Every year, housing associations in the UK are required to send notifications of rent increases for the properties that they own and manage. Each tenant must receive their 'update letter' before the 1st of April to ensure that the new terms are legally binding. The challenge? Housing associations have multiple rental types, each with its own rules that define the allowed changes.
As an Inspire Flex customer and full-service communications agency, Resource was presented with the task of making the annual letters clear and actionable, integrating tenant-specific messaging, and reducing the administrative work required to produce the letters.
Identifying needs at the data stage
The data supplied by the client is the most important factor in directing you to the best solution for the creation of dynamic communications. If the data contains nothing that allows for differentiation between letter type 1 and letter type 2, then there is no amount of fancy scripting that can support your personalization needs. Getting the data right and ensuring it contains everything required before loading it into Quadient Inspire Designer is the most crucial step in the process.
Sometimes clients cannot provide data in the format required, which is where you, as the data expert, can help the client and potentially create the databases yourself from anything supplied by the customer. Whether this comes in the form of manually splitting supplied databases into the formats you require or creating an intermediary database that allows you to identify properties on the fly, sometimes this extra step is needed to create a platform that you can use to create a seamless solution for the client. If you can make your customers’ lives easier, they will keep coming back to you.
Customers don’t want a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach
Some rental types include service charges, some include at-home care, some are shared ownership (where the renter and landlord own a share of the property), some are subject to ground rent, and some properties have none of the above. The big question for us was:
How can we provide a simple solution for our client while creating a communication that’s on-brand, contains only relevant information, and includes any additional, required printed materials?
As you can see, each communication must be pertinent to the given property type—you can’t have ground rent notifications going to properties that do not have this requirement. Similarly, you can’t have care charges being demanded from residents that are not in a care facility. Analyzing and segmenting the data supplied by the customer is crucial to pointing you in the best direction to accomplish the project. However, taking inventory of the available data and how it's structured is only the first step. You must also consider how the final letters are going to be produced and fulfilled.
Key items to consider when beginning a dynamic letter generation project include:
• Do you have variable inserters?
• Are you going to manually hand fulfil the letters?
• Are the letters predominantly the same, but with a small area of variable text?
Each one of these considerations should help guide you in deciding how best to design your workflow.
How Quadient Inspire Designer simplifies data-driven communications assembly
After analyzing the supplied data, you should be able to identify trends, or in an ideal scenario, dedicated columns, within the data that identify each type of rental property and the letter they require. These unique identifiers will be the driving force behind creating the correct letter and content for each customer.
Inspire Designer, a core component of Quadient’s enterprise Customer Communications Management (CCM) solution - Inspire Flex, has many built-in functions for isolating data based on your desired splits and communications production workflow.
- Data filters. If you have decided to dedicate one workflow to one letter type, then the Inspire Designer data filter module is your friend. You can select any number of conditions to be applied to your data to ensure that only the required data is passed through. By passing your data through this module, the system will prevent data that doesn’t match the criteria from creating letters that you do not want to be created.
- Imposition scripts. If you have decided to produce all of your letters in a single workflow, then the imposition script in Inspire Designer is your choice solution. You can write code within this module that reflects your identified type splits and append a flag to each record on the fly, so the correct letter is generated at the layout stage.
- Variable pages within the layout. If you have decided to let your layout control the different letter types, then a layout-driven letter definition workflow is your solution. Inspire Designer provides variable page selection and page flow based on the split types and the data that you have provided. This allows you to have a single workflow that controls all the pages and page flowing based on your defined logic.
- Create a workflow that splits the data into each letter type. This method will create a database that is dedicated to a single letter type, requiring you to make a database for each different letter. Using this method gives you a cleaner letter creation workflow, as the unrelated letter data is not within the database you are processing, and you do not need to create filters to block it from being passed through. However, it will require you to create a new workflow for each database and letter type.
Customer data, customer wants, & production capabilities define your final solution
Ultimately, what controls what you do and how you do it are the customer’s requirements, their supplied data, and your ability to produce the finished product. If the customer can only supply data with each letter type indistinguishable from the next, you are going to struggle, and no amount of software functionality is going to provide a solution. However, if your customer can supply high-quality data with easily identifiable letter types, then the world is your oyster.
Quadient Inspire Designer provides a vast array of scalable workflow options
Quadient Inspire Designer provides a plethora of workflow options that allow you to create a dynamic communications management solution that supports your unique workflow preferences, produces and fulfils the printed material, and ultimately, ensures the client is happy so they keep coming back for more.
To learn more about Inspire Designer, watch our on-demand recording for a deep dive into the latest features, including a high-performance PDF processing engine with support for files with transparency features and a variety of improvements for common output handling scenarios.
