A Dynamic Case Management (DCM) solution will be effective if and only if the new business scenarios, situational complexities and exceptions are handled in a timely manner. And to do that, the process workers must be bestowed with power and authorization to take the right decision at the right time. According to the situation, the process workers may select any ad-hoc process route, they can trigger any call for action or they can escalate to higher authority for permission. It’s the individual worker’s decision making ability which will make a DCM solution successful.
A DCM solution can be BPM centric- where the workflow routing becomes dynamic, or ECM centric- where right based content access is provided to the users, or CCM centric- where the right communication channels are chosen for the right customer with right content, or purely Strategic where Business Analytics like Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) tool and Rule Management System are used to monitor the process performance and take the right decisions at right time or change the business rule on the fly.
A DCM solution can be treated as a new layer between traditional BPM, ECM, CCM and Business Analytics tool and core applications. For any given process, various process templates will be available. Process workers will not design any new process templates but they have to select the right template according to the situation. Any new scenario will demand a new process template which will become an integral part of the solution so that it can be referred to in the future, if required. This is the process discovery part which makes the DCM solution more and more effective in time.
Organizations with a strong history of providing complex BPM, ECM and CCM solutions are now focusing on developing DCM solutions. The DCM solution will become a right blend of those individual offerings. To choose a right DCM solution, you must check that:
To use a DCM solution effectively and consistently, the business owners have to be careful about the following things:
In order to curb crimes like money laundering, financing of terrorist activities and identity theft, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has been regularly issuing guidelines on KYC (Know your Customer). In 2002 the RBI directed all banks and financial institutions to put in place a policy framework to know their customers before opening any account. In November 2004, the RBI again issued a comprehensive guideline reiterating the objective of KYC guidelines to prevent banks from being used for money laundering activities or for the financing of terrorism.
KYC, which is basically a client identification process, ensures that the bank or financial institution is completely satisfied with the integrity of an investor. Banks today, are faced with increased challenges due to the evolution of money laundering methods, with launderers using sophisticated technologies for financial frauds. This has brought the need for enforcement of the KYC imperative to the forefront, and regulators other than RBI have also understood the importance of making KYC mandatory. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has implemented KYC for mutual funds and trading accounts, while the Insurance Regulatory Development Authority (IRDA) has mandated it for buying insurance and the Forwards Markets & Commission (FMC) for commodity trading.
However, the documentation hassles involved in KYC implementation have had a negative impact on the growth of number of investors. It becomes frustrating for the customers as well as for the financial organizations to adhere to the complex KYC requirements. For this reason, banks and financial institutions are now looking at implementing a more strategic approach to KYC compliance.
KYC, being a key regulatory requirement for all financial institutions across the globe, can be viewed as an opportunity to minimize business risks. Financial institutions need an appropriate solution to integrate the KYC process with their existing customer onboarding process, to ensure faster customer onboarding and minimize business risk by providing a 360 degree view of customer behavior. An important offshoot of the KYC process is deeper customer understanding through customer analytics, further enabling effective cross-selling and up-selling.
Newgen hosted a webinar ‘Better Customer Experience Demands Smarter Communication’, on February 01, 2011, to discuss current trends and best practices in Customer Communication Management.
Craig Le Clair, leading international expert in Customer Communication Management (CCM), of independent research firm, Forrester Inc, kicked off the presentation by explaining to the participants, how an integrated Customer Communication Management (CCM) approach translates into customer loyalty and reduced operational complexity.
The webinar was co-hosted by Ashish Deshmukh, Director – Business Development, Newgen Software, who shared invaluable insights, revealing ways of achieving personalized customer communication for up-selling, cross-selling and meeting regulatory compliance. His session included a case studies walkthrough on how a leading Financial Service Organization and a large Healthcare Insurer transformed their Customer Communication Management (CCM) processes so as to enhance customer experience, augment operational performance and drive growth.
New generation customers demand more personalized, contextual communications, delivered in real time, through their preferred channel. Customer Communication Management provides a platform to deliver smart communication, maximizing the effectiveness of all communication touch points while complying with regulatory mandates and branding guidelines. An integrated CCM with enterprise content & BPM framework provides organizations an agile process for creation, review and distribution of personalized communication across multiple channels consistently.
Key Takeaways from the Webinar:
For many useful tips from both Craig and Ashish, click here to view the podcast.
