5 Best Practices for Managing Correspondence Processes

The overwhelming amount of business correspondence exchanged on a daily basis poses variety of management challenges. Due to the multiple forms that correspondence takes place in a typical business setting – from paper documents, letters, emails, electronic documents, fax and web content – manually dealing with incoming and outgoing correspondence leads to higher processing time, inefficient information allocation and increased cost for managing and monitoring this massive amount of data.

To manage correspondence in a timely, consistent and efficient manner companies are adopting correspondence management solutions to help them streamline these processes. Correspondence management systems have plenty of benefits, for all employees and stakeholders involved:

  • Manage and archive all types of correspondence for legal and compliance obligations.
  • Enhance employee performance and reduce time spent on processing and responding to incoming correspondences.
  • Reduce costs of storage and efficiently manage correspondences within a common platform and a unified repository
  • Improve customer service by providing accurate, fast and trustworthy responses to inquiries.
  • Achieve Return on Investment within a year by optimising content production, reducing paper usage and consolidating communications.

5 best ways to manage correspondence processes

  1. Implement a correspondence management system
    No business can afford to manually manage all of their correspondence – it is crucial that all correspondence processes are carefully monitored and managed in an organised fashion. If not, important information could be lost from a project, and it could end up hurting the company. Besides emails and records of phone conversations, most of the communication that happens in construction correspondence is on paper. Hard copies of data, instructions, formal letters, requests for information, and so on, are extremely difficult to keep track of all at once. Converting these correspondence assets into a digital format will eliminate wasteful hours of formatting letters and having to organise files of paperwork.
  2. Bring order & keep track of important contacts
    Managing proper correspondence with the people involved in any given project is crucial to overall progress. Miscommunication leads to delays and errors, which negatively impacts both the project and the people attached to it.The quicker you can speed along communication between cross-functional teams, both inside and outside of the company, the better for the time and budget of the project.
  3. Ensure access to company-approved correspondence templates
    Contracts, administrative forms, formal approvals, notices – businesses are using countless of formats to conduct their day-to-day activities. To ensure that everything goes smoothly and there are no major errors, companies ought to select, approve and distribute a set of correspondence templates that align with the company processes and policies. Achieving such consistency will significantly improve the communication processes both within the company and with third-party vendors. Most correspondence management systems either offer a wide selection of ready-made templates, or allow users to build them from scratch.
  4. Centralise your correspondence
    Correspondence management involves capturing and keeping records of business communications, which requires a certain amount of centralisation. In the case of a situation where communication is changed or lost, keeping all documentation of emails, letters, meeting agendas and so on is a good way to protect your business projects. With so many parties involved in each project, everyone must be on the same page for the work to run smoothly.
  5. Safeguard your correspondence
    Ensuring that your correspondence between clients is safe and secured should be one of the highest priorities for every business. Some correspondence exchanges contain more sensitive information than others, so it is important that official documentation, as well as more confidential information, stays secure and doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. This can be hard to manage with paper copy correspondences, which is another reason digital approach to all correspondence processing is a safer more reliable technique.

If you’re looking for a correspondence solution for OpenText Content Server, then reach out to us for further advice and information.