Madrid, May 10, 2023 – Before addressing this tricky issue, we need to take a step back to gain perspective. In this era dominated by customer experience, we must be aware that customer communicationsare essential in order to offer customers a high-quality experience. Without effective communication, there is no valuable experience.
Once customer communicationsbecome a strategic function, there is no choice but to know the true costs and thus the return on investment.
The problem is that it is not easy because customer communications involve several processes, tools, channels, and stakeholders. So here it is advisable to scrutinize each step of customer communications, from design to delivery, in order to addup the cost of each stage.
Six steps in customer communications
1 – Diverse business unit communication requirements
Each business unit is clear about what communications to send to its customers and why. It has a good understanding of the cost and benefit of communications. However, business units “live in their own world” and are not always aware of the impact their communications may have upstream or downstream.
Business units often conceivecustomer communication projects on an ad hoc and isolated basis. And they work very well to address their specific needs, but can cause problems afterwards related to archiving, delivery, or customer experience modeling.
Costs per job or month may be low at the beginning of the project, but integration and compliance costs may be high for another business unit.
2 – Consolidation of data and content
Once the necessary customer communications have been defined in each business unit, users look for data and content, which are the feed for the communication systems. However, some of the production and archiving systems require specific ECM or WCM systems to access integrations, which can increase customer communications costs.
Consolidation is the answer to this problem. Redundant systems need to be eliminated for two reasons: on the one hand, their maintenance is in the hands of expensive IT experts, and, on the other hand, the choice of system is not always in line with a clearly defined communication strategy.
3 – Design of the customer communications project
Now that the business unit knows what it needs and has the necessary data, it is time to design the communication project itself. To do this, Customer Communications Management solutions (CCM) offer integrated desktop, web and cloud components in their design frontends.
In addition to the design utilities, there are several graphic design packages, scripting frameworks and general office software packages. Therefore, having many tools results in redundant designs that increase approval, compliance, and deployment costs.
4 –Overlapping production systems
Once customer communications have been designed, it is time for production, an activity that is spread across numerous systems. Part of production is done through traditional customer communications management (CCM) systems, which are only one part of a complex mosaic.
Some specific customer communications are developed in separate interactive systems. Another part of production may be carried out through project-specific SaaS solutions or SaaS add-on services. In addition to in-house systems, part of production can also be outsourced to social media via an API.
This mosaic must be considered as a whole, and the cost, maintenance, labor, usage, and storage must be calculated. It is common for companies to have five or more parallel customer communications production systems.
The sum of all this might add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in software maintenance, and several million more in redundant labor and countermeasures to uncoordinated, disparate customer experiences.
5 –Archive of customer communications
Redundancies are once again present at this stage of customer communications. And they continue to be a source of avoidable costs that are not even known, since archiving systems bring to light many communications that are beyond the control of the accounting department.
Also beyond our control are simple questions about what we archived last month, where the communications sent to a particular customer are saved and where the communications archived for each channel are stored.
But of course, these are tough questions to answer when there are several document archiving systems with multiple owners. The maintenance, management, storage, and labor costs for each of these archiving systems are a considerable item.
Some systems archive email, SMS, social media posts and other digital customer communications. Other systems archive printed communications. When tying the customer experience to communications, all of these separate archiving systems must be able to cross-reference each other. So, once again, the magic word is consolidation: consolidating files will decrease this expense.
6 – Customer communications delivery
Physical delivery costs are easier to track, but do not show total costs. Let’s start with the usual suspects: truckloads of printed materials such as proposals, contracts, statements, correspondence, applications, onboarding kits and other ad hoc communications.
These costs should appear as a line item for postage and courier services. However, some of the more voluminous costs do not accumulate in a single line item because they appear tens of thousands of times in ridiculously small amounts. Obviously, when multiplying a small cost many times and by many departments, the situation no longer looks so rosy.
In short, when analyzing the different costs of customer communications throughout all phases of the process, it is clear that the true total cost of customer communications is distributed among numerous departments and activities.
The problem is that information exchange across departments is not fluid, and this impedes the discovery of the actual cost of customer communications. Companies must therefore strengthen collaboration throughout the customer communications project and the consolidation of systems to support their communication strategy, which must be well defined from the outset.
About DocPath
DocPath is a leading enterprise document software company that offers its international customers the technology that allows them to complement their ERP and implement advanced Document Output Management, Customer Communications Management and document software pooling processes.
Founded in 1993, DocPath is based in Europe, USA and Latin America and is present with its Solutions in companies around the world. Among its customers there are prestigious banks and top-tier corporations, facilitating the difficult and complex task of designing, generating and distributing their business-critical documents. DocPath keeps a strong commitment to R+D+i, an area to which it allocates a large part of its revenues, and in which lies one of the keys to its success.
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