The world over, Banks and Financial institutions are facing a tough economic climate. It is only natural that they are looking for ways to increase their business and without the burden of incurring costs. There is a need to be more innovative and Banks and FIs today realize that it is critical to effectively communicate with customers and deliver superior service, improve efficiency and reduce costs. In this light, maximizing the effectiveness of daily communications such as bills, statements and correspondence is becoming a top priority. This also means improving customer interactions in a consistent manner across a wide spectrum of customer touch points and media channels.
The 21st century is being annunciated as the information economy, wherein knowledge is power. The more knowledge and information banks have at their disposal, the more prepared and equipped they will be to handle the complexities and uncertainties of the economic ecosystem. So how is this unassailable knowledge extracted?
From customers of course!
The easier banks make it for customers to do business with them, the better it is, to gain an understanding of customer needs and the easier it becomes to enhance their relationship with them. The challenges that retail banks face today will not evaporate overnight. Banks will continue to face reduced marketing budgets, increased regulatory and compliance issues, ever demanding consumers and a diffident economy.
It is natural, in volatile times, for businesses to undertake serious self-introspection. The current economic gloom therefore throws up some intimidating questions:
The questions are compelling but their answer lies in one comprehensive solution. The answer is Customer Communication Management (CCM). CCM simply means enhancing customer experience in a cost-effective manner by communicating and engaging with customers through a multitude of channels and mediums. CCM enables banks to connect with their customers by providing them with personal and immediate attention. CCM also ensures that banks have better control over their communications, provide an opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell their services while also keeping their operations profitable.
Today’s customer is more informed than ever – and more astute in making purchase decisions. Effective customer communication can act as a catalyst for companies to create greater organizational efficiency while optimizing the profit potential of every touch point with the customer. Businesses need to realize the importance of customers’ data as a reflection of customers’ voice, and initiate the first step in giving voice to the customer by incorporating a timely and effective communication strategy. For an organization to achieve this, a robust Customer Communication Management (CCM) strategy – offering full functionality required to deliver on all aspects customer communication – is an absolute must.
Timely, personal, relevant and compelling communication is critical to building trusted and long-term customer relationships — this should be a given. However, organizations still struggle to manage and deliver consistent and cost-effective communications across today’s multitude of communication channels. The chances of cross-selling or up-selling are dramatically dropped if there is a gap between the customer’s requirements and the offer made to him. Distribution to multiple output channels like print, email and web presentment is challenging due to high turn-around-times for replicating changes and absence of versioning. Dependency on vendors/ IT experts for performing minor changes, like templates, business rules and workflow — things that should be in the hands of the business, not IT, leads to escalated costs and unnecessary delay in communication. Another major challenge lies in enforcing branding guidelines like font style and background to ensure consistency across all customer communication for brand recognition.
Inconsistent and irrelevant communication may have serious implications for any business. The solution lies in co-creating products and services with customers by intelligently using customer data to create personalized and targeted communication. In today’s “connected” consumer-centric world it has become imperative for businesses to adopt new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers’ needs, demands and expectations. To be able to up-sell and cross-sell effectively, businesses must monitor customer data in real-time to enable need-based targeting. CCM harnesses the power of existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and transaction data to ensure that the on-going communications are highly personalized and relevant.
With an explosion in new communication channels, businesses are faced with the challenge of ensuring clarity and consistency across all customer communications. The very definition of “customer communication” has expanded manifolds to include everything from billing to direct mail marketing to e-marketing to electronic bill presentment and so on. Banks and Financial Institutions have always been the leaders in setting high standards for customer expectations by continuously enhancing customer experience. The result is that high-touch, 24/7 service across multiple channels is no more representative of customer delight but has become a basic requirement for keeping customers happy and loyal in real time.
To survive in a competitive market place it is necessary to effectively manage all customer communications. Reduced customer acquisition costs, increased client retention and maximized lifetime value of each customer are the end objectives of every communication strategy. Customer Communication Management (CCM) refers to a convergent set of Information Technology solutions that help businesses achieve these objectives by providing a tool to advance the way they communicate with their customers. CCM takes care of every aspect of customer communication – including content creation, personalization, and multi-channel distribution and archiving using a single integrated solution. Dependency on vendors/ IT experts for performing minor changes on different systems leads to escalated costs and unnecessary wastage of time. CCM tools overcome this challenge by empowering business users to create and manage customer communications, reducing the reliance on costly IT resources.
