The business challenge

The customer service centre at Hydro-Texaco in Søborg, Denmark receives 70-100 customer account set-up applications daily. The information from the application forms was previously manually keyed into the Hydro-Texaco AS/400 administrative custom system. This manual data entry task was both costly and error-prone and in addition retrieving the original physical paper documents was often a slow process. Hydro Texaco not only wanted to avoid the costs associated with this manual data entry process cost but also needed to meet its legal compliance obligations to have these legally binding contracts archived and immediately available upon request.

The SoftCo solution

Hydro Texaco implemented a SoftCo solution to address these challenges. With the SoftCo solution all applications are scanned and the data is captured via the Eyes & Hands ICR (intelligent character recognition) engine. The captured data is then integrated with Hydro Texaco’s AS/400 system and a digital image of the original application is archived in SoftCo's archive. When customers or legal authorities call the customer service center, the information can be retrieved instantly through the AS/400 system linked to the SoftCo archive from where the original application can be retrieved, viewed and forwarded through fax or e-mail if necessary. Hydro-Texaco's customer service is open around the clock and the solution can be used by all customer advisors both at the office and from home, daily and at weekends.

The benefits of better information management

"Previously it was necessary to have a dedicated employee responsible for keying all the applications. Today we simply place the applications in the scanner and hit the start button. After a short validation all customers are automatically created in our AS/400 system together with an image of the original application." Says customer adviser Jane Lardi and continues: "Previously it was a slow process to retrieve the customer account applications - now they are just a single click away", which gives a better and faster turnaround time for both the customer adviser and the customer.