How customer communications management affects business agility A look at a day in the life with and without the flexibility of a customer communications management platform
Table of Contents Introduction A Day Without Flexible Customer Communications Management You Think You Are Delivering Good Customer Experience? Think Again! A Day With Flexible Customer Communications Management How to Find the Right CCM Platform for You Conclusion 3 4 6 7 9 11 2
Introduction Business leaders have always had to consider the end user, but in today s fast paced, high-technology world, it is more important than ever to maintain consistent communication and consistent branding to attract and retain customers. Maximizing the customer experience (CX) is a growing trend in business planning, but just what makes good CX is changing. According to a Gartner study1, 89% of companies surveyed expected to compete mostly through the area of customer experience, up by over 40% from just four years ago. A key to competing successfully in this area is good customer communications management (CCM). CCM improves the creation, delivery, and tracking of outgoing communications across all channels. You d like to think you give your employees the solutions they need to meet the challenges and do their job productively and efficiently. However, when it comes to communication solutions, you may not be equipping your employees the best way possible. This paper will focus on why the agility and flexibility of good CCM is so important by looking at a day in the life of a company s employees when a critical platform is missing, and one where CCM fills in the gaps. Sorofman,Jake. Gartner Surveys Confirm Customer Experience Is the New Battlefield. Gartner.com. http://blogs.gartner.com/jakesorofman/gartner-surveys-confirm-customer-experience-new-battlefield/ 1 3
A Day Without Flexible Customer Communications Management Your enterprise has had a good year with several major acquisitions and continued growth. Your employees, however, have had to deal with a lot of frustration and disappointment. Today is no exception. The day starts with the legal department facing a deadline and needing a paragraph in an important document changed. Since programming will be required to change the template, only a few in IT are qualified, an urgent request to them to make the changes will be required. The IT manager will need to pull personnel from their regular IT duties, which are important to the smooth running of the company, and have them deal with document changes. Unfortunately, the billing department has a change request in ahead of legal, so legal may or may not get the changes completed in time. On top of that, the legal department needs the changes to be in several different languages. Since there is no automated template deployment, each change will need to be deployed manually, further endangering the deadline. 4
A Day Without Flexible Customer Communications Management One of your departments needs a new communications channel, which will have to be manually set up. There are also multiple communications coming from different departments that need to be bundled together. This too must be done manually, and it is time consuming to deal with multiple systems and data located in different places. For every extra step that is manually required, there is another chance created to introduce human error. Because the clients are in different divisions and each division has its own processes, multiple software and hardware platforms will need to be accessed. Growth and acquisition has increased the problem. The main infrastructure is made of older mainframes, while newer acquisitions have newer output systems. With no central oversight, the hodge-podge of systems means there isn t a consistent look or feel to documents, which is confusing to the clients - which leads to poor CX. 5
You Think You Are Delivering a Good Customer Experience? Think Again! Your business department is about to send out some business correspondence. Unfortunately, because of the difficulty in making changes, there is little personalization. Also, since print is your standard, everyone gets printed documents whether they prefer email or digital delivery. This inflexibility will lead to poor CX, and a potential loss of clients. Your competition that has shown the agility to embrace the digital age is not at all sympathetic to your plight. A major factor in providing good customer service is having a 360-degree overview of all communications made with a customer. That 360-degree view means being able to pull together all the information relevant to a specific customer, so you have a clear picture of past and present communications to effectively correspond concerning future actions. In this case, your customer reps are having a bad day. The lack of a central repository has meant some reps didn t know what had been done previously for customers. The customers are feeling that nobody in the business knows what the others are doing. They are getting very frustrated. Studies have shown that 78% of customers2 will cease a transaction if they feel there is poor customer service, while 70% said they were willing to spend more with a company that had good customer service. You may feel you are delivering superior customer service 80% of the companies surveyed thought they did, yet only 8% of their customers thought the same. 2 Helpscout.net. 75 Customer Quotes, Facts, & Statistics. https://www.helpscout.net/75-customer-service-facts-quotes-statistics/ 6
A Day With a Flexible Customer Communications Platform Your enterprise has had a good year with several major acquisitions and continued growth. Your employees are energized and enthusiastic because they have what they need to serve the needs of the internal client and the external customer. Today is no exception. The day starts with the legal department facing a deadline and needing a paragraph in an important document changed. Because your customer communication management platform allows the business users to make changes to templates, IT doesn t need to become involved. Since documents and templates are in a central location, staff accesses them easily. Due to this business user empowerment, IT can concentrate on its jobs of maintaining the infrastructure to keep the enterprise up and running. At the same time, Billing has some documents they need changed. They access the CCM system to make their own changes. Since all output systems have been consolidated with one central CCM platform, training is simplified, costs are reduced, and there is less need for additional staff. Changes are dealt with immediately by the business users, eliminating long waits on IT, reducing the deployment time to market. When the market changes, reactions can be taken quickly to adjust. 7