Data-rich industries such as banks process volumes of transactional documents daily. Each such document is an opportunity for revenue realization. CCM treats these transactional documents like bank statements, statement of account, invoices etc. as marketing collaterals to promote company offerings to customers.
A properly implemented CCM solution can bring significant benefits to organizations. Let’s take a look at the advantages that a CCM or Customer Communication Management solution can bring.
Going by the J.D. Power and Associates 2010 U.S. Retail Banking Satisfaction Study the overall satisfaction of retail banking customers has decreased for a fourth consecutive year, to 748 on 1,000-point scale. The research has drawn a direct correlation between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. As the US retail banking industry struggles to adjust to the changes in the global financial and economic environment, the focus on customer loyalty to protect revenue and ensure the continuation of the most important customer relationships is of utmost importance to banks. Increased customer awareness about financial products, demand for better customer experience and growing customer attrition mean banks have much to lose if they fail to align their communication strategies with customer expectations and focus on retaining existing relationships.
The study has further identified 12 core Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) of customer satisfaction that focus on three key objectives: managing customer expectations; effective customer communications; and providing convenient and flexible service.
Capturing customer interest on various promotions for lead generation can be a daunting task if you don’t have an efficient communication strategy in place. Effective customer communication has the potential not only to enable banks realize customer loyalty but to deliver customer advocacy by making the best use of myriad customer touch points as marketing opportunities.
With formidable competition to fulfill customer demands, banks must take radical steps to maximize the use of various communication tools. Transaction documents should be treated like personalized marketing collaterals targeting the right offer to the right customer on the basis of analysis of transaction. For instance, a bank account statement may include details of an investment option or a credit card statement may be personalized with invitation to open a new bank account. Or if a customer uses his credit card/bank account to make utility bill payments you may introduce him to automatic utility bill payment service. When looking at managing cross channel communication between a business entity and its customers, an interactive customer communication management system is an intelligent proposition to bank on.
Regardless of the diverse risk profiles of individual banks and measures taken by regulators and governments in different countries to support their banking systems, banks across the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) region are faced with the challenge of combating consumer mistrust, a major consequence of the economic recession and credit market crisis of 2008.
The current market scenario is extremely challenging. A recent Forrester research emphasizes on the importance of “customer advocacy” in developing deeper customer relationships among financial services consumers. The key here is the perception on part of the customers that a firm’s strategies and actions are governed by their needs and well being, not just the firm’s own selfish motives. In order to survive today’s market environment, banks in the region our under tremendous pressure to deploy advanced functionality, comply with regulatory requirements, improve security and enhance customer experience.
Banks are dissatisfied with the outcomes of their cross-selling/up-selling efforts. Other major concerns include consolidation of multiple products like account statement, credit card statement and investments and loan statement, consolidation of multiple systems like loan management system, wealth management system and CRM, distribution to multiple output channels like print, email and web presentment and dependency on vendors/ IT experts for performing minor changes on different systems.
Banks that succeed in defining and implementing solutions to offer fulfilling banking experiences to their customers will be the ones that will thrive into the future. Making the best use of customer data and segmentation is the key to high-quality interactions that attract and retain customers. An effective Customer Communication Management System would help banks leverage demographic profiling to capture customer interest, establish customer intimacy and earn customer advocacy.
A study (Source: Prentice Hall, Leading on the Edge of Chaos, by Emmett C. Murphy and Mark A. Murphy) suggests that a 2 percent increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10 percent.
Recently banks in the Asia Pacific (APAC) have been on a spree to accelerate branch automation and enhance customer experience. The trend suggests that in APAC the countries with high economic growth prospects, like China, India and to some extent Indonesia are leading the IT implementation race in the Banking industry. The pace at which APAC banks are implementing modern IT systems indicates that they have realized the importance of customer experience to ensure continuation of the most important customer relationships.
To enhance customer experience, banks today need a robust and scalable Customer Communication Management system that ensures superior customer service through consolidated information, single statement template for multiple distribution channels, easy change management by incorporating version control mechanism and conformance to regulatory compliance.
With increasing competition in the banking industry, there is a strong push towards capturing customer interest by dynamically including highly customized and personalized marketing messages in statements. This would reduce the time to market considerably and facilitate up-selling and cross-selling by targeting the right offer to the right customer on the basis of analysis of transactions.
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