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AIIM Research Shows 56% of Organizations Not Utilizing Digital Archiving Technology
[July 24, 2014]

AIIM Research Shows 56% of Organizations Not Utilizing Digital Archiving Technology


(PR Web Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) TORONTO, ON (PRWEB) July 24, 2014 Crawford Technologies today announced the results of a new survey conducted in partnership with AIIM, focusing on global trends in high-volume transactions across industries. The most surprising insight of the survey indicated that even though organizations stated the need to archive outbound customer correspondence for customer service, legal and regulatory compliance and historical record keeping needs, only 44% of organizations save exact facsimiles of these documents.



The survey found that the most popular reasons for archiving outbound customer communications are for historical record keeping (56%), legal compliance (54%), regulatory compliance (49%) and customer service needs (47%). 20% of respondents indicate that employees are making more than 1,000 retrievals per day. 40% cite more than 100 retrievals per day per employee.

"Storing and presenting transactional customer communications may not be a necessity, but with such strong business drivers, one would expect more focus," said Ernie Crawford, President of Crawford Technologies. "Not all companies are taking the benefits of archiving seriously, but the ones that are find them in heavy use." Customer retrievals run at a rate of more than 1,000 per month according to 46% of respondents yet only 32% indicate online access is available to their customers. Surprisingly, 53% cite online access is not yet available to their customers indicating that customer-related retrievals are a manual process.


More than one-third of organizations have no one person or role responsible for outbound archiving, while 22% expect departmental staff to be responsible and 14% place the responsibility with IT. Administrative and customer service staff are found to be the primary users of outbound archives followed closely by sales, marketing and records managers.

The survey discovered that the most popular formats for archiving high-volume transactional documents are changing rapidly with PDF at 75%, TIFF at 39% and the fastest-growing PDF/A at 32%. PDF and PDF/A are becoming the accepted choice as a final format for archiving customer communications.

Efficiency of business processes remains the top priority for those archiving high-volume customer communications. 57% cite they have a custom/in-house solution with 78% indicating their solution is on-premise. Cloud solutions have surprisingly not penetrated this business area yet.

Visit the AIIM website for more information about this Trends in Customer Communication Archiving joint survey between AIIM and Crawford Technologies.

About AIIM AIIM has been an advocate and supporter of information professionals for 70 years. The association's mission is to ensure that information professionals understand the current and future challenges of managing information assets in an era of social, mobile, cloud and big data. Founded in 1943, AIIM builds on a strong heritage of research and member service. Today, AIIM is a global, non-profit organization that provides independent research, education and certification programs to information professionals. AIIM represents the entire information management community, with programs and content for practitioners, technology suppliers, integrators and consultants.

About Crawford Technologies Crawford Technologies is an award-winning, worldwide leader in print-stream transformation, document re-engineering, workflow, document accessibility and archiving software solutions. For nearly 20 years, Crawford Technologies has continuing to grow and expand their solution offerings in the Enterprise Output Management (EOM), Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Document Accessibility markets.

Since 1995, Crawford Technologies' award-winning solutions have helped over 1,800 companies around the world reduce costs associated with multi-channel customer communications' by delivering bills, statements and other mission-critical transactional communications to their customers in the format preferred by each customer. This includes print formats for laser and inkjet printers, online formats like PDF, HTML and XML and alternate format documents in Braille, Large Print, PDF/UA, Audio and E-text for visually impaired and print-disabled customers.

With CrawfordTech's range of unique software products and services, our clients simplify, automate and extend document delivery cost effectively - irrespective of current, legacy or future standards in infrastructure or document output. These clients, including four of the top five US banks, four of the top five US insurance companies and four of the world's top five car manufacturers, are realizing high-value results as costs associated with document processes are minimized through automation, new opportunities for savings across critical communications are realized and they react quickly to changes in regulations, policies, business requirements and technical infrastructure.

CrawfordTech's quality software, expert support and transactional document business knowledge help clients to meet operational, service, marketing, legal and compliance requirements and automate the delivery of billions of communications to their customers annually. Simply put, companies look to Crawford Technologies for a platform-independent approach, leading system performance and superior output fidelity. Please visit http://www.crawfordtech.com to find out more about CrawfordTech's clients, people, partners and solutions.

For media and other enquiries please contact the CrawfordTech Press Office: North America Tel: +1-416-923-0080 UK Tel: +44 (0)20 3239 4724 media(at)crawfordtech(dot)com http://www.crawfordtech.com Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/07/prweb12043743.htm (c) 2014 PRWEB.COM Newswire

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