Customer service has always been important in business, but companies have only recently started routinely competing on that basis. Meeting customer expectations is now a critical requirement for acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones. Keeping customers fully engaged is also essential for increasing revenue and growing a business.
A customer communications platform delivers business correspondence throughout the customer’s journey towards a purchase. This capability provides multiple benefits such as optimizing the customer experience and keep customers engaged. Implementing centralized customer communications management (CCM) software also facilitates customer interactions across all communication channels.
This article discusses seven business areas that benefit from CCM.
1. Customer Experience
Improving customer experience (CX) is one of the most obvious benefits of customer communications management. It accomplishes this through a collection of features that provide interactive communication in real-time across multiple channels.
Personalization
CCM solutions allow users to create highly personalized experiences and manage those preferences, ensuring organizations keep their customers fully engaged in the communication channel of their choice. One of the most recent additions to CCM capabilities is the integration channels with voice assistants, allowing chatbots to deliver personalized content to customers in real-time. This content typically consists of general information, messages and transactions. Chatbot functionality isn’t able to completely replace a human agent at this time, but it does improve customer engagement by making interactions more consistent, helpful and relevant.
The latest customer communications management software also initiates sales and support cycles on a customer’s preferred channels, allowing organizations to continue interacting with customers until the transaction completes. They can also interact on the fly with their mobile devices by using channels such as fillable PDF forms, interactive email messages and online web portals. In contrast, traditional communication methods such as phone calls and in-person visits to company offices often require substantial planning to conduct. Interactive communications also include visualization tools such as charts, graphs and sliders. These dynamic capabilities facilitate real-time experiences such as mobile and web communication.
Consistency
Customer communications management also improves CX by keeping communications consistent across channels. This capability requires organizations to keep their designs channel-agnostic, meaning the communication is the same no matter which channel it occurs on. Consistent messaging builds trust just as consistent experiences do, which keeps customers coming back.
Convenience
A centralized customer communications platform allows businesses to get the right messages to their customers faster. They also create seamless onboarding for their customers through the use of features like pre-populated forms and electronic signatures.
2. Regulatory Compliance
Organizations often treat regulatory compliance requirements as a barrier to creating content. However, a better approach is to integrate compliance into operations by keeping the compliance team involved throughout the content creation process. This practice requires a centralized customer communications platform that offers a holistic view of the communications process, collaboration between team members, and greater control over the content.
Holistic View
Customer communications management platforms should provide a view of all communication forms such as mobile applications, paper and web pages. This feature reduces errors of omission in compliance since team members can analyze what customers see and how they see it.
Collaboration
A collaborative process helps compliance team members share content with other departments such as legal and line-of-business through the creation process. This benefit reduces creation time, thus speeding time-to-market.
Control
Team members need to perform all the steps involved in compliance quickly, including the approval of language, management, tracking and auditing. The best CCM solutions ensure that content changes occur in only one location, but apply them to every location the user chooses. They also lock down blocks of content to prevent unauthorized regulatory language.
3. Marketing Campaigns
In addition to communications, CCM systems are also beginning to manage simple business processes. This capability allows enterprises to conduct marketing campaigns that are more relevant to customers. These systems can generate messages that are rich in text and have multimedia embedded in them, which enterprises can leverage into marketing opportunities. For example, a company can embed marketing content into monthly statements that keep customers updated on new products.
4. Customer Engagement
It’s no secret that engaged customers generate more revenue for businesses, which requires them to meet the expectations of those customers. Service factors such as convenience, flexibility and simplicity are becoming increasingly important to customers in determining which company they do business with. As a result, modern customer communications management software focuses on improving CX in addition to the experience of other users such as company employees and independent contractors.
For example, these users can provide customer service from any location and device with internet connectivity. This capability also eliminates the need for customers to physically visit their service providers’ facility. CCM also keeps customers engaged by reducing the dependency on IT.
5. Operational Efficiency
Centralized CCM also improves operational efficiency by reducing user dependency on IT. Users no longer need to rely on IT to create content, edit and manage it. A CCM also helps eliminate data siloing, which occurs when an organization separates communications data by channel. This practice is a major source of inefficiency since it increases costs and reduces message consistency. Centralized customer communications management also propagates changes across an organization’s various channels automatically.
6. Digital Transformation
Industries such as finance, government, insurance and utilities often have a complex IT infrastructure that has developed over the years. This infrastructure consists of a collection of legacy systems that were developed when physical printing was the only output that software needed to generate. CCM must be able to integrate with these existing systems to provide a single user interface (UI) that enables a consistent cross-channel experience. Today’s CCM solutions also allow users to leverage the existing data from legacy systems to ensure CX remains personalized and relevant across channels.
7. Omni-channel Capability
Customer Communications Management solutions allow organizations to deliver correspondence to customers via the device of their choice. This capability requires the software to support a range of display sizes and formats due to the large number of mobile devices that currently exist. CCM systems must also communicate with customers through social media, which is now the preferred channel for many customers. These systems must also keep pace with additional customer touchpoints as they emerge.
Summary
The benefits of CCM software generally relate to its ability to improve communication between an organization and its customers. CCM is particularly effective at customizing communications for each customer based on data gathered from multiple sources. The elimination of data silos also allows customer communications management software to ensure a consistent CX regardless of the communication channel the customer uses.
André Klein
Freelance Consultant for DocPath