Ensure Consistent Omnichannel Customer Communication with the Right Tools

The stakes have never been higher. In today’s business environment, companies must deliver a consistent and personalized omnichannel communication experience for their customers. Innovators like Amazon and Netflix have raised the bar on customer expectations by delivering custom-tailored experiences built on a scalable platform. Digital technologies have made it possible to operationalize the concept of “mass customization” around the customer experience.

The so-called “Amazon effect” goes far beyond the company’s impact on consumers’ buying habits. Today’s customers expect more. Overwhelmed with information, they want messages to be tailored to their individual needs, presenting them with relevant information and filtering out the rest. If companies get it wrong, it can lead to a drop-off in engagement, as today’s consumers are quick to ignore communications that they believe won’t be relevant to them.

An even worse scenario can arise from communications that are not appropriate to the target audience, misleading customers or leading to confusion. In this era of high expectations, one bad experience can result in a lost customer. Most business leaders understand this and are taking steps to manage omnichannel communication more effectively.

Create, centralize, and personalize

Omnichannel communication must be personalized, tailored to the unique needs of each customer and delivered through the right communication medium at the right time. However, a need for consistency, that is, effectively managing your brand identity, communicating product positioning with one voice, and addressing legal and compliance requirements in the process is also of utmost importance for brands.

Managing all of that becomes even more challenging as the business evolves, the product line changes, and as the brand voice grows to meet the changing needs of your target audience. Legal requirements make it necessary to update communication templates on a fairly routine basis. If communication templates could remain frozen in time, then the process of managing this complexity might not be too overwhelming. But in a world where “the only thing constant is change” businesses must leverage technology that allows for a smarter way of working.

Let’s look at a few examples of the challenges business leaders face in creating a personalized customer experience.

Minor differences drive major complexity

A long-standing UK mutual society found that it was struggling to manage the documentation and letters it sent to its customers on a routine basis. Because each customer is unique, letters would need to be manually assembled using templated sections that were fitted together into a personalized communication. This could take up to as ten minutes for each individual letter, making it enormously expensive and inefficient. Hard-coded templates often required changes, but the process of executing those change requests could take as long as six months to complete.

For the mutual society, many of the changes to customer communications became necessary when a client moved from one product or service to another. Failing to accurately reflect the updated products could lead to confusion or otherwise reflect poorly on the mutual society.

Additionally, even minor changes in a company’s product line, or shifts in brand communication strategy necessitate many changes to the details within communication templates. Modifications to a brand’s logo, color palette, or tagline will affect virtually every template currently in use.

And as regulatory changes are enacted, companies often have no choice but to update their customer communication templates yet again. Indeed, there may be legal consequences if they do not do so promptly.

To deliver the right messages to the right customers without sacrificing efficiency, a better approach is required. EngageOne Compose from Precisely streamlines the process with a toolset for creating, centralizing, and personalizing customer communications. For the UK-based mutual society mentioned earlier, EngageOne Compose led to better, more consistent messaging, higher customer satisfaction scores, increased upsell opportunities, and much smoother compliance audits.

Messaging and the customer life cycle

To create a positive customer experience, it is also important that businesses tailor their messages to fit with each unique stage in the customer life cycle. As consumers, we are all familiar with the kind of “welcome” letters or e-mails that arrive shortly after our initial contact with a company. That’s common practice, and it helps to pave the way for a good start in the customer relationship.

Unfortunately, relatively few companies do a good job at delivering targeted, personalized messages at other times throughout the customer life cycle. By understanding a customer’s circumstances, including events that may trigger additional purchases or defection to a competitor, smart businesses can proactively reach out to upsell an existing client or guard against losing the customer’s business.

Precisely’s data enrichment and location intelligence products provide a window to the kinds of life events that may be relevant to virtually any business. An insurance company, for example, might benefit from knowing when a customer’s college-age children may be planning to buy their first car. An insurer who deals in both residential and business policies might want to know whether a customer with a homeowner’s policy recently started a small business.

By combining the power of data enrichment and location intelligence with EngageOne Compose, businesses can customize and fine-tune their communications to reach the right people with the right messages at the right time.

EngageOne Compose enables a unified approach to omnichannel communication for vastly increased efficiency and accuracy, improved customer satisfaction, and better compliance. Precisely can help you identify revenue opportunities that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, identifying upsell opportunities and preventing the defection of existing customers to the competition.

Read our white paper for an in-depth review of four common-sense strategies to help you overcome common obstacles to digital transformation.