Customer experience (CX) is one of the most talked about trends in business today. When it comes to CX strategy, a great deal of focus is placed on frontline, person-to-person communications—training and coaching employees regularly on how best to speak (and interact) with customers. However, routine documents, such as contracts, customer correspondence, customized quotes, welcome kits, invoices and statements, are often overlooked, even though they are equally important to the customer experience and represent a significant percentage of overall customer touchpoints.
With these routine communications, the customer’s voice and experience rarely gets incorporated into design and delivery. Typically, these documents perpetuate inside-out thinking where the company knows best, rather than outside-in thinking where the customer is a part of every design and decision. That needs to change for significant CX improvements to take place.
Invoices, statements and other necessary customer communications aren’t going away. They are fundamental essentials of every business. The question is—how can they be transformed?
A collaborative enterprise
The challenge with necessary customer documents stems from how they are created, which historically has been an IT and operations-driven process. Many disparate legacy systems are typically involved in the creation of one piece of communication. For most organizations, none of that aligns with or connects to marketing, branding or the customer experience.
In many cases, the CMO and the CXO (Chief Experience Officer) are not involved in the document production process, and so the message that these communications send to customers is vastly different from what the CMO or CXO conveys elsewhere. What is missing is the ability to communicate with customers in one voice, across the organization and along the entire customer journey.
Some questions to ask about your current customer documents include the following:
• Are they relevant, personalized, and accessible on-demand?
• Do they reflect positively on your brand?
• Are they consistent and compliant?
• Are they bi-directional?
• Are they delivered via the customers’ preferred channel today? What if they change their preferred channel?
• Do they incorporate the knowledge of subject matter experts across your organization?
• Do they help the overall customer experience?
If the answer to even one of these questions is no, then it’s time to give serious consideration to adopting a new customer communications management (CCM) strategy.
Elements of a successful CCM approach
To succeed in delivering the best CX possible, enterprises require a CCM approach that enables them to:
1. Ensure all communications, regardless of the channel, deliver a seamless brand experience for the customer.
2. Map the customer journey by bringing into the map all of the touchpoints that customers use or interact with along the way, including marketing communications, letters, welcome kits, statements and bills.
3. Give business users the ability to create, edit, and manage content, instead of requiring the IT’s involvement to make changes.
The right cross-functional teams need to be involved to ensure that disparate voices, systems and channels don’t sidetrack the brand messaging and, hence, the experience. Many organizations still have separate teams dedicated to creating communications for print, mobile, email, and web—leading to operational inefficiency, high costs, inconsistency, and increased risk.
A centralized CCM infrastructure can deliver a better customer experience; and there are efficiency gains thanks to the fact that changes are easily propagated across various touchpoints and channels. A centralized platform can result in lower maintenance costs as well, and there is a reduction in specialized skill sets managing disjointed and siloed processes. Additionally, the centralized tracking of communications offers benefits not only from a compliance and risk perspective, but also from a customer experience and customer engagement perspective.
Achieving an exceptional customer experience
In order to remain competitive, businesses must be able to provide information as a utility, making it available to business users in the right format, at the right time. This requires a centralized CCM strategy, allowing for easy access to data, the ability to reformat that data, create the right communication, adapt to the best design, and deliver it to the right channel in an optimized format.
Enterprises around the world are facing choices in the next 36 months that will affect their ability to produce effective customer communications for the next ten years.
