The lines between customer communication management and document management are blurring. As the shift to customer-centricity ripples through all industries, companies are looking for more ways to deliver highly tailored, personalized documents. That means that the use case for customer communication management with bulk-document processing has to become more personalized, and document management operations need to be able to output more documents. With these two software categories becoming closer together, the decision as to which is best for your business becomes harder to make.
So, let’s break it down and look at the differences between the two different types of software.
What is customer communication management (CCM)?
According to Gartner, CCM is both a strategy and set of tools used to create, deliver, store, and manage outbound communications across various channels like email, SMS, documents, and web pages. These communications are generally high output, account or item specific documents that are generated and sent to customers through multiple different delivery channels: digitally and direct to printer.
What kind of communications does a CCM tool manage?
CCM tools often generate millions of documents per run. There are a few typical types of documents that people use CCM to generate that fall into two major categories:
Customer facing transactional documents:
- Financial documents like invoices, billing summaries, account statements or banking statements
- Order confirmations, receipts, and shipping notices
- Usage reports for utilities or services
- Marketing materials such as welcome kits, invitations, promotional materials, or loyalty program offers
- Appointment notifications, service reminders, or renewal notices
Legal, regulatory, or compliance documents
- Bulk generated tax forms
- Policy, insurance, or renewal documents
- Legal documents like terms and conditions statements, warranty or return documents, and compliance disclosures
This isn’t a complete list, but it gives you an idea of the types of documents CCM tools generate. These documents can be generated in mass quantities such as multiple millions of documents per day – that are either sent to a physical printer, or sent electronically through an email, website, or SMS message.
What is document management (DM)?
Document management is a little more complex and complicated – it manages the entire lifecycle of a document, from original data sources to final, delivered document. According to Gartner, Document Management (DM) refers to software or middleware that handles the storage, organization, and lifecycle of unstructured documents. Historically these systems focused on a small set of critical business documents, however in the recent years, this software category has expanded to include new solutions targeting broader, everyday document needs. Organizations select these solutions when looking to reduce costs, mitigate risks, and stay competitive with their current document processes.
What types of documents do document management tools manage?
DMs tend to manage more complex documents that are highly tailored to a specific need. Generally, these documents are more specific to the use case that they are used for versus a generic statement that’s produced in bulk. A couple examples are:
Customer facing materials
- Sales process documents like proposals, quotes, invoices, bill of sales and receipts
- Legal documents like contracts, purchase orders, business agreements
- Marketing materials like newsletters, catalogs, announcements, and customer communications
- Service, maintenance, and repair quotes, agreements, or work orders
Back-office documents
- Shipping paperwork, customs forms, labels, and material specification sheets
- Account information, statements, and finance reports
- Standard operating procedures, work orders, and maintenance procedures
- Human resources documents like onboarding forms, performance management documents, benefit statements, and payroll related documents
Product specific documents
- Product manuals, technical data sheets, and MSDS forms
- Specification paperwork like certificate of conformance, certificate of authenticity, or product certifications
- Product traceability and regulatory documentation
Where is the overlap between the two types of software?
The two systems are very similar, but they also have their unique differences. To make it harder to decide what solution is best for your organization, it is helpful to understand where there is overlap between the two software types:
- Document creation: both systems use some sort of template or standard form to create documents
- Archive and storage: both systems have archive capabilities
- Integrations: both integrate with business-critical systems like ERPs, banking cores, CRMs, and other data lakes through API and shared data models
- Output management: both can deliver documents in common formats and through channels such as email, SMS, webpages, print, etc.
As we can see above, the difference between the two software categories is getting slimmer. With a sizeable amount of overlap, companies building document generation and management software often fit some of the definition of both.
Battle of the document software: how do I choose the right solution for my business?
What now? You need a document generation tool that can archive and send communications to your customer? Your best bet is to find someone in the industry who can help you find the right solution for what you are looking to accomplish. Here at Formpipe, we have thoughtfully designed Lasernet to solve for our customers real document problems – not to fit into a rigid software definition. We advise our current and prospective customers to understand exactly what your current and future needs are, then pick the right software provider who can help you now and scale with your business needs (even if that isn’t with us). Because of this, we have designed Lasernet alongside customers and we have landed in the middle of these two product categories.
So – why does Lasernet fit into both categories?
Lasernet has a rich history in the CCM space, with thousands of customers using our Lasernet platform to simplify and produce millions of documents a day. We also have customers who use Lasernet for document management handling highly specific, tailored documents. In working alongside our partner ecosystem and customer base, we have developed our functionality to help our customers solve their real documentation problems.
How do our customers use Lasernet?
We have customers who use our native CCM functionality to streamline their document generation programs. Customers in need of mass-producing documents have used Lasernet to deliver significant savings within their organizations:
- A 75-million-dollar medical billing customer based in the USA, was spending 180 person-hours every two weeks to run their billing statements. With Lasernet, they reduce this to one 90-minute run every 2 weeks. Saving >300 person hours per month
- A regional utilities company in northern USA needed to produce 1,500,000 graphical account statements per month – with a processing requirement of 250,000 statements at a 60-minute run rate. With Lasernet, they cut the amount of time by 60% and are now able to produce 250,000 statements in 34 minutes
- A Middle Eastern based retail banking customer prints 7 million End of Month (EoM) account statements per month. With Lasernet, they can easily accommodate that scale and increase as their business grows
- A European based retail bank needed to migrate 70 million historical documents into a new archive. With Autoform DM, Lasernet’s archive module, they were able to transform and manage those documents in under 3 months
Some of our customers are also using Lasernet to build more specialized, highly personalized content. Often, customers have one to two very specific use cases that require a high degree of personalization. These use cases are critical to their business: impacting their revenue generating opportunities or in critical departments such as service and maintenance.
- One of the top 5 home builders in the United States sells homes before they are built. As a part of the sales process, they deliver a highly customized sales quote that includes CAD drawings and rendering of the proposed home, fixtures, and floorplan. Our customer uses Lasernet to pull account, CAD, and design files into personalized quotes for each of their prospective customers.
- Steel Warehouse sells specialized products to their customers that require custom documents, shipping labels, paperwork, and certificates for each different customer or product. Using Lasernet, Steel Warehouse can design each set of documents to meet their end customers’ requirements and offer this as a unique selling point when selling to new customers.
- Munters are a manufacturer and service provider for wind turbines. Munters needs to deliver highly customized service and repair documentation complete with repair specific images, notes, maintenance instructions, and compliance certifications. Munters uses Lasernet to deliver these highly customized, maintenance records to their customers before and after time of service.
- A US Caribbean based bank needed to produce hyper personalized portfolio reports for its ultra-high net worth (UHNW) clients. This required gathering ESG statistics, fund performance data, market forecast, account details, and on-the-fly calculations from 5 different systems and deliver it in graphical, visual format. With Lasernet, they are exceeding customer expectations and delivering 50+ page, hyper personalized banking documents to their clients.
So, looking at our customer base, it is almost impossible to define Lasernet as either a CCM or a DM software solution. But we are OK with that. Lasernet delivers and will continue to deliver value to our customers. We have been document experts for the better part of 30 years, and we look forward to helping define the future of customer documents.
