Inprotech: Correspondence to Clients by Email?

I have recently been working on a very interesting project that has been about the streamlining delivery of communications with clients and IP offices via e-mail.

For years Inprotech has had useful features for creating correspondence as Word documents but it hasn’t really advanced much in the area of delivery of correspondence by email and managing the workflow around drafting, approval and filing of this type of correspondence to customers.

In order to address this we took a number of steps:

1. We set up standing instructions against the name record to define the correspondence delivery mechanism for the client eg. by email to the contact, by email to the associates docketing address and copied to the contact, email but paper confirmation, by fax to contact, by fax to the organisation, by mail.
2. We set up new name relationships for email copies to.
3. We created a new doc item that worked out the addressing based upon these standing instructions and copies to arrangements.
4. We then created new doc items that built the email to & cc address lines as well as the email subject line as document variables in the finished document. These variables were then used by a new macro that copied the body of the document into the email body and set up the email subject line and addressing ready to go. The letter signature block was incorporated into a new bookmark that allowed it to be deleted and replaced by the email signature when then email was created.
5. At the same time the IRN was recorded with the draft email to allow automatic profiling and integration into the firm’s document management system when sent.
6. Outlook add ins where then developed to allow the email to be automatically sent and saved. The created file using the date and the letter name that had been moved from the document title of the finished document, which corresponded to the name of the letter in Inprotech letter table.
7. Other add ins were developed to allow filing of non Inprotech emails and, in general, facilities were provided to make moving between the electronic file, Word and Outlook as seamless and with as few clicks as possible.

As this was a long time user of the product, prior to this effort, a project had been put in place to revise the firm’s document templates to use the now standard approach to template set up with a header/footer document and paragraph templates. This meant that all of the above could be built into one or two places, rather than changing approximately 350 documents. Also, all of this has been predicated on using Word as the email text editor.

At the same time we initiated a project that improved our overall approach to the validation of names and address data and, in particular, ensured that email addresses were captured in the Inprotech database for all the required parties. I may write about this in another article if people are interested.

While the above processes give excellent improvements in productivity, the issues that have been highlighted have been more related to policy and related processes:

• What correspondence should be delivered as an email body and what as an attachment. Should substantive advice be provided on the firm’s letter head with a signature?
• What if documents are likely to be forwarded by an associate to the end client, does this affect the presentation of the firm to that organisation?
• What if the recipient doesn’t receive emails in HTML format or uses a different email tool than Outlook? Does this raise concerns as to the presentation quality of our correspondence?
• How does the packaging of the total piece of correspondence occur? How are incoming documents such as IP office receipts and certificates scanned, filed and attached to the email?
• If our invoice is to go with the correspondence how is this created, attached and delivered? Is an electronic (PDF) invoice acceptable?
• Which correspondence is to be signed? Can the PA or support staff apply the signature?
• Who should send the email? The PA? The PA on behalf of the attorney? The attorney themselves?

I would be interested to get other people’s feedback on how they have approached these issues.

Inprotech: Emailing One Off Statements (and reports in general)

Ever been in the situation where you are chasing debt and the customer requests a copy of the invoice or statement. Rather than re-print them, scan them or mail them, why not e-mail directly from Inprotech.

With statements this is relatively straight forward. Release 4 includes the ability to create PDF files on the majority of print functions. To e-mail a statement:

1. Run the statement program and select the debtor you need the statement for.
2. Select the Print button and choose the PDF file option and click the Email Report option.
3. If the e-mail address of the person/organisation that you want to send to is recorded in Inprotech complete the name in the Email To field. This will cause the system to extract the e-mail address from Inprotech and use it to the construct the e-mail. If it is not, leave this field blank.
4. Select the Print button and an e-mail with the statement attached is created. If the e-mail address can be found within Inprotech it will be used to create the e-mail otherwise the e-mail address will be left bank. In this instance enter the e-mail address from your contact list or simply type it in.
5. Send the e-mail!!

As a note, this functionality is available on virtually all print dialogs in the system.

Prior to release 4 the only file format that you could send to a customer in any sort of readable manner was RTF and if you follow the above using the Rich Text Format File option then the process is exactly the same.

If you are not comfortable with this approach another way to create a PDF version of the statement and e-mail it is as follows. Unfortunately it is a bit more convoluted (and hence the potential to go wrong is higher) but still better than a manual process.

1. Run the statement program and select the debtor you need the statement for.
2. Select the Print button and choose the Print Set Up button.
3. Select the Inpro Document Converter printer and OK.
4. Select the Print button. The document will be created as a PDF, save the file to your desktop.
5. Double click on this document to open it with Acrobat reader. Selected File and Attach to E-mail from the menu in Acrobat, this will create an e-mail and attach the file to it.
6. Complete the e-mail address and send the e-mail.

Unfortunately invoices are another story so I'll cover that in another article.