Suzanne's Story - Sometimes Change is Good

Suzanne is a longtime correspondence staffer in Marie's office.

Suzanne's Past

Suzanne was one of the key correspondence agents, preparing responses to letters addressed to the agency's senior executives. A year ago, Suzanne and the other agents were on a constant treadmill of paper. Over the five years she had worked in the unit, the stress levels had grown at the same rate as the piles of file folders.

She well remembered the sense of panic and the "all hands" searches for a missing file that had suddenly flared in urgency. But even on a normal day, Suzanne spent most of her time looking for papers - searching for file folders that should be on her desk, searching for file folders in the piles on her desk, or searching file folders for the latest draft of a response. And she remembered the constant frustration of just starting to work on a response and being interrupted to go find a different file folder in order to report on its status.

The bottom line for the agents was that they were spending less and less time doing the actual work of writing responses that used their skills and made their jobs interesting.

Investigating ccmMercury - Worth the Risk

Like most employees who have worked in the same job for years, Suzanne and the other agents were wary about making substantial changes to the way things worked. But with their job satisfaction lessening every day, they were willing to listen as Marie introduced the idea of using a software product to manage the correspondence processes.

Suzanne became very intrigued as they looked at how the ccmMercury software could help them do their job. Once the decision was made to proceed, she volunteered to be part of the project team that first defined the agents' requirements and then met with the WorkDynamics analyst who helped them configure the software to use their terminology and adapt it to their processes.

User Interface Requirements

For the agents, the most important issues were those around the user interface to the ccmMercury system. When you're doing the same operation hundreds and hundreds of times per day, little things make a huge difference to your productivity and ease of use. The agents wanted a system that would:

Let them enter new correspondence information in "heads down" mode - all keyboard driven, without having to take their hands off the keyboard to move the mouse or click on buttons or links.
The ability to do bulk updates that would change one or two fields for an entire set of correspondence items, instead of having to make the changes one item at a time.
Allow different formats for dates and numbers to match the standards for different types of correspondence.
Allow fields to be limited to a specific set of keywords unique to that field, in order to eliminate inadvertent errors. Furthermore, the content that was valid for a field needed to be dependent upon the value selected for another field. Lastly the system should be able to automatically fill in default values, and automatically choose the right value, if only one choice remains.
Allow responses to be in different languages for different files.

Once again, ccmMercury easily met all of these fundamental correspondence management requirements. In fact, the WorkDynamics analyst showed them some additional time-saving features they could use, including:

Having fields that could automatically do calculations based on other fields - for example, calculating different due dates based on the priority field.
Automatically printing routing slips for the workflow that could be attached to the physical file folders that would be circulated as the item was processed.

The onsite training courses helped to allay most of the concerns and fears of the other agents, and once the system went live it didn't take long for them to see the benefits right away:

A dedicated data entry team used a high-performance ccmMercury client version designed for the crucial task of correctly entering each new item of correspondence as a record in the ccmMercury database. Once the incoming correspondence was scanned, the paper originals were immediately archived for backup and the correspondence agents never had to deal with the paper documents or file folders again.
Once an incoming item was entered into the system and assigned to a process based on the type of correspondence, ccmMercury could instantly tell them where it was in the process and who was currently responsible for the file. This all but eliminated the irritating interruptions and searches to find file folders in order to report on their status. Now, with the help of ccmMercury's searching capabilities, the unit's receptionists handled almost all status requests immediately, without having to phone people back or leave messages.
With ccmMercury keeping track, files never went missing. And ccmMercury kept everything about the item of correspondence in one place - the digital images of the original correspondence, all revisions of each response along with the comments added by the agents as they made phone calls and worked on processing the item. No more panicked "all hands" searches for missing files.
Suzanne and the other agents could now see at a glance what was in their workload - which items they had open and which were waiting in the queue of items assigned to them. The secure knowledge that the ccmMercury notification system would alert them to any impending deadlines they might have forgotten allowed the agents to relax and focus on the task at hand without worrying about what they might have missed or forgotten.
ccmMercury's searching abilities also created a better "corporate memory" by enabling the agents to easily find previous items and responses that could serve as precedents for the one they were currently processing. Instead of "re-inventing the wheel" over and over again, the agents could reuse prior work.

Suzanne Now

All of these capabilities led to one result: Suzanne and the other agents were soon spending two or three times more hours each day doing the actual work of processing the correspondence - the work they were actually being paid to do and that was the enjoyable and interesting part of the job.

Yes, they had come a long way!