Customer acquisition costs are always higher than servicing costs — it costs on average five times more to acquire a new customer to maintain an existing one. Companies that gain new customers only to lose a competitor are wasting money and undermining their long-term growth.
Fortunately, data companies capture information about their customers (such as age, homeowner, family size) that allows them to understand their customers’ desires and needs. For a young couple, for example, those requirements may be a down payment or home equity line credit in the first home instead of a college savings account or retirement fund.
When a company understands the specific needs of its customers, when it provides meaningful products and services, when customers feel that they are relevant, it improves the customer’s “stickiness”. In contrast, studies show that 43% of consumers opt out of email marketing because the content is not relevant. CCM Solutions allows companies to collect customer preferences for language, reminders, digital vs paper, etc., using live conversations or asking directly what customers are interested in using the customer self-service portal.
Retention is important but improves revenue. There are many ways to increase revenue from customer communication management. First, by increasing revenue through the sale and sale of products and services. Data from each communication touchpoint can be analyzed in conjunction with existing customer data to reveal more possibilities to resell or sell to customers.
The other is the acceleration of current revenue flows. For example, when patients are confused with medical provider bills, it slows down the payment cycle. A CCM solution that uses the best practices to implement clear-cut statements optimally reduces day sales (DSO).
Components of CCM solution
Information management. It all starts with the data. Companies keep huge amounts of customer data, which are usually stored in different types of databases. Companies can also collect customer data (name, physical and email addresses, phone numbers), sensitive data to be stored (such as passwords and social security numbers) and transaction data (such as opening date, balances, purchased items) and social media and third-party sources Use structured data from streams. A CCM solution takes this information from a variety of sources and generalizes it to a standard data model.
Content bibliography: The content manager is another component to control message, content, and business rules. Content is managed by users and contains assets such as variable content that can be placed in whitespace zones on company logos and documents. All data maintained through the change control auditing and approval activity is stored in the Central Data Store.
Priority management: Companies usually have some information priority information for internal use, for example, in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. However, a CCM platform not only contains information such as phone numbers, consents, and language preferences but also allows users to update them when their preferences change.
Communication design composition: It is the actual information compilation process that combines customer data, templates, graphic assets, and delivery preferences to create a communication touchpoint. For some types of communication, there may be additional processing, such as adding barcodes to printed mailing. Communication Touchpoints must be logged in and archived for auditing and re-creation.
Communication Archive: In addition to the data collected and archived for each communication, a CCM system must log important delivery data such as the date and time of shipment. These are required for regulatory consent to prove that communications were sent. The customer service representative is required to search the archive online, they must answer customer questions and return communications. It is also used to place PDF versions of communications in the customer portal. The archive also captures metadata on email openings and interactions such as click-throughs that can be used to optimize communications.
Reporting Features: For CCM, reporting involves analyzes to measure the effectiveness of each communication. It includes status reporting on every communication and regulatory audit and should have the ability to generate provisional reports beyond standard activity reports.
Why not build your own customer communications management solution?
Most companies believe that they can build their solution faster and at a lower cost than a third-party CCM solution. At first glance, this makes sense. Internal teams understand their data assets and their process flows to implement customized communications for their specific needs. They may already license the composition software and may also maintain their printing facilities.
But building a positive solution is not always the best decision. Companies that want to implement a native customer communication application face several challenges, starting with large-scale data integration requirements. CCM solutions run on customer data and that data is stored in many, landfill data sources. This is a huge task to access and generalize to incorporate into the CCM system. Most companies trying to design their solution do not skip this first step of integrating data from different data sources.
Another approach is to purchase different CCM components and then integrate them with existing systems. However, significant CAPEX investment is required to purchase different point solutions, to integrate them with existing systems, and then pay the licensing costs and keep each solution up to date.
Estimates of customer communications and the technology that supports them have changed a lot in the last five years. Continuous investment is required to stay afloat. A company does not implement its solution as the seller’s CCM solution. There is an opportunity cost to dedicate resources to the internal solution, which deviates from their many other programs. And building a uniquely customized solution often comes with flexibility in the app — for example, changing print service providers after merging or onboarding other business lines.
Another problem is that IT-built solutions are IT-based. However, customer message and content control should not be busy and within the purview of the high-cost IT department. Business owners and subject matter professionals should have these systems designed to enable end-users to compose and execute communications.
Finally, most companies do not work with communication professionals. As a result, the native CCM solution leaves the best practices. In comparison, the CCM solution from an established vendor is sophisticated and designed to follow best practices. It can be customized and run faster and requires less support from IT. It also simplifies the company’s tech stock — eliminating the need for point solutions that require support from ongoing licensing and technical staff.
Advantages of Hosted Managed Services for CCM
Over the past five years, it has changed how we communicate with each other. And the Kovid world we live in now has increased consumer demand for digital self-service options and the ability to execute growing transactions online. This puts pressure on companies to expand their digital capabilities and allow a greater number of channels to engage.
Climbing new customers onto old customers and building infrastructure will lead to high customer growth and adversely affect long-term growth. Companies that still rely on legacy technology platforms will undoubtedly lose this mark and lose customers to their more forward-thinking competitors. High-cost solutions with long implementation timelines cause them to fall further behind the competition, not properly create a customer experience and lead to validation.
By equipping customer communication management with a hosted managed services model, a company can avoid the large capital investment and multi-year timeframes required for IT projects, replacing it with a full OPEX model that covers investment with cost savings. CCM-hosted management services combine the best practices from years of industry experience on an integrated technology platform configured to meet the company’s strategic goals.
What if you could improve your customer experience to increase revenue, reduce risk and increase retention and protect your investment in customer acquisition? What if you could realize the cost reductions that technology bears?
