Part 5: Connecting the dots: megatrends in global customer experience
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”. I look at building out effective communications processes, how to keep customer communications and invoicing processes flexible, and how we at Quadient applied some of these principles to our invoices. If you prefer, you can access the video recording of the webinar here instead.
Building out effective communications processes
Once you have your data and put that design together, it is essential to focus on your business processes, workflow, and ways of working. For example, in banking, when a customer closes their account, several varied triggers occur and drive the creation of communications – including a thank you letter, final statement, and a potential retention offer. You must have intelligence built into your communications processes and integrated with core applications. This applies to all enterprises – including banks, insurers, and healthcare providers.
Your team needs to be able to easily trigger these workflows based on business rules and ensure an audit trail is available across every step for each communication distributed. Forrester also reviews various use cases and suggests where to invest in new capabilities to automate processes more effectively.
The next step is ensuring you have an adequate distribution of critical communications across different channels and ensuring that communications are bidirectional to drive engagement. For example, sending out a PDF statement may require a button embedded in the PDF or a hyperlink that links directly to a payment option.
Communications also need to be timely and get out when it matters most. In a January 2023 survey comparing companies that have omnichannel strategies for customer engagement versus companies that don't, we see that companies with an omnichannel strategy have higher retention rates. This is important because acquiring new customers takes time and effort. And once we have a customer, we must be ready to drive engagement and deliver excellent service to drive loyalty. And going beyond retention, excellent communications also create upsell opportunities.
At the tail of the communication process is potentially the most crucial step – tracking the communication's impact on your business. To do so, we recommend ensuring the data you are getting back is actionable, makes sense, and is mapped to sentiment analysis along the customer journey.
How do I keep customer communications and invoicing processes flexible?
Gartner also tells us that over time we will be collecting more data. These might be traditional data sources such as demographics, information related to transactions or policies, or behavioral, life event, milestones, and more. How do we accommodate a continually growing pool of data to continue improving communications without being creepy and maintaining compliance?
Once we have gone through a step in the communication process, we should not have to return to the beginning. It should be simple to add a data field to your communication. Design should be seamless – adding, dropping, and analyzing data fields. Adding distribution channels, including print communications, should be easy.
Take a step back and look at your communications processes, understand where your business sits in terms of your communications maturity level, and understand the elements you can address most easily to improve the experience for your employees and customers.
For example, let’s look at generating and delivering invoices – something many of our customers rely on Quadient Inspire to produce. There are typically a lot of questions that come from the business about the invoice:
- Can I track when it is delivered?
- Is it compliant?
- How do I avoid manual work that might be involved?
- How do I reconcile the invoice with my ERP system automatically?
- Is the invoice well laid out and brand compliant?
- Can I make it more compelling?
- How do I include additional variables and personalized content that might not come from my ERP system?
- How do I make it bidirectional to allow customers and suppliers to engage with us?
As a communication type, invoices have historically been boring and generic. But it is possible to transform these into world-class experiences that are compelling, personalized, bidirectional, relevant, and leverage intelligence behind the scenes.
How Quadient redesigned our own invoices
In 2022, the team at Quadient took on a project to revamp our invoices using Inspire. We took feedback from our call center and customers to understand how to make our invoices more meaningful. Below is an example of the before and after.
We started by redesigning and rebuilding customer invoices. We had many stakeholders to consider, including sales, support, marketing, legal, and our customer experience office. We engaged outside consultants that helped in terms of the design and best practices. And then there's one stakeholder we sometimes forget – finance - especially when it comes to invoicing and making sure that payments are connected to our ERP systems.
We looked at how to get our message across to customers and connect the dots - not just within the communication but also with other applications for purchase orders and payments. Including e-invoicing mandates from local governments, collections, assessment, and credit analysis.
We also considered how to manage the delivery of communications best – whether to manage them in-house or via outsourcing, in a way that brings vendors and customers together and delivers a world-class experience.
And we’ll continue looking at improvements, including deeper integration with ERP systems,
And predictive analytics to a model of which customers are at risk and which customers may require additional payment options to predict and drive better outcomes for the business. Tying together accounts payable, accounts receivable, and customer communications in a way that has been challenging in the past.
