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Smartly Integrating Inbound Customer Communications

Boosting customer relationship management in a multichannel world

The Business

Since 1998, Gebühren Info Services GmbH (GIS) has managed all broadcast licensing fees in Austria, where residents are required by law to register and purchase a licence for all television and radio equipment. GIS services more than 3.5 million customers with its 300 employees and handles all the accounting, payment processing, customer service and communication. The company represents a financial transaction volume of about € 750 million annually.

The Challenge

GIS customers can submit information on a variety of forms through their preferred communication channel. A sharp increase in customer e-mails to the general corporate address revealed problems with manual routing that led to frequently misdirected messages. Because e-mails were handled in a separate manual workflow, GIS risked re-entering data without sufficient quality control and auditing.

The company already utilized Papyrus to extract data from traditional forms of communication, such as paper and fax, and wanted to integrate e-mail extraction capabilities with this existing capture workflow.


The Solution

GIS and ISIS Papyrus implemented an advanced capture solution to classify documents and extract data from all inbound communication channels – e-mail, online, paper, fax and mobile. The Papyrus Capture system is able to recognize 12 different types of forms in multiple languages – including handwriting – and extract data based on well structured definitions while validating results against existing GIS business applications. The system integrates with the existing Microsoft Exchange e-mail server via the Papyrus MAPI (Messaging Application Programming Interface) Adapter for automated processing and routing of e-mails and faxes.

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Specifically designed forms for handwriting recognition

Simple Shift from Paper to E-mails

As a totally scalable system, the same Papyrus Capture functions GIS used for traditional channels – paper mail and fax – are also applied to e-mail. The classification step to determine document type employs a variety of cascading methods, which are applied to the e-mail subject, sender, body text and attachments. Papyrus handles a wide variety of attached file formats, including PDF and home-scanned TIFF, JPG and PNG images.

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Data is extracted from the e-mail and the attached form.

Today, GIS can handle hundreds of incoming e-mails per day with less personnel effort and higher accuracy. After passing a unified workflow, the automatically indexed e-mails are archived in the same way as incoming paper documents.

Easy Integration to Accurately Validate, Verify

Extraction definitions for form elements and validation rules for database lookup are created once and can be re-used for multiple forms.

In the case when a document cannot be recognized automatically, it is passed on to a capture user for verification, manual validation and data completion. The Papyrus Client/Capture provides a user-friendly GUI with color highlighting that shows which fields need completion. Manual database lookup against 3.6 million records provides the necessary results quickly and reliably.

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Color-guided user interface for validation and verification.

Papyrus Capture integrates with existing GIS systems via loose-coupling. Data extraction for GISMO (GIS’ core business application), the marketing database, archive and statistics systems is done in their native data formats.

Quickly React to Business Changes

In response to new marketing messages, GIS can quickly add keywords to the capture definitions to track campaign performance and keep responses relevant. When internal organization changes occur, the system allows non-technical business administrators to easily change routing rules for incoming e-mails without programming.

The robust versioning architecture of Papyrus with its Change Management enables GIS to define modifications in the system in ‘Development/Test’ status and set them to ‘Production’ as soon as they are positively tested, along with the most simple rollback, if necessary.