There is a lot of buzz and plenty of buzzwords around the idea of improving your company's customer experience. Today, this communication is occurring across a wider variety of devices, platforms and media than ever before. Compounding this delivery diversity is the increase in pace or speed with which the communications are or should be executed (at least according to your customers).
You’re probably trying to figure out how to deal with a vast inventory of content and fundamentally improve your customer experience at the same time. To get your strategy and execution plan aligned, consider these five ways in which your customer communications management program can be used to drive improvements in the customer experience.
1. Voice of the customer
Align your writers, compliance and legal groups around a shared vision for the customer voice. Experience has shown that after a few early battles, the group can align on a set of standards that not only your customers will appreciate but that will also keep you out of the regulator’s dog house.
2. Personalization and relevance
2. Personalization and relevance
Winners in business today cannot survive on great product alone. They must be able to communicate with prospects and customers alike, using pertinent information delivered in a personalized way. Generic mass communications are much more likely to turn people off or to just be ignored. It’s easier than ever to integrate your customer data with modern publishing platforms to enable the improved experience. Combine that with effective business user tools to create and control the rules of engagement and personalization and you’re well on your way towards creating the experience that you aspire to provide.
3. Multi-channel delivery
3. Multi-channel delivery
No conversation about customer experience today is worth having without including the impacts driven by the web and mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. With recent history as our guide, many firms address the emergence of new channels or devices by creating entirely new delivery teams and infrastructures to address their specific requirements. While this redundancy may initially seem more agile and get you a footprint in the market, eventually the cost and speed equations turn negative and the resulting fragmented messaging from independent silos can have an even more disastrous effect. Plan to consolidate your communications silos on a modern platform designed for effective management of your content across many delivery channels. Your competition has been investing here, so don’t get left behind.
4. Speed to market
4. Speed to market
Customers and prospects expect their information “when they want it,” meaning it must be timely from their perspective not yours. Maintaining hundreds, if not thousands, of redundant documents will not help you meet expected timelines. Two keys to improving your creation and maintenance speed are to reduce your total inventory through refactoring and development of common high-level processes across your business units.
5. Consistent branding
5. Consistent branding
The synergies of customer communications management (CCM) and customer experience present the perfect opportunity to address branding issues. Content refactoring and rewrites for voice of the customer should definitely include standards and implementation of consistently applied, channel-specific branding.
These are just five of the ways in which an enterprise CCM program can help you improve the customer experience you deliver and the relationship you build with prospects and customers. With the bar set higher than ever before, it is time to turn your vision and strategy for customer communications and experience into an actionable plan.
Mr. Roberts will be presenting on Tuesday, May 13, 2014 at the DOCUMENT Strategy Forum. Don't miss his Power Session M304/M305 “The Next Chapter: Creating a Seamless Multi-Channel Communications Approach That Really Works.” For more information, visit www.DOCUMENTstrategyForum.com.
