83% of consumers say that when they choose future healthcare providers, they seek clinics that offer four fundamental technologies: online scheduling, digital payment options, portal and engagement capabilities, and results reporting tools. It’s no secret that today’s omnichannel customers across all industries demand clear, consistent, and personalized communications. But healthcare, financial institutions, insurers, utilities, and other regulated providers face increased challenges to adapt to these demands when sensitive and confidential documents come into play.
Customer Communications Management (CCM) platforms, powered by AI and run in the cloud, can transform the way these businesses communicate with their customers, helping them to meet the demands of an omnichannel world while staying efficient, compliant, and customer-focused.
This blog will explore the role of AI and CCM platforms in delivering on these expectations while addressing the inefficiency, costs, and compliance challenges of disconnected legacy communications systems.
The Omnichannel Expectation: Why Customer Demands Are Changing
Financial institutions, insurance providers, healthcare organizations, telecom service providers, and utility providers continually establish and maintain lasting relationships with their customers that include ongoing correspondence, billing, appointments, contracts, alerts, marketing, etc. Not long ago, these businesses communicated via mail, telephone, or in person. It was simple, frustrating, and slow. However, consumers understood the limitations of the communications channels. They expected it to take days to schedule a service, get approved for a loan, or receive copies of medical records.
Today, the adoption of digital communications has fundamentally shifted the customer experience and elevated expectations. Customers have many more communications channels and seek digital on-demand access to actions, insights, and documents. They receive countless communications and documents via push notifications, SMS, email, web portals, and mobile applications. They now expect instant access to health records, lab results, claims information, contracts, financial records, and billing statements. But with increased regulatory requirements and far greater volumes of communications happening across all channels, the new sources of customer frustration lie in the complex processes and inconsistent communications across devices, platforms, and internal departments. Customers desperately want clear and consistent communications from any device or channel.
The Growing Challenges of Modern Customer Communications
These complex service industries employ customer-facing communication groups and processes for:
- Enrollment
- Onboarding
- Billing and Payments
- Customer Service and Appointments
- Account and Policy Service
- Claims
- Legal and Compliance
- Marketing
- Records
Creating, approving, archiving, and sharing these personalized communications and documents often requires touchpoints across multiple internal stakeholders. Sensitive data and documents must be governed and protected from exploitation, misuse, outages, and loss. Furthermore, each business has its own standards for customer service, branding, best practices, and other internal policies. The challenge of meeting internal and customer demands is further compounded in these industries by:
- Siloed legacy communications systems: Many organizations still rely on outdated legacy systems that are not well-integrated. This leads to disjointed and inconsistent messaging as different departments manage their communications independently, creating a fragmented customer experience.
- Poor cross-department coordination and collaboration: Departments like marketing, sales, legal, and customer service often work in silos, leading to a lack of coordination in messaging. This can cause delays, inconsistent content, and non-compliance with internal standards or regulations.
- Increasing Volume and Complexity of Communications: Businesses are producing more communications than ever before, from transactional messages to contracts, to marketing campaigns and legal notices.
- Regulatory Compliance: Industries like banking, healthcare, and insurance face stringent and constantly evolving regulations governing customer communications, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI. Failing to meet compliance standards can result in legal issues and fines.
- Multi-Channel Communication Requirements: With customers interacting across various platforms, businesses must ensure that communications are cohesive, consistent, and tailored to the channel preferences of each customer.
Given these complexities, it's no surprise that these industries are struggling to keep up with the demands of modern customer communications.
How CCM Platforms Solve These Challenges
CCM platforms are designed to address these challenges by unifying disparate data and communications systems. By integrating all key players into the workflows, all required departments can engage at the right time, to optimize efficiency, consistency, and customer experience while ensuring security and compliance at every step.
The Quadient Inspire Evolve CCM platform harnesses these capabilities with four key components:
- Content Author: Streamlined creation and management of communication templates
- Front Office: Allows customer-facing teams to personalize communications while staying compliant with branding and legal requirements
- Generate: Efficiently send communications in both batch and on-demand modes, ensuring customers receive timely, relevant information
- Archive: Enterprise-grade archival and retrieval solutions for secure and accessible storage of customer communications
By deploying on the cloud, as a SaaS solution, Inspire Evolve extends its value further:
- 24-7 Monitoring: for around-the-clock reliability and incident response
- Built-in security: with enterprise grade protection
- Agility and Scalability: to quickly adapt to changing business conditions
- Reduced IT Resource Requirements: freeing up IT to focus on innovation
- No Hardware Costs: Cloud offloads the infrastructure to 3rd party providers
- Continual Updates: for ongoing hands-off rollouts of new features, security updates, and performance enhancements
- Access to latest technologies: including big data analytics, machine learning, and AI
AI-Powered Enhancements in CCM
While CCM platforms are already transforming customer communications, the addition of AI takes them to the next level. The AI-driven features of Inspire Evolve enhance every aspect of the communication process, from design to delivery. Inspire Evolve includes:
- Template Creation & Translation: Business agents receive real-time assistance in creating templates, writing text, reducing errors and minimizing the risk of miscommunication. Using Evolve, they can instantly create copies of customer communication templates in the desired target language.
- Sentiment Analysis: Assists business users in evaluating the tone of messaging in documents such as correspondence letters, notifications, or contracts
- Prompt Creation & Management: Enterprise administrators can easily create, manage, and deploy AI prompts, ensuring business users have the tools they need at their fingertips.
Importantly, while AI provides efficiency and guidance for improved customer experience, final decisions are left to approved stakeholders, so that the final output remains under human control, ensuring alignment with a company’s tone, policies, and compliance requirements.
With its user-friendly interfaces, Inspire Evolve supports intelligent workflows from communication design to fulfillment, with journey mapping and dynamic elements such as interactive charts, tables and white space management, ensuring efficiency, consistency, quality, and compliance.
Quadient is an award-winning recognized leader, dedicated to the CCM space, with offices, support centers, and trained partners around the globe.
Final Thoughts: The Future of Customer Communications
AI-powered CCM platforms can revolutionize how businesses manage customer communications. They unify legacy systems, streamline workflows, and ensure compliance while delivering personalized, omnichannel experiences. If you’re ready to modernize your communication stack and take your customer experience to the next level, now is the time to explore AI-powered CCM solutions on the cloud.
Watch this video to see how Inspire Evolve can help your business deliver exceptional customer communications.
