The following points highlight the “lifecycle” of a customer contact letter:
Not yet extracted. When a customer contact is first created and the customer contact type refers to a letter template, the extract batch control is stamped onto the customer contact along with the current run number of the batch control. Note that internally, the customer contact also has a “print letter” switch that is set to “Y”.
Extracted. When the extract batch process runs, the appropriate information related to the customer contact is sent to the printing software. The customer contact is updated with the extract date / time. At this point, the application does not have any additional information about the status of the printing of the letter as it is in the control of the printing software.
There are some implementations that may want to attempt to suppress a letter from printing if the process that created the customer contact is canceled for some reason. If the letter has not yet been extracted, then it is possible to suppress the letter from being printed. Once the letter has been extracted, it is possible to still prevent mailing of the letter by either stopping the print via the printing software or by intercepting the printed letters before mailing. However, the application does not have any control over intercepting letters after they are extracted.
The product provides the following support for attempting to suppress the letter via an algorithm. Currently there is no support for suppressing the letter using the customer contact page.
Updating the “print letter” switch. The extract batch process only selects customer contacts where the “print letter” switch is set to “Y”. If an algorithm would like to suppress a letter, it should mark this switch as “N”. Note that if a letter has already been extracted, the switch may still be set to “N” if desired by the implementation. This may be done for audit purposes to indicate that the process attempted to suppress the letter but that it was already extracted.
Suppression Reason. The product supplies a customer contact characteristic type that may be used to mark a reason for suppression. Algorithms that attempt to suppress the letter should populate the suppression reason characteristic with an appropriate value.
The customer contact user interface displays letter information and will adjust the information based on whether the print letter switch is Y or N and whether or not the letter has already been extracted.
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