In this fast changing business landscape, the only thing that has managed to keep pace with the evolution of technology is the evolution of customers’ expectations. Customers today demand more of everything; more value for money, more features, more comfort, more customization and more positive experiences. Apparently, this poses a challenge for businesses to meet and exceed customer expectations, in order to remain competitive. However, this challenge comes with a surprise package – the opportunity to build customer trust and loyalty by surpassing customers’ expectations and gaining a competitive edge over other players in the market. To leverage this opportunity to its fullest, a business needs to focus on achieving process agility or the ability to align processes with dynamically changing market requirements.
Access to the right information, at the right time, by the right people is the key to profitably meeting the ever-increasing customer expectations, in a volatile and globally competitive business landscape. To achieve true agility across the breadth and scope of all operations, an organization needs to practice continual process improvement by implementing more flexible and transparent processes and systems that are capable of accommodating changes seamlessly and quickly.
Automation of business processes has become the order of the day, but to differentiate themselves from competition, business organizations are increasingly turning to Business Process Management (BPM). At its outset, BPM primarily focused on automating workflows and moving documents from “system to system”, but today it has evolved to incorporate more “human-centric” and role-based capabilities across the process lifecycle. This enables stakeholders at different levels of the organizational structure to take the appropriate action at the right time and to more directly drive the creation and management of business processes with minimal dependence on IT. An efficient BPM platform underpins the IT infrastructure and enables an organization to lower operational costs, increase productivity and enhance customer experience.
Bio: Garima is part of the Marketing team at Newgen Software.
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.
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.
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