This post is part of a series based on content from my recent keynote presentation at Quadient Inspire Days 2023 titled “Connecting the dots: megatrends in global customer experience”. It focuses on examining what all communications have in common and what benefits companies can find from “connecting the dots” that we identified in Part 1. If you prefer, you can access the video recording of the webinar here instead.
What do all communication experiences have in common?
When we launched Quadient in 2019, we created the tagline “Because connections matter” – because we realized that connecting these dots required companies to plan their communications strategy across three major themes.
The first is ensuring that all the interactions and experiences you provide your customers and employees are impactful – that they mean something. It's not simply sending out a templated or generic communication. It needs to be impactful, meaningful, personalized, and accurate.
The second item is compliance. You must ensure you comply with the laws and regulations for your specific industry and the regions in which you do business.
And finally, bring together the experience of your customers and your employees to improve and elevate the entire process of building out customer engagements. Let’s look at some ways of connecting these dots across your business.
What is the value of connecting the dots?
There is a good framework from IDC that we can follow to outline the process of creating these robust customer engagements. In June 2022, they issued a report detailing the five benefits of improving the customer experience.
The first benefit is better customer loyalty. When you engage with customers, we know you're better servicing them, and they will be loyal. The second is driving efficiencies and lowering costs – by consolidating technologies or moving technologies to the cloud and enhancing processes to drive profit margins. The third is improving internal processes and how to make them more efficient. And the last two positively impact revenue and improve customer lifetime value.
These last two are critical metrics that the CEO and CFO look at regarding any changes - whether that be a change of process, a change of system, or bringing in a new product. What is the impact on revenue, and how will you improve the lifetime value of the customers?
This report details the benefits, initiatives, suggestions, and recommendations regarding improving the entire customer experience – and shows that it’s very much about personalizing communications and tailoring them to the audience and their preferred channel.
One customer might want to receive something digitally or via a mobile app. Another may prefer to receive it via print or physically. And a third may prefer to receive on multiple channels. Optimizing each approach to delivering the best customer experience ensures you maximize customer lifetime value, top-line revenue, and profit.
Building a strong CX foundation through data accuracy
When building a foundation, looking at the communications process and internal stakeholders is essential. Let’s look at some of the trends we are seeing and hearing from our customers and partners regarding how to connect the dots and improve communications processes and output.
Building great communications starts with collecting the data you want to make available in the document. We all know that data is being captured as we browse the web or make purchases. This might be demographic data, geographic data, or other data. And we understand that this data resides in the cloud and sometimes is being matched to other third-party data sources. For our customers, building communications typically require data from 5 to 10 systems to be integrated. With all this complexity, how do you ensure your data is accurate? A quick view of some statistics highlights the challenges businesses are facing:
- 95% of businesses cite the need to manage unstructured data is a problem for their business.
- 45% of businesses worldwide are running at least one of their big data workloads in the cloud.
- Big data in healthcare will be worth more than $71.6 billion by 2027.
- The market for big data analytics in banking is set to reach $62.10 billion by 2025.
- By 2025, 60% of data quality processes will be embedded and integrated into critical business workflows as opposed to being individual and distinct tasks, up from less than 30% in 2022.
The takeaway here is that when you have all this data, it's imperative that you create processes to ensure that the quality of the data is high. But most important is that the processes must be embedded directly into your business workflows. This helps drive efficiency and ensures that your communication and the overall experience are accurate, personalized, and positive.
