Creating and enterprise wide ad hoc correspondence and document creation system

One of many challenges facing large organisations today is the growing need to create personalised letters, general correspondence and documents in the call centre or customer service centre. These types of correspondence have been created using batch processes with Document Composition software such as DOC1, CSF, Papyrus, Extreme and Pres after a request by the Customer Service Representative (CSR). All these products work very well at the batch level but for ad hoc document creation they fall short in many areas.

Due to the lack of any products addressing this requirement many organisations have built systems using MS Word templates or other software not really suitable for an enterprise wide implementation. Issues with this soluiotn include;

• Users have control of thier output
• No "corporate branding" enforced
• No workflows and approval processes
• No centralised control
• Typically, the solutions are based on Office Textprocessing
• Text cannot be shared between departments
• Macro-Applications gets out of hand

DOPE/Dialog was designed and written to deliver an ad hoc letter creation capability at the desktop that was integrated into the enterprise environment and controlled by administrators to ensure company standards were adhered to.

Users of IBM's ASF (Automated Statement Formatter) software will have had some experience as to how good a dedicated package such as this can be. Dialog takes the IBM design ethos and enhances it dramatically to deliver a true "create, manage, control, audit and deliver" capability for documents created by anyone in your organisation.

DOPE/Dialog uses a "Java Bean" which runs on almost any operating system allowing any desktop to create letters using standard elements, corporate fonts, standard layouts, pre build paragraphs, images, ad hoc text entry and fully corporate compliant output. The user interface is very similar to the MS Word front end (including a spell checker) and functions can be added or removed at a user or group level.

Different users and user groups can be authorised to have access to different functions and capabilities.

Variables are inserted by the system so in some cases it might just be a case of a CSR selecting a new policy schedule and then after checking it's contents sending it for printing either locally, centrally or batched up for a larger print run. A CSR with greater authority might have the ability to create a new ad hoc paragraph in the letter reflecting the more important nature of the correspondence such as a complaint handling situation. Document workflow is also included to allow documents to go through an authorisation process before they are released for dispatch.