Managing information, documents and records can certainly be challenging. With information being the lifeblood of business in the knowledge economy, digitising documents and getting the right information they contain at the right place and time for the right reasons is more important than ever.
As the volumes of data, content and even paper documents continue to grow, the challenge grows as well. With all of the different forms of documents out there these days it can be difficult to find a way to sort through everything in a way that makes sense for the desired outcomes.
Designing document capture with value in mind
Getting access to the information customers, staff and other stakeholders need remains a challenge in a siloed environment where very often processes still need manual interventions or scanned documents are sitting in repositories as unindexed PDF files, slowing down operations.
How can companies make sense of it all, overcoming the silos and seemingly endless stream of content and crucial information hidden in various documents? The core challenge at hand is deriving value from the right documents and content.
A way to make sure it happens is by designing your document capture and scanning approaches with this challenge in mind, as choosing the right capture strategy determines whether you will succeed at deriving value by capturing and extracting content in the fastest, smartest and most cost-efficient way. As written in a previous blog post: capture is crucial for business success.
Document capture is part of a smart holistic document management and even intelligent information management approach.
Customer-facing and knowledge worker challenges
Customers use all kinds of channels, sources, documents and information formats to interact with companies. Furthermore, other stakeholders, such as customer-facing staff need the right information to do their job.
Unfortunately, too often customer-facing staff and knowledge workers still have to wait too long for crucial information, certainly when it concerns paper, the enemy of speed and digital transformation.
This is why distributed capture and transactional scanning, bringing the documents and content closer to your staff (which is involved in the capture) and to your processes, is important.
A range of smart information management technologies can help companies sort through the myriad of information, to make sure they’re getting the relevant information when and where they need it, allowing to achieve the best outcome. The importance of information and knowledge management in customer-facing processes, for instance, becomes clear when we look at the graphic below.
The most important attribute of a successful customer service professional
What do customers see as the most important attribute of a customer service professional? Efficiency or the ability to answer questions and handle transactions quickly. In other words: information and rapid access to the right information. This goes hand in hand with the second most important attribute: workers are expected to be “empowered”. They are expected to dispose of the information, knowledge and tools to handle requests or simply provide information upon the first contact/interaction, again enabled by the right information.
Customers – and other stakeholders – don’t care about our silos and the – manual – bottlenecks we have. They expect us to have a full overview of their “case”, whether it’s in customer service processes, case management or other processes.
From paper to digital
As mentioned, one of the bottlenecks that continues to exist is paper, posing a challenge to utilise documents to the fullest. For starters, it slows down processes, exactly what customers, staff, management and others involved don’t want anymore.
Organisations do realise this: according to AIIM’s latest report of the progress of paper-free processes the large majority of respondents agree that businesses at-the-speed-of-paper will be ‘unacceptable in just a few years’ time’. So, what can be done to create a solution?
Today’s scanning technologies are a great way to help take care of the paper problem. However, it is important to know that document scanners alone are not enough. As our whitepaper, “The future of intelligent document capture”, explains, organisations often fail to implement paper-free initiatives because documents are placed in electronic archives such as PDFs. This essentially digitises the paper files into a “digital filing cabinet” without accessing any of the relevant data.
In order for companies to fully extract the necessary information needed the information needs to be taken from the document and on boarded into an organisation as an indexed archive, or directly into the business process. It’s again a reason to revisit your document capture strategy and look at the possibilities of the latest transactional document scanners and web-based information capture solutions whereby documents can be scanned via a browser or directly from within the line of business applications as Kodak Info Input allows you to do. This ensures that the information doesn’t become trapped and lost.
Business process automation is key
Empowering workers, such as customer service reps or knowledge workers in a specific line of business context (as in transactional scanning), also means helping them focus on the creation of value. Information, and more specifically the automation of information-related processes plays a key role here.
Removing simple but repetitive tasks, such as having staff manually entering or checking data, leaves them more time to focus on more complex and higher value-generating tasks, while also providing them with a higher level of engagement, just by automating the workflow.
Reducing paper usage and automating workflow are just a few of the ways companies can better manage and utilise document information and information overall. Now more than ever is the time to find the solutions that are right for your company.
For more information on the possibilities of document capture and management, check out the White Paper, “The future of intelligent document capture”.
» Contact us to make the most of your documentsDer Beitrag Make the most of your documents: capture and extract relevance where it matters erschien zuerst auf KnowledgeShare by Kodak Alaris Information Management.