Smooth, efficient operation and administration are critical to a successful Consumer Affairs department. With CRS approach to operating and administering CRS.  

Feature Overview

Printing/processing responses 
One of the most time consuming tasks in any consumer affairs department is the production and preparation of fulfillment items. CRS has many features to make this process easier and faster:

	Use our one-step batch printing process to print and/or process all out-going correspondence - this includes letters, envelopes, labels, checks, coupons, blind carbon copies, emails and pick lists.
	Documents are sorted for efficient forms handling and collating. Multiple printers, paper bins and forms are supported.
	Letters are grouped by user for easy return to the representative, if needed. Letters can also be completed with an automatic signature.
	For complete accounting control, print pre-numbered checks.
	Find mistakes? Need to reprint? Use the same program and reprint the entire batch, selected forms or selected contacts.

Setting up and maintaining master tables
CRS has dozens of support tables that you'll use to specify everything from Response Types to Paragraphs. Many of the tables tell the system how to work under specific conditions and how the reports are structured. Others contain the data that representatives use to respond to consumers. These are fill-in-the-blank tables, no programming required! Here are a few highlights:

	Representatives may enter product, subject and location codes for each contact -- behind the scenes is the structure that make this information usable. For example, the product hierarchy consists of five levels with UPC code at the most detailed level and business unit at the highest level. Reports and queries can be performed at all the levels and offer drill down opportunities.
	Master letters consist of collections of master paragraphs. Paragraphs may have automatic inserts or variable inserts. An example of an automatic insert is the customer's name. There is no need for the representative to retype this information.
	Over 50 automatic inserts are available. An example of a variable insert is "the pet's name". The system will prompt the representative for "the pet's name" and it will be inserted into the letter.
	Information maintained in the Parameter file controls a wide variety of system functions including your company calendar (e.g. select 12 or 13 periods per year and the start and end dates for each) and field validation rules.
	The formatting and destination of all forms are controlled in the support files. Each printed form is tailored to your Installation using the Form Setup file. You'll specify items like paper size, paper bin, orientation, margins, font and line spacing. In the Letterhead file you can control the queues, formatting, and destination (printer, file, email).

Setting up handling rules
Throughout the system there are hundreds of opportunities to link actions to other actions. These are designed to help you maintain the integrity of the responses and the integrity of the data collected through simple data entry programs. Here are just a few examples:

	Automatically respond with the right letter, letterhead, literature, survey, etc. based on the product and problem.
	Automatically fill in data based on state or zip code (e.g. plant, marketing region or sales office).
	Response codes let the system verify fully that the contact is complete and prompt for incomplete data.

Realigning and restructuring codes
Has your company ever reorganized product groups? Maybe every year? Use the CRS realign utilities to make your database reflect the current reporting structure including all historical contacts. As your business grows and changes and over months and years of system use, you may find you need to re-categorize or change coding structure for expansion or ease of use. Use the utilities in CRS to change the codes throughout your database. No problem. 

Importing normalization data 
Many standard CRS reports generate normalized data by comparing raw contact data to some form(s) of normalization data. This normalization data can come from a variety of sources including production, distribution, sales, Nielsen, IRI or other volume measurements that are appropriate to your business. Using a flexible loading process, normalization data is loaded by product, location or product/location. The information is verified and converted for use. 

Archiving historical contacts
With CRS you can store over a decade of detailed contact data on-line. But, you may prefer to archive much of the older data and simply store a summarized version for reporting purposes. Maybe you leave contact details on certain issues for 5 years and others for 2 years.

Details:

	Printing/processing responses
	Setting up and maintaining master tables
	Realigning and restructuring codes
	Setting up handling rules
	Importing normalization data
	Archiving historical contacts