With so many options, every interaction with your customers is critical. When it comes to quality service, 17% of customers will only give companies one chance, while 59% will walk away after a handful of bad experiences. However, not all is lost–just like in any successful relationship, communication is critical to positive customer interactions.
Keep customers engaged and informed with positive, consistent communications in the channel of their choice.
Personalized communications prompt consideration and factor into purchasing decisions—76% of customers are more likely to purchase if they’ve received personalized communications, and 78% will repurchase from that brand and recommend it to their family and friends.
However, providing personalized communications can be challenging for organizations. Read on to learn why customer communications are the gateway to a great customer experience and how you can augment your existing customer communications.
Organizations with a large and diverse customer base effectively manage their extensive customer communications with CCM platforms. These platforms use a rules-based engine to determine a customer’s communication preferences—some want print, others want email, and others prefer to receive a text message.
Instead of receiving another piece of mail with a promotion that isn’t tailored to what the customer wants or needs, a CCM platform ensures each communication is thoughtfully curated for the customer based on their purchase history and preferences.
It’s common for organizations in industries like financial services, healthcare, insurance, and utilities to use CCM software. They have significant data on their customers and frequently communicate about different products and updates to meet customer and regulatory requirements. In today’s digital age, organizations from any industry can benefit from CCM to streamline communications.
Despite the benefits of using a CCM, not every organization is ready to use one. Personalized communications rely on structured data, which organizations lack. For example, when a new client enrolls at a bank, they must provide personal information. In most cases, that can be done online in a digital experience that captures the data and passes it to downstream systems. The captured data can be leveraged for a welcome email that outlines the next steps for onboarding and is delivered automatically to the customer’s inbox in minutes.
However, many organizations rely on manual processes that don’t provide structured data as an output. For example, a customer has to fill out personal information using a pen and paper. Upon completion, customers must sign, scan, and send various documents back to the company, where another bank employee will input it into a different system. This process is lengthy, error-prone, and not customer-friendly. Worst of all, it doesn’t allow for straight-through customer communications—the CCM would only generate personalized communications once the manual process was completed.
Despite the advantages of using a CCM, there’s still room for improvement when it comes to providing automated, end-to-end customer communications. Currently, organizations are limited in the number of straight-through dynamic communications they can provide because of legacy technologies and funding constraints.
To augment customer communications even more, adding a low-code solution can help automate customer processes end-to-end.
The right low-code platform allows those closest to a particular process to improve it. So, instead of relying on IT to update a legacy system or digitize a particular process, a business user can create a customer experience that collects customer data upfront and then sends it downstream to the CCM.
IT sometimes frowns on low-code platforms, but the right platform balances IT’s concerns with the business needs. IT gets to maintain governance over data and compliance, while the business can take the problems they want to solve and turn them into digital experiences. Best of all, customers benefit from true, end-to-end automated communications.