Most organizations create and distribute customer communications with software systems that have existed for many years. Some are decades old. Business leaders understand the value and the necessity of a digital transformation throughout the enterprise; however, their document production workflow can be a roadblock.

Software developers know their customers want and need to upgrade customer communication management (CCM) operations. Development efforts have shifted to cloud-based, digital-first products. The latest innovations are unlikely to be rolled into legacy server-centric solutions. Moving to a digital, cloud-based platform for physical and electronic documents is now a better strategy than attempting to upgrade existing on-premise solutions.

Digital Transformation: Where to Start:

Perhaps the most important idea to grasp about a digital transformation of legacy customer communication software is the notion that your desired future state may require a complete change in how you do things. A digital-first document system requires a willingness to change many aspects of how your organization designs and produces documents. Clinging to legacy systems and procedures doesn’t just make adoption difficult. In most situations, steadfast attachment to an outdated concept makes it impossible to fully realize the benefits of a digital-first solution.

Digital transformation starts with retiring legacy document management systems that do not support your corporate digital strategy initiatives. From a technical standpoint, companies cannot typically adapt older systems to support a digital platform. If the organization’s marketing and revenue goals depend on the benefits a cloud-based digital document management platform can deliver, upgrading existing systems is not an option.

What is Digital, Cloud-based Document Management?

Digital, cloud-based customer communications software allows organizations to manage physical and electronic documents and the workflows that create and distribute them. A document system designed to meet today’s requirements is critical for professional printers/mailers, third-party document management services, and internal corporate providers. Cloud technology improves productivity and competitiveness because your organization can scale the application up or down depending on current needs and the business climate. Cloud storage uses external servers to store a company’s data. It allows secure data hosting and accessibility for remote and on-site employees. Managers can make decisions and act quickly because secure access to data and CCM applications are available to all team members.

If activating your disaster recovery (DR) plan ever becomes necessary, digital CCM platforms will be an advantage. The flexibility, redundancy, and accessibility aspects of a cloud-based document management platform eliminate many of the challenges associated with cold site or warm site DR instigation.

Infrastructure Investigation

Once everyone involved is on board and genuinely committed to digital transformation, you must dive deep into your infrastructure. Inspect your interconnected components, systems, and applications. Understand how they fit together and identify the bottlenecks. When you discover a problematic component, it is not enough to fix the problem and move on. Identifying how a process relates to and affects all other elements is essential. Move modules to new cloud-based infrastructures when possible. Your technical team should optimize any of the backend code they can modify without changing the front-end behavior. You are considering digital transformation because the world has changed. Consider new business requirements when creating your plan and build something fresh from the ground up.

Departmental Communication and Information Flow

An indicator that the time for this transformation has come takes the form of siloed information and business practices in various departments. This segmentation of data makes it difficult for people to communicate and collaborate. Maybe the document composition and legal teams are not collaborating on a new billing format. Perhaps marketing did not update the press room on a new design for a direct mail piece. Whatever the case, information trapped in a data silo is only available to one team. Insight made possible from a comprehensive customer view is hampered when the legacy infrastructure cuts departmental data off from other groups who could use it. Segregated data makes it impossible for people and their technologies to work together.

For a successful digital transformation, data needs to be available to everyone in the organizations that use it. Document creation composition, printing, distribution, and management workflow must move freely across your enterprise. In a digital transformation, every piece of information belongs to the organization.

Quickcoms’ next-generation CCM platform enables organizations to build and execute effective communications while lowering operating costs and ensuring compliance. Residing in the cloud, Quickcoms’ technology provides banks, insurers, and other regulation-sensitive companies with practical ways to improve change management and update address information and other data files. Data is available across functional areas to empower employees to build and distribute timely customer communications. Quickcoms cloud-based CCM software uses regulatory intelligence to automate rapid document updates. An intuitive interface and no coding give an organization the power to meet all regulatory deadlines and provide superior customer service.