A Day With a Flexible Customer Communications Platform The CCM platform provides a user-friendly communications design environment. So, outputting several versions or documents in different languages is no problem. Even though there are standard templates, they can be customized. Styles and graphics insertion make the documents more appealing. Having different divisions or brands through diversification or acquisition is not an issue. The CCM platform integrates with the existing infrastructure, providing one consolidated central interface that delivers the same look and feel for communications, with brand consistency throughout - regardless of the department. Organization CRM Order Bill Help Centralized Communication Platform Customer There is a true 360-degree view of the customer over all channels. A central dashboard displays all relevant data, including job details, emails, and other vital statistics. Your staff analyzes the data to pinpoint choke points or areas needing improvement. The CFO and CIO are happy because there has been no need to scrap the old to update to the new. This CCM system was installed in stages, so the transfer was relatively seamless and painless. Easy CCM platform scalability has given you the flexibility to start small and grow as needed. Regardless of how the customer needs the communication, you deliver what the client wants. You are truly one of the 8% of companies that customers feel deliver superior customer service. The excellent customer experience leads to loyal and long-lasting customers. 8
How to Find the Right CCM Platform A CCM platform should be designed to fit your needs. It should take CCM to another level and focus on three major components Design, Communication, and Analysis. DESIGN COMMUNICATION ANALYSIS Design is about creating templates and communication schemes. A common complaint with many systems is how difficult this can be. With features like a WYSIWYG designer, reusable objects, and multilingual support, it becomes easy to create and customize templates and no programming skills are necessary. IT dependence in document creation will be greatly reduced, if not eliminated, in many cases. Another important feature should be the ability to proof communications and test how they look with actual data before deployment. Communication involves the communications flow where data is converted to output to the desired delivery channel. It should be easy to add new channels, such as the web, SMS, and mobile, while retaining existing communication channels, such as print. The CCM platform should track every step, with fallback scenarios to ensure delivery. In Analysis, customer behavior can be identified to verify delivery and to make improvements where needed. Bottlenecks and duplication are eliminated. By analyzing which are the most productive channels, you can adapt to customer wishes, so wasteful or irrelevant communications can be removed. The result will be relevant, personal, and interactive communications that engage the customer to provide a quality customer experience. 9
Additional Benefits Customizable A CCM platform should be setup and customized fully tailored to your needs. Stateof-the-art customer communication platforms offer a central communications hub, which has pre-set standardized processes and dashboards for a variety of business needs. Although standardized, the central hub should also be highly customizable. Flexibility Another important feature of a CCM system is how flexible and extensible it is. Integration with document management, crm, marketing automation and other systems through APIs and web services expand the reach of a customer communications management platform. And if the CCM system is based on Open Standards, it fits every environment. Since it sits on top and integrates thoroughly, there will be no need to sacrifice existing infrastructure. Being modular and scalable, a CCM system can be adapted easily to any sized enterprise. You can install it for a specific project and deploy it enterprise-wide in stages. Your CCM should also be cloud-ready. Being digital first is very important. A CCM should be designed with digital output in mind and provide real native support for the different channels, instead of workarounds. 10
Conclusion There is little question that customer communications management software gives a company the flexibility and adaptability required to succeed in today s market where CX is of paramount importance. Customers are becoming more demanding in what type of communications they receive and how it is delivered. CCM provides the way to manage personalized communication. The reduced overhead, lower maintenance, and efficiency in workload from using CCM result in cost savings and more productive employees. The ability to deliver in multiple communication channels efficiently and effectively results in happy and loyal customers. Scriptura Engage is a flexible CCM platform that allows you to tailor your communications to the specific needs of your customer. With the ability to integrate physical and digital channels, you deliver personalized, engaging communications to your customers with reduced overhead, less effort, and lowered costs. You and your staff are happy, and more importantly, your customers are happy. If you want to know more about how Scriptura Engage can help your organization become more agile, contact us now at www.scripturaengage.com 11
Scriptura Engage is a flexible customer communications management platform. Our customers have improved their customer experience and increased response rates by 65%, reduced development time by 70%, and eliminated up to 80% of the cost of delivering communications for its clients compared to their previous communication methods. We can help you improve customer experience and engagement through multichannel communications. Call +32 3 425 40 00 to start a conversation or mail info@scripturaengage.com 12