors such as IBM. Siebel integration is usually a given, but Clarify, PeopleSoft and SAP are commonly catered for as well.
The degree of integration varies from system to system, with access to COLD/ERM documents usually available via a hyperlink in the corporate portal or intranet that launches a document viewer.
For COLD/ERM applications that store just text and position or the raw print stream, this viewer is usually proprietary, but some, in common with those that convert output to PDFs or other common document and image formats, will use a web 00browser in combination with standard plug-ins to view the documents.
COLD/ERM (computer output to laser disk/enterprise report management) technology can overcome that problem enabling organisations to provide faster and format-accurate access to historic legacy data for customer support or redistribution. It works by intercepting the print stream of a document as it is printed, capturing, indexing and storing the output for access by internal users and customers. So as organisations print invoices, statements, bills and so on, they are able to store the output digitally for instant access later on.
By integrating COLD/ERM systems with customer relationship management (CRM) or call centre software, users can obtain exact replicas of computer print output and an electronic history that is essentially unlimited.
Customer problems can be solved more easily because the customer service representative has access to the right documents at the right time and can even send them directly to customers by fax or email.
Typically, COLD/ERM capabilities are not built into CRM systems, but are instead available as 'point' products from specialist vendors such as DocFinity or as part of wider enterprise content management (ECM) packages from companies such as IBM, Documentum, Mobius and FileNet.
Executives from these companies, however, readily admit that COLD/ERM integrated with CRM is a hard sell - not the fault of the technology itself, they say, but a lack of appreciation by most organisations of the power of the "unsexy" technology and the benefits it offers.
"I've always been surprised that businesses haven't jumped onto these capabilities much more than they have done to date," says Craig Sullivan, director of product management at CRM vendor NetSuite. "Access to information is one of the biggest inefficiencies we see and hear about in SMEs [small and medium-sized enterprises]."
Kim Jasper, an IBM marketing manager, says he struggles to get his sales people to even mention COLD/ERM. "I often tell our sales people that report management and COLD are of very strong value to our customers. Just the ability for a customer-facing employee to retrieve stuff sent to customers in the last year or so is of immense value, not just to big enterprises but to SMEs as well."
"If you can archive all your information and invoices and statements on your system and retrieve them when your customer is on the phone," says Jasper, "you can give customers much higher quality of service - and with a total implementation and installation time of just a few days, it's an easy kill for IT managers and popular with end-users."
For those reasons, COLD/ERM implentations linked to CRM might be due for a second wind - and the concept of information lifecycle management (ILM) might be an important additional driver.
"What's new is thinking about how people can look at the content management lifecycle and see how things like reports are not standalone, but part of a lifecycle," argues David Gingell, vice president of marketing EMEA, at Documentum. "Information probably needs to be used in many ways and on many occasions. The ILM message talks about understanding the value of the information you're dealing with."
COLD/ERM systems offer two key benefits from an ILM perspective: the ability to retain data as dictated by legal and regulatory mandates but also to repurpose it as needed.
The ILM message - pick a storage medium to suit the data, depending on its position in the "information lifecycle" - fits nicely with COLD/ERM's integration into CRM: few customer statements are important after any more than a few months and can be archived to slower media, such as tape, avoiding the investment needed for faster storage media.
With EMC heavily promoting its disk-based write-once, read-many Centera system, companies are increasingly aware that archiving off reports for compliance purposes and then trying to access them in real-time through a COLD/ERM-enabled CRM application does not necessarily result in slowdowns in customer response.
In addition, many COLD/ERM vendors are working closely with storage systems suppliers to ensure that their systems can not only integrate with common storage management tools, but also to be able to bypass tools and write to the storage directly.
Although linkages to CRM systems from COLD/ERM systems have now been in existence for several years, the failure of organisations to benefit from CRM - and indeed in many cases to regard CRM as a failure - has meant that many are unwilling to sink more money into their CRM deployment to benefit from the integration.
Nick Ellis, UK managing director at content management system vendor Mobius, says that, originally, the company predicted increased demand for COLD/ERM capabilities to store the "huge amount" of data that CRM systems were expected to generate.
What actually happened was that problems associated with CRM implementations - budget and schedule overruns and compromised business benefits as a result - led to COLD/ERM being used less. That situation is changing fast. Storage vendors are increasingly highlighting the benefits of an end-to-end approach to data management through their ILM messages and document management vendors are doing likewise to promote enterprise content management. Alongside that, compliancy regulations are forcing data-retention to a previously unheard-of level.
As a result, more and more organisations are starting to develop an enterprise-wide, end-to-end policy for managing customer information. And as a result of that, COLD/ERM might just become the accidental hero that helps recoup the investments in storage and CRM systems that might otherwise have been wasted.
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