Writing a paper letter

A key feature for us is writing letters (paper) to customers, and being able to track this in the customer history as easily as with an email. We also need to record date, who sent it plus a link to the letter content and a list of attachments to the letter. A typical letter is a follow up after a phone call together with some marketing material.

You would think that this should be a standard feature in CRM systems, but no.

THE OLD AND CUMBERSOME WAY
ALL systems I have looked at insist on treating printed letters in a fundamentally different way than ex email.
Mail merging is a very old fashioned way of sending out letters with several problems.
1. It takes a lot of time and includes many different operations
2. It involves some kind of third party word processor (what if you are on the road on a public computer?)
3. It does not automatically create a history on the customer
4. There is no way to track what was actually written to a specific customer unless you scroll through the entire merged document looking for the right customer.
5. Not to mention, the content of the letter is not searchable within the crm.
6. Writing a single letter to a single customer this way is also highly impractical.

THE IDEAL WAY
Ideally, the process should be like this:
1. Find the customer (s)
2. Choose New Letter
3. Choose between pre defined templates with different headers, merge-fields, fonts and standard text.
4. Write the letter in an internal word processor, the similar one as used for emails
5. Pick standard phrases from a text library.
6. Add simple product information to the letter via an ajax search box. (search product name or SKU then hit Enter when the right product)
What product info to be shown is defined in the global settings (name, image, brief desc, price etc)
7. Choose "add attachments". This simply records which attachments (brochures etc) that are sent out together with the letter.
8. Click Save and Print
Upon clicking print the letter is stored in the database, a new history event is created on each customer with a link to the text in the letter, and the letter is downloaded as a pdf, ready for printing.

Step 5-7 is a 2nd step bonus, but good to keep in mind in the DEV process.

Good luck,
Oystein