Regulated customer communications have always been critical in verticals such as healthcare, insurance, and financial services. But since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, you’ve needed to reimagine communications as digital experiences. Businesses from retail to restaurants have made the switch from in-person to online—and consumers now expect every industry to offer seamless experiences across devices while allowing them to control the ways you communicate.
That’s tough in industries that have been mired in print communications and required to produce them to meet security, privacy, and regulatory requirements. But the recent digital acceleration makes it imperative to shrug off legacy customer communications management (CCM) systems in favor of new technologies. That’s driven by external drivers like superior customer experiences but also internal needs for growth and better employee experiences as well.
That’s the subject of a recent report entitled “Next-Gen Correspondence: Developing More Meaningful and Profitable Relationships with Customers” from Kaspar Roos and Will Morgan of Aspire Customer Communications Services. The report explains how you can overhaul and upgrade your communications to use new digital channels and develop deeper and more rewarding relationships that satisfy customers and keep them loyal.
A survey of 300 American businesses in July 2020 determined that nearly all identified customer retention as their top priority, an increase of more than 20% post-COVID. At the same time, the priority of digital transformation increased 35% and omni-channel communications rose almost 20%.
The response to the pandemic is a shift from acquiring customers to keeping them with superior digital interactions. Businesses are starting by reallocating marketing dollars to communications. That’s a smart move given that a majority of consumers chose to conduct transactions like bill payments and check deposits digitally for the first time in response to the pandemic. Consumers predict that two-thirds of their transactional communications will be exclusively digital by 2022. This digital acceleration has meant enterprises that traditionally overestimated their digitization rates have now exceeded their projections.
Meeting consumer expectations today requires modernizing your IT infrastructure. You can do that by migrating from legacy or home-grown solutions or upgrading outdated CCM solutions—or both. The shortcomings of existing solutions make it difficult to scale, deliver omni-channel communications, support personalization, make changes quickly and cost-effectively, and ensure compliance.
Next-gen CCMs alleviate many of these issues, especially those based on the cloud. You can run them as stand-alone solutions or as part of a business process. Extensive features let you tailor software to support industry- or customer-specific needs, personalize at scale, support artificial intelligence and machine learning to speed processing and boost quality, deliver output on many channels, track and store every interaction, and enable a good user experience.
Digital communications today still look like electronic versions of static documents. Few companies take advantage of digital’s interactive elements, but younger consumers in particular want bi-directional interaction in real time, say Roos and Morgan.
“Email is seen as a broken channel and won’t be able to fulfill this need. Emerging mediums like rich communications services (RCS), WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger do show promise, however, their lack of tracking and document management may make them less suitable. Increasing adoption of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will power chatbots and other voice technology while portals may be supplemented by intelligent channels that allow customers to retrieve correspondence in easier ways.”
—Kaspar Roos and Will Morgan
Gen Z and Millennials, the wealthy, the tech savvy, and the COVID-wary will do whatever it takes for exceptional communications, including switching providers and paying more. That makes it imperative even for regulated industries to deliver relevant, personalized, and consistent communications wherever consumers want to receive them.
Learn more in “Next-Gen Correspondence: Developing More Meaningful and Profitable Relationships with Customers.”