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Customized Communications: Closing the Gap between Your Business and Your Customers
June 09, 2008
By Chris Stone
Attracting and retaining customers has never been more important to a company's bottom line and overall financial health, particularly in today's challenging economic climate. To date, companies have spent a fortune on CRM implementations in an attempt to provide a better customer experience, but these systems are not able to automate the numerous customer touch points in a consistent manner—one that's capable of leveraging and protecting their brand and providing a truly unique and informed customer experience. It's a missed opportunity and one that organizations are desperate to resolve.
Technology's Benefits and Challenges
While companies now understand the benefits of a technology platform that addresses these issues, they also realize that the endeavor often involves a number of challenges including managing the many sources and formats of input such as enterprise data and content; and the many formats and channels of output. Organizations want a platform that allows their business users to publish relevant and highly personalized content, leverage existing technology and employee skills and manage all customer communications—regardless of channel—so they can avoid involving their already over-worked IT team.
Fundamentally, companies understand that in order to increase operational efficiencies they must minimize the time it takes their business managers to act upon these ideas and get them in play with customers in a way that is meaningful and relevant. But, more specifically, they seek a solution that can addresses the particular needs of communication-intensive business units—such as marketing, legal and call centers while enabling the delivery of customized messages across a multitude of channels in both high-volume and ad-hoc scenarios.
Customer's expectations have grown to the point that they expect organizations to speak to them at "the audience of one" level and convey high quality communications at each and every touch-point. Companies like Amazon have excelled in personalizing the customer experience to the point that customers are now asking themselves, "If they can do it, why can't you?"
Transforming to Transpromo
Solutions such as dynamic enterprise publishing—or transpromotional marketing—are earning a seat at the table for many organizations. These strategies enable comapnies to reduce costs and to increase revenue-enhancing activities by centering on interactive content with proactive marketing. More specifically, it allows an organization to maximize document white space, manage and fully leverage multi-channel distribution and combine content from multiple sources while creating interactive two way communications. Many multinational companies are now looking to deliver personalized and customized customer communications a process known in the analyst community as "transpromo."
Forrester Research analyst Craig Le Clair defines transpromotional solutions as a growing segment that combines transactional and promotional content in order to leverage predictable and long-term customer communications. Put simply, transpromo documents place marketing messages on transactional statements, which makes it more likely a customer will see the promotions because roughly 95% of people open and look at their bills and statements. Considering most direct marketers strive for a 5% conversion rate from unsolicited mailings, communicating to customers on statements increases that number to an almost perfect 100% open rate.
And the adoption rate is soaring. Customers are adopting transpromo solutions as a way to make static documents relevant and dynamic. Organizations, driven by the opportunity to provide better up-sell and cross-sell initiatives and streamline operations, are also adopting transpromo solutions at an impressive rate. In fact, transpromo solutions are one of the few applications that are expected to be immune from the economic downturn and technology cut-backs that analysts are predicting for the remainder of 2008.
Closing the Gap
As organizations look for ways to bolster their CRM and loyalty initiatives, many now recognize a need to bridge the gap between its employees and its customers. According to industry pundits, every 1% drop in operational costs will contribute an extra 1% to an organization's over-all profitability. According to Melissa Webster, an IDC analyst and program vice president for Content and Digital Media Technologies, "Companies today are focused on engaging their customers in order to increase customer loyalty and the commitment to the brand. We are seeing a tremendous opportunity for companies to leverage a dynamic enterprise publishing platform to create an electronic conversation with the customer—essentially, to enable sophisticated mass-personalized customer interactions."
But despite the recognized benefits of more effective 1-to-1 communications, the harsh reality is most business managers are separated from customers because of their inability to respond in a timely manner. For example, a marketing vice president may be responsible for creating the latest new product plan and for directing the content development, but they are expected to hand off the actual implementation to other support resources. Depending on workloads, support expertise and the complexity of the enterprise's infrastructure and business practices, getting new or changed business communications strategies and materials into play can face serious delays and multiple revisions and approval cycles.
Apart from constraining the enterprise's ability to engage in a timely and relevant way, existing processes are responsible for non-revenue generating efforts—resulting in lowered productivity and increased costs. Instead of requiring business managers to hand off routine implementations to other team members, organizations are adopting enterprise-wide correspondence management environments that enable all lines of business users to directly create and launch personalized content while maintaining all necessary rules that govern its use such as approvals, roles and stylistic requirements. By leveraging correspondence management, companies can simultaneously cut the time-to-market for new and revised customer communications, simplify the workflow process and reduce the involvement of the IT staff. With more personalized and dynamic communications, enterprises can ensure that their document contributions—from customer letters and statements to notices and claims forms—are accurate and current. Because content revisions take effect immediately, organizations can enhance customer communications while improving business processes which result in speeding time-to-market and reducing the risk of outdated or incorrect content.
Creating Better Relationships…One Communication at a Time
While every company understands the need to manage its own customer-related content, each company also needs to take into consideration its unique set of circumstances, infrastructures, and organizational considerations. The best way to maximize the benefits from a correspondence management or transpromo solution is to identify the right capabilities and configurations based on how developed an organization's current infrastructure and processes are now and where they'd like their future channels and output devices to be in the future.
The true power and ultimate value of transpromo is its ability to integrate and manage communications across all channels to generate a unified and meaningful customer experience that meets regulation requirements. By creating a consolidated enterprise strategy that supports reusable content, organizations can achieve a meaningful customer relationship that translates into long term loyally and improved profitability across the enterprise. While streamlined processes and simplified support and infrastructure reduce operational costs, faster time to market, quicker response to changing conditions, and finer control of customer communications all increase revenue opportunities. Not a bad conversion rate considering today's economy.
Chris Stone, is president and CEO of StreamServe, a global leader in dynamic document composition, management and delivery solutions. For more information, contact the author at chris.stone@streamserve.com or visit www.streamserve.com.
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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