ITP/Customer Correspondence Management Overview
Today enterprises try to capture their customer profile in a single Corporate or Enterprise CRM system. These CRM systems are specialized in capturing the complex marketplace in which enterprises operate today. Customers are known to them via various business channels. Sometimes the customer comes in through a direct channel, at other times they are serviced by an agent, shop or other third party and they come in through a collective product, e.g. via an employee benefits program. Within each context individual agreements are made with the customer about their communication preferences.
Line of business applications are typically unaware of all these different ‘customers’ being the same person in the outside world. Each application traditionally has its own output component. This component generates documents that are sent to the customer. Sometimes multiple line of business applications produce documents that relate to the same ‘product’ as perceived by the customer.
Building the complexity of today’s marketplace into the line of business applications is very complicated and expensive making it almost impossible. That is the main driver for investing in a corporate CRM system.
Most organizations and enterprises have a large number of applications, both old applications running on legacy platforms and modern applications running on current platforms. Newer applications already leverage the information in this CRM system. Using this information from a legacy application is very expensive, making it nearly impossible to do. This results in a situation where e.g. even though the CRM system holds a preferred output channel of email for a specific customer the legacy systems will still send spool files to a printer, that are printed and mailed on paper instead of by email. In addition every new application needs to develop its own interface to the CRM system to retrieve the customer communication profile. In today’s market where there are individual and collective or group products and where there can be multiple business channels (direct, agents, web, etc.) the information captured in CRM can be very complex. Every application needs to understand this information and make sense of it, before it can be used profitably.
When there is no central CRM system business users must update information in each line of business application and infrastructure component when the customer data or profile changes. Companies are currently working on implementing an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). This could potentially solve this problem once this service bus is in place. However, implementing an ESB require changes to all the legacy application to receive information from the ESB.
With ITP/CCM we want to enable Enterprises to untap the value of their CRM system without large investments in updating legacy applications. ITP/CCM will gather all output generated by traditional and modern output production components for structured, on-demand and interactive output. ITP/CCM will interface and synchronize with the corporate CRM system to determine the customer communication profile. Based on the profile and on communication rules and profiles managed by business users ITP/CCM will analyze, manage, (re)combine and enhance all output flowing through the enterprise.
