March 2000

READERS' BEST TIPS

Edited By Maria Medina

Successful Backfile Conversion

Steps for Preparing, Scanning, Indexing and Testing

1. Examine document handling. This process includes classification, storage, retrieval, security and distribution of your documents. By doing this, you can get a sense of the organization's needs and how it handles its documents. Not all organizations handle documents the same way. For example, banking and finance firms have strict security issues to consider.

2. Locate information. Where is the information that needs to be converted? Is it in microfilm, tapes, electronic media? By gathering data — such as the typical number of pages, their condition, size and weight, media types and handling and retention requirements — you can assess how long it will take to complete the conversion.

3. Structure and categorize. Identify the optimal index schemes based on current and future methods of retrieval, page or file-level indexing needs, availability of existing index records, and the feasibility of optical or intelligent character recognition (OCR and ICR).

4. Outline a project plan. After determining what needs to be converted, pick the best equipment for each process. The outline should include a determination of facilities, equipment, staffing, document tracking and methods required to port images into the system.

5. Conduct small-scale tests. What if your plan needs adjustment? Don't just dive in; get your feet wet to ensure that procedures are valid and meet quality standards.

Greg Bartels is the founder and president of Image Processing Systems (www.imageserv.com), a Secaucus NJ- based image conversion company.

Customer Service for the Web-Savvy

How A Multimedia Contact Center Can Meet the Challenge

A new breed of IP-enabled multimedia contact centers is meeting the anytime-anywhere challenge with unified customer service systems that integrate telephone, voice and video over the Internet, keyboard chat, mail, voicemail and fax. What are the advantages?

1. Release from time-of-day restrictions. Customers can make inquiries at their own convenience, boosting the rate of completed transactions and halting the cycle of returned calls, missed calls and misunderstood calls.

2. Service beyond the brick and mortar. Customer service agents can handle inquiries (or even telephone calls) using their Internet connection. Agents can be located anywhere in the world. Customer inquiries can be intelligently routed to specific service agents based on their ability to address the issues at hand.

3. Consistent service. IP-enabled contact center technology permits customer messages sent via email, fax and voicemail to be routed to the same customer service agents.

4. Upsell and cross-sell products. Service agents can "push" specific displays on to computer screens so customers can view the item they are inquiring about.

Wynne Fischer is Director of Marketing Operations at CosmoCom (www.cosmocom.com).

Portal Primer

Tips for An Effective Portal

Portals let enterprise users create personalized views of corporate information and interact with that information in real time with the same comfort that they have searching the Web. There's a lot of portal hype out there. Keep a few key precepts in mind to ensure successful implementation.

2. Make it user friendly. The portal should put as much functionality as possible in the hands of its users. From an IT perspective, the more responsibility end users take for an application, the more time IT can spend on larger, more strategic issues. From a user perspective, the more control users have over the information they consume and the more intuitive it is, the less time is wasted calling with questions that just get in the way of making better decisions.

3. Be price savvy. There's no such thing as a free lunch, but don't pay for every bite! The price structure of a portal can interfere with ubiquitous deployment throughout the enterprise — defeating the purpose of trying to save time and money by deploying a portal in the first place. The portal can't add to the bottom line if you have to control who uses it because you got trapped into a license that makes you count seats.

John Chaconas is Director of Marketing at Visual Mining (www.visualmining.com).