Some 160 000 customers in the SME sector currently rely on Pastel for their accounting requirements, and therefore rely heavily on the company delivering these crucial solutions to provide its value-added services rapidly and efficiently.
Through the implementation of a business information delivery (BID) solution from value-added distributor AmVia and its business partner Abnoba and service partner Galdon Data, the company has achieved these goals by improving communications efficiency and the integration of multiple channels of communications into a single holistic business platform.
Softline Pastel was particularly interested in a means to integrate faxed documents into its BID solution, as its fast-growing SME customer base employs this mechanism extensively. The company was dealing with large volumes of faxes from this customer base on a daily basis, and was therefore sending a similarly large number of responses. This situation resulted in increasing communications costs and less than optimal turnaround times for customers, as data first had to be captured from faxed pages and processed before it could receive any value-added attention.
Abnoba was able to resolve this situation thanks to the tight integration of Captaris RightFax into its BID solution suite. This application provides the automated capturing of fax data into digital format, to be manipulated and routed as any digital content can be in a holistic business information solution.
Says Abnoba CEO, Fairoz Jaffer: "Softline Pastel needed to reduce the costs of communication, improve productivity and provide higher levels of service to its customers. Our solution enables the company`s staff and service agents to receive faxes in their inbox and enables them to send faxes and encrypted PDFs from their desktop. This means that customer requests can be received and processed speedily. Service agents can now also track fax delivery."
Not only did Captaris RightFax provide the integral link in the communications chain, between paper-based and electronic business information, but it is able to utilise this medium more securely by encrypting the fax data as it is processed and delivered to precisely where it needs to go.
By getting information to the attention of the employees responsible for responding to it, in the most efficient manner possible - be this through e-mail, via the Internet or to a mobile device - the BID system into which RightFax integrates so tightly provides Softline Pastel`s customers with the highest levels of satisfaction, thanks to rapid turnaround times. In addition, the company`s workforce is made more productive by being empowered with the flexibility they require without sacrificing potentially productive time.
"Both Softline Pastel and Abnoba share the same philosophy on customer service. We also share a strategy of being the number one solutions provider with our respective technology solutions," comments Tanya Miranda, Softline Pastel Support Director. "Abnoba has extensive experience in providing business information delivery solutions for customers who wish to reduce communication costs, improve productivity and provide a higher level of service to their partners and customers."
The advanced technology employed in this solution provides customers with a seamless architecture where the business data repository, including faxes, e-mails, voice messages and crucial business information, is available to users via a single interface, namely the IP network itself. Sending a fax becomes as easy as printing to a workgroup printer, and received faxes land directly in the inbox - whether it be accessed from a system affixed to the LAN or a mobile device over IP VPN - of the user who can give the most appropriate response, the soonest. Best of all, this all through a GUI which users are already familiar with, namely their mail client or Web browser.
Kevin Hurwitz, MD of AmVia, comments: "Rightfax alone has proven a valuable cost-cutting tool in the past, but now as an integrated component of a BID solution has been shown to cut communications costs by up to 90%. It leverages the modern, integrated communications network efficiently to provide these cost savings, while driving higher employee productivity and improved customer satisfaction."
He concludes: "Abnoba has built for Softline Pastel, the BID platform it required to accommodate the strong growth being experienced in the SME sector, and enabled it to better meet the needs of this market through dramatically improved communications efficiency and enterprise agility."
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