Many customer communications management (CCM) platforms are currently available, but they often emphasize different aspects of business communications. It’s therefore important to understand your particular business before you start shopping for a solution. Six of the most commonly used CCM technologies include the following:
- Extract, Load and Transform (ELT) services.
- Data scrubbing.
- Document design.
- Document generation.
- Production reporting.
- Post-processing.
Extract, Load and Transform (ETL) Services
ELT services process raw, unstructured data from other software solutions such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). These data sources use a variety of formats that the ELT feature must convert into a single format. A customer communications management solution typically runs ELT in the background by using a set of pre-defined rules. It processes the data in a single pipeline, performing the extraction, loading and transformation steps in sequential order.
The extraction step identifies the data and reads from its data sources, which may include archives, databases, files or other software. The loading step adds the extracted data to the target data source, usually a database. The transformation step is the most complex since it involves converting data from its native format to the format needed to analyze the data. This step typically uses rules to define how the Customer Communications Management software will convert the data. The conversion process is highly variable, although it generally involves using code and lookup tables.
Data Scrubbing
The data scrubbing phase of customer communications management is also known as data cleansing. It filters essential information from the raw data stream based on existing algorithms, lookup tables and rules. It also corrects data that’s duplicated, incomplete, incorrect or improperly formatted.
The data correction aspect of data scrubbing is particularly helpful for data-intensive industries such as banking, insurance, retailing, telecommunications and transportation. These tools also correct specific mistakes in the data such as missing fields and duplicate records. Data scrubbing typically saves database administrators (DBAs) significant time over fixing these errors manually.
Document Design
The document design phase, or document composition, determines how documents will look when they’re presented to the user. The flexibility of this feature is often a deciding factor when selecting a customer communications platform since it facilitates the implementation of the marketing department’s ideas by the technical team.
The primary purpose of document composition is to communicate with customers, especially mailings sent out on a recurring basis such as billing statements and marketing. These functions play critical roles in maintaining an organization’s relationship with its customers. Document composition also aids in the creation, generation and distribution of documents, ensuring that customers receive a consistent user experience (UX). Software with document generation capability uses information from multiple sources such as a desktop computer cloud platform, whether an organization is using a multi-channel or omni-channel approach to customer communications management.
Document Generation
Document generation involves the conversion of text-based documents into templates that can greatly increase an organization’s productivity. A customer communications management solution with this feature can automatically generate simple documents with personalized information such as bank statements and other basic customer correspondence. They can also handle more complex documents like contracts and insurance policies.
Document generation includes a wide variety of specific applications that typically run in a batch process. This capability greatly automates document generation, but some CCM software requires manual steps to upload the data files needed to personalize the documents. This limitation can result in a prohibitive delay when generating millions of documents.
Today’s customers and other stakeholders expect on-demand communication, whether it’s through e-mail, PDF files, printed documents or SMS. They also want responses in real-time, often across multiple channels tailored to their preferences. Furthermore, organization stakeholders want to complete transactions quickly, often by signing an agreement over a mobile device. The ability of a customer communications management solution to generate documents is thus the deciding factor for many companies.
Post Processing
Post-processing consists of activities that occur after document generation, but before its delivery to the user. These include sorting, bundling and labeling documents, which customer communications management solutions often perform automatically. Preparing the print job for production and distribution also includes the application of barcodes needed to deliver the instructions for individual mail pieces, which can vary considerably between manufacturers.
These features are important in a customer communications platform because mailing costs are a key consideration for many organizations. Postal services routinely offer discounts to large mail producers for sorting their mail before dispatch. These discounts are typically higher when the postal service experiences periods of high mail volume.
Organizations typically separate document composition and post-processing into distinct steps. However, they may also make post-processing an integral part of document composition, especially when the organization has a large amount of post-processing. This approach may be more efficient because it makes the post-processing part of the primary document application, allowing the organization to deliver the document in a single step. Integrating post-processing with document composition can reduce production time, provided the customer communications platform can leverage this workflow.
Production Reporting
Production reporting provides users with visibility over in an organization’s production workflow, ideally from a single interface. For example, users can view the status of their jobs, from creation to delivery. Production reporting in a customer communications management system can include several options such as developing customized formats with a report generator and exporting for data directly into Excel.
Many production reporting tools eliminate the need for manual data collection and transcription, which reduces the cost of data collection. This feature also improves data accuracy, especially for inventory. The ability to digitally update inventory and track order status via real-time production monitoring is another feature that some CCM’s solutions offer.
Verifying job standards against actual activities is generally quite difficult without production reporting. These tools perform the data collection needed to verify metrics like cycle time, downtime, run-time and setup time, which increase the accuracy of job cost estimates.
Another feature that manufacturers value in CCMs is the ability to display a dashboard with customized key performance indicators (KPIs). This display can display any data elements the system collects in real-time, allow users to view KPIs like average cycle time, production rate, job hours to go and machine status.
Summary
CCM is becoming an increasingly important priority for businesses as they begin competing on service. Even small mistakes in managing outbound communications with customers can have a financial impact on an organization. Selecting the best customer communications platform for a particular organization requires careful consideration of its customer communications, including the degree of personalization and volume of those communications. It’s also critical to plan for future changes in CCM requirements since this type of business software is evolving so rapidly.
J.C. Olivares
Business Development Mgr. at DocPath Corp.