The Three Cs of Customer Engagement

Transcription

1 Conduent Business Services Customer Experience Solutions The Three Cs of Customer Engagement How to build better customer relationships through enhanced communications and back office harmony. SubjectFugiandia as simi, endus aut

2 2 The traditional model for customer engagement has changed. For a long time, quality and price were all that mattered to customers. Could your product or service perform better than the competition? If not, was it cheaper? If you could answer yes to either of those questions, you d have customers for life. Now things are different. Customers today not only care about what you offer, but also how you offer it. The customer experience has become the most important driver of loyalty and retention. In a world where customers want to know you care about their needs, the way you and your employees connect with them matters more than ever before. And to start making better connections, you need to understand the Three Cs of customer engagement.

3 3 The Three Cs The Three Cs are the legs of the customer engagement tripod. If all three aren t working together, the whole thing comes tumbling down. Customer expectations: what customers believe they deserve if they re going to do business with you Compliance: how well you adhere to industry regulations Communications: how you get in touch with your customers, and how they talk to you Compliance Customer Engagement Communication Customer Expectations

4 4 Customers expect you to be more accessible. Ever since the smartphone introduced the idea of constant access to the world, customers have wanted more. Now, whether they re signing up for a newsletter or buying a home, customers expect each transaction to be seamless and completely personalized. It also needs to be convenient capable of happening anywhere, at any given moment. That means, if you want to make a real connection with customers, you need to start working on the little things that make you more accessible. If you re not available in the right channel, or make customers provide the same information more than once, or worse yet offer something they already have, they don t just see it as a minor inconvenience. They see it as a breach of trust. Are you ready to take care of their needs at every touchpoint? Only 14% of organizations say they are currently running coordinated marketing campaigns across all channels

5 5 Compliance demands that you keep customers safe. Regulatory compliance isn t an option. But it doesn t have to be an obstacle. The consequences of not meeting compliance are very real: fines, bad reputation, loss of customer confidence. On the other hand, there is an opportunity to build stronger customer relationships through compliance. The problem is that few organizations really seem to know what compliance looks like. New technology and regulations have turned it into a moving target. While a few businesses will take the risk and shoot for the bare minimum of regulatory messaging, many more do the opposite especially in highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, utilities and pharmaceuticals. To truly make an effective connection with customers, you have to clearly define your compliance needs ahead of time so you can give your communications channels enough room to breathe. Banks alone have paid over $200B in regulatory fines and penalties in the past seven years. 2 Billion 2

6 6 Communications struggle to strike a balance. Communications are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Customers want compelling content that s accurate, bitesized and relevant. And compliance insists it be packed with protections, warnings and validations. When you strive for one and then the other, it s like mixing fire and ice: all you get is lukewarm water. The resulting communications are cumbersome and consistently fail to get the job done if they even get made at all. In some cases, compliance requirements can make it impossible to design communications for a certain channel. Needless to say, this is frustrating for everyone involved. Brands want to connect with customers in more than one or two channels. And customers don t want to sift through tons of information just to get to the bottom line. Your communications need to strike the right balance by keeping both customer expectations and compliance in mind from the get-go. Otherwise, your customers won t stay with you for long. 58% of businesses use at least eight channels to interact with buyers. 3 3 CEM Executive s Agenda 2016, Aberdeen Group, April 2016

7 7 Conflict within the Three Cs can lead to a rocky customer relationship. If you can t get the Three Cs in alignment, your customers will notice. And they won t put up with it. Channel hopping is something that happens a lot when it seems impossible to design communications for a certain channel and satisfy compliance needs. It s when a customer tries their favorite channel, fails to get in touch and then tries their next favorite. If they can t get a hold of you after trying three separate channels, they ll give up. 4 This is a great way to lose loyal customers and scare off new ones. Even if you don t get to that point, a failed interaction puts you on thin ice and makes it harder for customers to trust you in the future. That s why it s so important that you identify and eliminate friction between communications, compliance and customer expectations wherever it occurs. Businesses that successfully employ a consistent cross-channel marketing strategy enjoy a 13% annual improvement in customer retention rates. 5 13% 4 Technology Edition: The State of Customer Service

8 8 Look for what isn t working. Friction between the Three Cs is 15 seconds of benefits followed by 45 seconds of potential side effects. It s 40 pages of updated terms and conditions when you try to download a game. It s a request to fill out yet another form with the exact same information as the one before it. It s employees scrambling to find information that s been spread across multiple departments. Once you start looking, it s not hard to spot. Keep an eye out for anywhere there s a lack of channel optimization, low customer satisfaction or a high number of complaints. Disproportionate customer service costs and employee difficulty resolving customer requests the first time are also pretty good signs something s not quite right.

9 9 Get to the root of your communication problems. Friction between the Three Cs has one cause: back office inefficiency. It can take a lot of forms, but the root of many external communication problems typically comes back to that. Organizational Silos Isolated silos prevent your employees from planning communications that keep both customer expectations and compliance in mind from the beginning. Ineffective Workflows When documents are spread across multiple departments, or approval processes are manual or confusing, it makes it much more challenging for employees to do their jobs. Fragmented Processes and Poor Process Design The more disconnected your processes, the more likely they are to gum up the works and frustrate your customers. Information bottlenecks and unnecessary slow business bring the customer experience to a crawl.

10 10 Start building healthier communications structures. The best way to get your external communications back on track is to reengineer your internal communications and processes. By breaking down barriers between isolated silos and departments, you can address both compliance requirements and customer expectations from the start. Sometimes it takes a fresh set of eyes to see where exactly things break down. That s why you should conduct a Communications Advisory Service audit. Through a series of personal interviews, discovery workshops and assessment studies, we are able to provide a thorough analysis of what s working for your business and what isn t. We identify collaboration gaps, technology disconnects and all the places where improvements can be made. Here s what a CAS audit can do for you: Provides a roadmap for improvement and innovation Identifies resources that are needed for your communications strategy Highlights weaknesses in structure and processes Helps incorporate automation for streamlined efficiency

11 11 Your Partner for Improved Customer Engagement The Three Cs customer expectations, compliance and communications are central to customer engagement. And they re constantly changing. We can help you reduce friction and increase efficiency by giving you the best tools for the job. We provide a roadmap for improvement and innovation identifying the resources you need for your communications strategy, highlighting where your structures and processes can improve and helping you incorporate automation for improved efficiency. The result? You can harmonize the Three Cs and put them to work building better, stronger relationships with your customers. Key Benefits: Greatly reduced risk of non-compliant messaging Improved internal processes for an optimum customer experience Reduced overhead due to fewer calls that result in expensive human touches Greater accessibility to data Start making a real connection, deepening customer loyalty and increasing lifetime value today. Find out how you can sign up for a CAS audit today at

12 About Conduent Conduent is helping change the way the world works. By applying our expertise in imaging, business process, analytics, automation and user-centric insights, we engineer the flow of work to provide greater productivity, efficiency and personalization. We conduct business in 180 countries, and our more than 140,000 employees create meaningful innovations and provide business process services, printing equipment, software and solutions that make a real difference for our clients and their customers. Learn more at Conduent Business Services, LLC. All rights reserved. Conduent and Conduent Agile Star are trademarks of Conduent Business Services, LLC in the United States and/or other countries. 05/17 CNDT122 BR893