Robert's Story - Self-Service is Better Service
Robert is a lawyer at Marie's office, interested primarily in querying the data.
Robert's Past
Robert was a lawyer in the agency's compliance unit, dealing with complaints and questions from companies who felt their regulatory filings had been improperly handled in some way. Almost always there would be correspondence about the case and so Robert was frequently a client of the Correspondence Unit - calling up to verify that correspondence had been sent or received, or to ask for a copy of the file folder to be sent to his office.
Several times during his years in the job, Robert's repeated requests would get no response - another file had gone missing. Occasionally this was worrisome because the legal unit often had to respond within their own legislated deadlines. A more common concern was his need to be "in the loop" whenever any kind of correspondence was sent or received from companies who had filed complaints. Although he would send a memo to that effect to the Correspondence Unit, there were numerous instances where responses were sent back to companies without him being able to make important revisions to protect the agency's options.
Investigating ccmMercury
Marie had wisely consulted a number of their internal agency clients about the plan to adopt ccmMercury, and solicited their requirements. Robert was enthusiastic in working with his fellow users in other departments to identify what they needed: Their primary needs were for direct access to the information they needed, and automatic (and immediate) notification of correspondence items of interest to them:
- A web interface to ccmMercury that gave users in field offices anywhere across the country, immediate access to correspondence files the needed.
- Allow users to define their own searches of the correspondence database - both generic searches ("show me all correspondence received in the last n days with the keyword x") and specific searches ("show me everything to and from client y"), and save those searches to be used over and over again.
- Allow users to add files and their own correspondence to the electronic file folder containing the correspondence item.
- Allow user departments to be assigned tasks and become part of the workflow for certain kinds of documents.
- Allow departments to associate metadata using their unique terminology with correspondence items.
- The availability of context-sensitive online help for casual users who didn't use the correspondence system every day.
Once again, ccmMercury proved to have the flexibility and features needed to meet these common user requirements.
Robert Now - Find It Yourself
After the training session Marie's group organized for the internal clients, Robert volunteered to work with the implementation team to define a set of standard search queries to help clients find the information they needed on their own. The deployment of ccmMercury had an immediate impact for Robert and his colleagues:
- They no longer had to contact the Correspondence Unit to find the status of files - they now used the web interface to ccmMercury and did their own search for the file, with immediate results.
- They no longer sent memos in order to intercept correspondence to companies with open legal cases. Robert trained his admin assistant on how to create and save searches that checked for new correspondence to any companies with open cases in the legal unit.
- They no longer had to ask for copies of file folders - ccmMercury kept everything in one place, including all versions of documents and responses.
- Workloads could now be easily shared with people in remote offices, who now had the same access to information as those at the main office.
In a few short months, Robert and the other users had come to see correspondence management in an entirely new light. Instead of strictly being a housekeeping function that sometimes created obstacles, correspondence management had become a powerful tool that could both assist and transform the way they did their jobs.
Yes, they had come a long way!