How technology advancement can help businesses lead effective customer communication?

The average human attention span is decreasing. What this implies is that the opportunity window to engage with customers is getting narrower. So, how does an organisation engage with their customers and ensure that they are being heard?

How effective is your customer communication?

In today's digital world, customers ubiquitously consume content on YouTube, Facebook, Whats App, emails and other digital channels. Over the time, communication channels have evolved and so have customers' needs. These tech-savvy customers look for instant results and real-time responses. To cater to the increasing needs of the customers and get their attention has become quite a challenge for businesses.

Organisations have a great opportunity to engage with customers through the communications they deliver. These communications range from welcome letters, bills, statements, policies, and acknowledgement letters to various marketing mailers, allowing businesses to reach, acquire and retain customers, and grow their share of wallet. However, the key is to know the context of customers and engage them through their preferred communication channel.

Customer Communication Management system to rescue

Customer Communication Management (CCM) systems have been around for quite some time now. The systems have helped businesses across industries to deliver consistent, timely and accurate communications across multiple channels. As organisations battle with the depleting attention spans, these systems can come to their rescue.

With the right CCM system in place, organisations can streamline their communications across the customer life cycle and earn customer loyalty.

Here's how:

Reaching Out to Customers: Communications should be designed keeping customers' preferences in mind, addressing their needs. For a customer to click and read a communication, it has to be well-designed with highly targeted messaging. CCM offers inbuilt template library with multiple templates to choose from, allowing businesses to design creative communications for marketing campaigns, direct mailers, and proposals, there by helping organizations reach customers effectively.

Acquiring New Customers: To acquire new customers, organizations need to cast their net wider. With CCM systems supporting multiple communication channels, such as web, email, print, SMS and social media, interacting with customers through their preferred channel becomes easy. Further, with CCM’s capability to customize messaging based on customers' profile and preferences create a win-win situation for businesses, enabling them to leave a lasting impression on customers.

Retaining and Engaging Customers: Engaging customers to gain their mind share and retain them is an important step in the customer life cycle. The key here is to know the context of your customers. Leveraging CCM, organizations can configure and personalize communications based on customers’ purchasing pattern, recent account transactions and other activities performed. Further, the system ensures timely, consistent and secure communication delivery with security features such as password protected PDFs, data masking, encryption, digital signatures, and extensive tracking capabilities, enhancing the customer experience.

Growing Customers' Share of Wallet: Transactional documents such as bills, policies, and others, which are sent at regular intervals, offer an opportunity to cross and up-sell products or services. By presenting targeted offers, promotions and loyalty programs through these communications, businesses can leverage untapped opportunities and increase their share of wallet. CCM, in this case, helps by analysing customer demographics and suggests the best suitable offers for promotion.

Organisations are striving hard to get their customers' attention. To cater to customers, overwhelmed with marketing information, businesses need to deliver the right message in the right context at the right time and through the right communication channel. Leveraging a robust CCM system, businesses cannot only get more eyeballs but also tap customers' mind share and share of wallet.

—by Mr Virender Jeet, Sr Vice President, Technology, Newgen Software Technologies Limited.

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