Correspondence Registries: Effective Bi-Directional Correspondence Forwarding

Correspondence Registries: Effective Bi-Directional Correspondence Forwarding

Most companies receive and send many types of messages. Simply generating and receiving these messages is one problem, but monitoring these messages and making sure that the appropriate responses are sent and received is what makes it correspondence, i.e. effective communication.

One of our customers came to us with a problem with the following specification:

Their correspondence processes could span months, so a mechanism was needed to make sure that the process was still ‘active’ or detect if it had ‘failed’ at some point. Because these communications were often with regulatory agencies or judicial institutions the repercussions of failing to correspond in a timely and appropriate manner could be significant. Therefore, a system for recording and monitoring correspondence became critically important for this client.

Benefits

By implementing their workflow in the AMODIT system their correspondence workflow is smooth, dynamic, well organized, and quicker. Together these improvements act to increase effectiveness and reduce risk. The client now has an easily accessible central correspondence registry with the following features/information:

• quick document previews
• full case histories
• current case statuses
• who is currently responsible for a document
• how many documents are waiting for approval
• … and more

In the AMODIT system all elements of processes are transparent, accessible, and programmable.

Solution

The mechanism we created enables you to select a group of people who should be informed that correspondence has arrived. A reception employee describes the type of case and assigns the case to a department/group as defined in a dictionary; eg. Legal, Sales, etc. The sender’s address, recipient’s address, and other essential information are stored in the registry. The system then reads your company’s organizational structure and assigns the manager of the group, eg. the Sales Manager, to be responsible for overseeing this case. At this point all the data previously entered into the Correspondence registry is copied into the departmental process, eg. the Sales process.

All the members of the group who are designated as potential stakeholders in the case receive a notification from the system that correspondence has arrived which may concern them. These stakeholders then have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the content of correspondence and assess whether the matter concerns them. If so, by clicking the “Join observers list” button, they can add themselves to a table of employees involved in the process initiated by receiving that piece of correspondence.

To ensure that the case proceeds to completion the group (or manager) decides what kinds of notifications to use; one-time or cyclical. The process in the correspondence registry ends when all the interested parties sign off on their line in the observers list table. Of course, the group manager can close/reopen cases when they need to, but the ‘natural’ mechanism is to build a consensus.

If the matter requires a response a similar registry comes into play, this time an Outgoing Correspondence Registry. This registry can also be configured to have ‘interested parties’, ‘response deadlines’, and any other information that you determine to be important. For example, the sales department might have emailed out a contract with a link prepared for an e-signature and the system could be waiting for the e-signature to be initiated or completed.

To see how your company or organization could benefit from Correspondence Registries, e-signatures, or other processes to automate your activities, register a Free Demo!