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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.