Three ways to improve enterprise customer communications
1. Enable business users to manage customer communications
Customer communications play a crucial role in the operations of all businesses. However, if not managed effectively, they can become a source of problems and negative customer experiences, which can impact business performance. Customer communications encompass a wide array of customer touchpoints, including regulatory documents, such as invoices, statements, contracts, and dunning letters, as well as messages sent through email, SMS, push notifications, or platforms like WhatsApp.
Managing customer communications is challenging for a variety of reasons, ranging from tight deadlines to the complexities of personalization, regulatory compliance, and adherence to brand guidelines. IT departments have traditionally been responsible for designing, maintaining, producing, and distributing these communications. This ongoing operation is both expensive and difficult to manage because it requires continuous collaboration with key business stakeholders, such as legal, compliance, marketing, and customer service departments. Many enterprises struggle to update documents, with logo and regulatory text changes taking months, if not years, due to IT bottlenecks.
The consequence of IT overseeing Customer Communications Management (CCM) is that updates to documents and customer communications are slow, and business users cannot meet market demands promptly. To address this, a paradigm shift is necessary, with control transferred from IT to business users. Empowering business users to manage customer communication from the design to the fulfillment stage enables businesses to flexibly respond to evolving business needs while reducing compliance risk and increasing control over messaging, branding, and distribution channels.
Enabling business user empowerment can only be achieved with tools that are user-friendly, secure, and scalable. Quadient Evolve provides the necessary toolset to empower business users. A cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, Evolve offers interfaces optimized for business users and incorporates essential controls to secure operations and validate communications before release. This allows teams like legal, marketing, and customer services to contribute to customer communication design and maintenance without being hindered by IT constraints.
2. Leverage digital channels
Customer communications have traditionally relied on sending physical documents via postal services, which has proven to be costly due to printing expenses and stamp duties. Over the years, the cost of sending these documents has increased, and this trend is expected to continue due to environmental regulations and inflation affecting paper, electricity, and labor costs. In certain European countries like Denmark, the cost of sending letters to customers exceeds 1 US dollar per document and is still on the rise.
Aside from the financial burden, physical distribution of documents is slow, taking days to reach clients. In today's fast-paced world, clients expect instant and meaningful communications. A significant majority (above 75%) of clients prefer digital channels over paper-based communication and would opt for digital distribution if given the choice. Some enterprises, particularly in the telecom industry in countries like France, UK, and Spain, have already transitioned to being entirely digital.
However, enabling digital channels poses challenges for enterprises, as it often involves integrating with various systems and coordinating different teams. Additionally, documents are not always digital-ready and require rework to be suitable for digital distribution. Consequently, some enterprises might be hesitant to adopt digital channels and may choose to focus on other priorities. Unfortunately, this reluctance not only misses an opportunity to enhance client experience and satisfaction, but also limits the enterprise's flexibility in meeting both business and customer demands.
To address these challenges, modern Customer Communication Management (CCM) solutions, like Quadient Evolve, offer comprehensive packages that facilitate both print and digital distribution. These solutions are digital-ready and empower enterprises to seamlessly distribute documents through various channels, including email and SMS. Business users have the flexibility to choose the most suitable distribution method for each customer, and the CCM solution adapts the output accordingly.
3. Use SaaS to reduce operational costs & innovate faster
Once the need for a modern Customer Communications Management (CCM) solution that empowers business users and accelerates digitalization is recognized, the next critical consideration is selecting the appropriate platform. With cloud SaaS CCM increasingly growing in popularity, it is likely that you will be assessing different SaaS platform questions, and asking the question: Why should I consider Inspire Evolve over the competition?
Before identifying the ideal CCM solution, several key points should be considered:
• Inspire Evolve Accelerates Migration with AI: CCM implementation can be complex and time-consuming with certain vendors. As an example, a Tier 1 Insurance company in EMEA initiated its RFQ process for a new CCM platform back in 2016. After finalizing its vendor selection in 2018, the insurer started to upgrade its systems, and was ready to develop customer communications by 2019. It took three years to migrate 94% of their document volumes onto the target platform, and the platform version is now seven years old from when they initially began their project implementation. As a result, the client must now upgrade to the latest version and thoroughly test all their scripts to ensure compatibility. Inspire Evolve, however, automates migration with AI-driven technology (InspireXpress) that extracts templates, content, and logic from legacy systems to create new, optimized communication templates that are ready for use with only minor modification.
• Inspire Evolve Offers Seamless Upgrades: Quadient's Inspire Evolve platform is seamlessly upgraded every two months to deliver consistent innovation to our customers, while other platforms only upgrade every 18 to 36 months. With upgrades occurring seamlessly, there is no need for regression testing or change management. With Evolve, upgrades occur without any required IT oversight, so you're always using the latest technology and features.
• Inspire Evolve Supports Modularity: Inspire Evolve is the only solution in the market that has a complete suite of components to support the entire design to production communications lifecycle. The modular suite of components allows you to scale capabilities to your unique requirements, including support for high-volume, batch communications output.
Opting for a SaaS vendor like Quadient Evolve to support your customer communications management offers not only a future-proof solution with continuous upgrades, but a way to free your critical IT resource to focus on other enterprise initiatives. Given that SaaS has now reached a level of parity, or even superiority compared to other software, we encourage you to consider Inspire Evolve as a competitive SaaS choice.
To help you select a SaaS CCM platform that's right for your business, Quadient has developed a SaaS CCM Compatibility Checklist.
Make the shift from legacy to cloud SaaS CCM with confidence: Download SaaS CCM Buyer's Checklist
