Customer Communications: Removing the Risk

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Meeting the Challenges of Legacy Technologies and Processes

Communications are a key element in delivering a superior customer experience. But they can also keep your management up at night given the countless risks associated with them.

There are several categories of risks associated with communications that every organization needs to address: compliance, inaccurate content and customer satisfaction.

All may have serious consequences, including financial implications. For example, “out-of-compliance” communications may result in fines, inaccurate content may lead to overpayments or lawsuits and irrelevant and untimely communications may result in lost customers.

To understand how to mitigate these risks, we must first identify the underlying causes that trigger the problem areas.

Communications may be non-compliant due to timing issues (i.e., late responses), improper formatting or incorrect or missing content or attachments.

Inaccurate content may be due to poor-quality data, layout and graphics or faulty logic that triggers incorrect inclusion of data.

The main culprit that leads to all these risks lies in old, legacy communication technologies and processes that have not kept pace with your business needs.

Addressing the Risks

Modern customer communications solutions can help to address many of the underlying risks associated with your communications:

  1. Personalization and customization – a composition engine that enables the merging of variable data with rules logic, and supports interactive communications that can be created in real time by customer-facing users.
  2. Component management – the ability to track text objects (e.g., paragraphs), graphic elements (e.g., logos), e-signatures or other objects.
  3. Version control – the authorization and workflows to manage individual components as well as templates and final communication versions.
  4. Template management – the ability to “lock down” certain graphics or text components within a particular template.
  5. Delivery tracking – recording when specific print or electronic communications were sent and received.

Establish a Cross-Functional Communications Team

A key best practice that many organizations are beginning to implement is the establishment of an executive-sponsored, cross-functional team responsible for all customer communications.

This group monitors all customer communications for every department across the enterprise. Their charter is to ensure brand consistency, accurate communications, compliance and overall excellence in customer communications.

Modern customer communications solutions along with this organizational construct will go a long way to help remove the risk in your communications.

 

 

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