Digital Archiving

What is Digital Archiving?

Digital Archives store and retrieve high volumes of communications from both businesses and customers. These communications can be in any digital format - think of bills, statements, policy documents, videos, pictures and more. These communications require storage for several reasons including records management, customer self-service, reprints, and legal compliance. 

Being able to quickly and securing retrieve these documents is critical to a business operation.

What’s important in a Digital Archive? 

There are many forms of digital archives, but it’s important to look for one with the following attributes:

Compliance - Complying with regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and PCI (Payment Card Industry) are of top importance in a digital archive. GDPR requires you to be able to delete individual customer communications at a customer’s request, and keep a record of what was deleted and when. Record management laws also require you to purge communications when they reach a certain age. Encryption, authentication, access control and auditability are all things to look for when choosing a digital archiving solution.

Speed - Digital archives must support many concurrent communication retrieval requests with sub-second response times. For businesses who have thousands of customers and generate thousands of communications at a time, you need a digital archive that can load these communications swiftly, making them available for your customers and support agents to view online as soon as possible. If you have thousands of customers wanting to view their latest bill or statement at the same time, then you can’t afford to deliver anything but the best performance, even on low-bandwidth connections.

Multiple formatting capabilities - Whatever format you use to communicate with your customers, be it print or electronic, you need to be able to view an exact replica of the communication, as viewed by your customer, for many years to come. For print streams this means being able to render them to a PDF/A format and, where appropriate, emulating pre-printed paper of the original document. For responsive HTML this means being able to re-render communications in the way they originally looked across different screen sizes. It also means being able to archive and link any referenced images, videos, stylesheets and other referenced resources for as long as the communication needs to be kept.

Integrations – In today’s omnichannel world, when your customer logs into their portal they want access to all communications. Similarly, when a customer calls your call center, your customer support agent needs to be able to find and easily retrieve any communication related to that customer in seconds. Having them integrated with your systems ensures an optimal customer experience.

How Precisely Can Help With Your Digital Archiving

If you are looking for a digital archiving solution that has all these things and more, EngageOne Vault from Precisely can have you up and running fast.