Toronto, ON - 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.