Case Study

The hotline to the customer: Automated incoming mail processing for T-Com

There are a variety of ways for companies to improve their customer service. For T-Com, swift processing of customer correspondence is one of them, both in terms of paper documents and electronic correspondence via customer portal and e-mail. To achieve this, the company�s data center in Magdeburg runs a system for electronic processing and automated distribution of incoming mail. Around 12.5 million documents per year � customer queries, connection and change requests, billing rate changes and customer correspondence from 256 T-Punkt and T-Com branches throughout Germany - are processed in Magdeburg centrally, and almost entirely automatically, by the Mail CENTER incoming mail processing solution.

The User

The T-Com business unit of Deutsche Telekom AG caters for the Group's private and small business customers in the strategic area of broadband/fixed network services. This also includes business with resellers and international network operators as well as preparatory work for other business units. At T-Com, Customer Relationship Management is a top priority, which is why the Group decided to automate processing of all incoming correspondence and thus achieve faster transfer of mail to the appropriate back offices. Document recognition, process classification, matching with the T-Com CRM system and forwarding to the appropriate back office team are performed centrally and almost entirely automatically in the T-Com data center. Documents that cannot be assigned immediately to the correct processor are automatically forwarded to a clearing back office.

The Challenge

Deutsche Telekom receives around 12.5 million documents annually from approx. 256 T-Punkt and T-Com branches – in the Customer Care division alone. That is equivalent to 50,000 pages of every sort of document on a daily basis. These include forms such as telephone or DSL requests, change of address forms, billing rate switches, relocation service and a large number of unstructured documents, such as informal requests and letters. In order to link any document received by T-Com to the CRM system and thus assign and dispatch it to the appropriate back office, at the very least the sender’s name, telephone number has to be extracted accurately from the document. Recognition must be verified by extracting multiple such data in parallel and reconciling them with each other.

As much process-relevant information as possible should be extracted automatically to minimize manual data entry in processing.

Mail CENTER is also required to process faxes received as TIFF images by electronic fax servers in the same way as it does scanned paper documents. Faxes often have inferior document quality and image resolution, sometimes reaching less than 100 dpi, and their image distortion presents a special challenge to any incoming mail processing solution. The requirements for processing speed and performance at peak load times are also extremely high. Even during peak times, digital documents have to become available in the responsible back office within an hour of receipt and processing in the data center. The extremely robust server infrastructure in the failsafe multiserver cluster of Mail CENTER can automatically process up to 25,000 documents an hour.

Naturally, the solution has to automatically process not only paper documents, but also e-mails. This application’s ability to bridge different media to create a comprehensive view of customer processes, irrespective of document receipt modes and ‘communication silos’, constitutes a further significant aspect of its utility. In comparison to this, the fact that implementation and roll-out of the solution to productive operation at high loads should take place within a space of just a few months, constitutes a relatively trivial challenge.

The Solution

These requirements comprise the perfect setting for Mail CENTER, the automated incoming mail processing solution. Mail CENTER is scalable and easy to configure quickly to the specific requirements of individual projects. Mail CENTER incorporates DOKuStar Professional document analysis software. This software was specially developed to meet the most exacting demands made of recognition and interpretation, and to do so quickly and cost-effectively even in high-volume applications. This explains why its special features include multi-phase document recognition and analysis, modularity, scalability and load balancing options. The integrated free-form recognition has proved its value for poorly recognizable faxed forms.

The recognition and analysis system for incoming paper and fax mail was installed centrally in Magdeburg for direct routing of incoming mails to the CRM system. The 256 Deutsche Telekom branches throughout Germany scan paper documents, queries, orders, requests etc decentrally, mostly using Kodak scanners. Only small Telekom branches or field offices with low document volumes use fax machines for scanning and forwarding. The resulting digital images are then sent to the Magdeburg back office.

Here, the document images have to be processed routinely within one hour. DOKuStar reads and automatically classifies them. All relevant data is extracted, analyzed, matched with the customer CRM system and stored in the electronic archive system. The electronic data is then distributed among the 100 regional back office employees located throughout Germany according to its subject matter, and transferred to them digitally for further processing with reference to the electronic archive system. All this in order to meet Deutsche Telekom�s guarantee that every customer contact should receive a response within three working days.

The Benefits

Fast amortization is not a promise, but a fact. The greatly enhanced process speed and improved process transparency has markedly reduced the processing workload. A state-of-the-art recognition and analysis system has replaced cumbersome manual processing, giving processing staff time to respond quickly and appropriately to customer queries. All this means that Customer Relations is of top priority at T-Com.

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