Thomas Cook is updating customer data and communication management systems to improve internal processes and cut costs.

The travel company is installing document handling software to reduce the amount of money it spends on printing and postage.

Marian Manson, business transformation programme manager for Thomas Cook’s tour operations and airlines businesses, says ageing technology has been affecting processes that service customers.

‘We had old hardware,’ she said. ‘We were printing customer information such as booking confirmations on dot matrix printers that were slow and costly to maintain, and our systems couldn’t support email or changing customer information.’

A lack of integration also made it difficult to produce comprehensive booking, invoice and tour information for customers at the point of sale.

The company is in the midde of a project to install document handling product Doc1 Series 5, from supplier Group 1 Software, to manage its customer data.

‘Along with the software we have installed at the back end to control print output, we now have a data flow from the servers that can be merged between different systems,’ she said.

Manson says the company has already made significant savings on print and postal overheads.