If the last few months have proved anything to the financial, healthcare and state sectors, it’s that digital and remote interactions between organisations and their customers are hugely important. That’s a fact that’s been highlighted, of course, by the complete absence of in-person interactions right across the world.

But in areas of commerce that rely on person-to-person interactions at what are often delicate and personal moments, getting communications right is critical.

Companies and organisations from the largest agencies through to the smallest specialist insurer have worked — often for years — to build up a market “persona”, a set of core values between themselves and their customers that represents them at their best. And the challenge over the last few months has been to keep a personalised experience maintained, presenting the company as it truly is, despite extraordinary circumstances.

As for new customers, getting a coherent and helpful set of messages over to people experiencing lockdown, shielding and difficult circumstances is, to say the least, a challenge. But some organisations managed to achieve at least business stability, and in some cases, managed to get their customer communications management strategies just right — even to the extent of achieving a growth in customer numbers. That was achieved by careful deployment of CCM (customer communication management) platforms. The new generation of this specialist technology supplies just the types of tailored communications that not only support existing customer bases but are capable of onboarding new prospects. And in both cases, that’s done by portraying the company’s core values in the best way.

At Tech Wire Asia, we strive to maintain a global view of key markets, and it’s here that our oversight can showcase some CCM solutions that are major players in other geographies outside the APAC region.

One such is Cincom, a company whose Eloquence CCM platform is already the de facto choice for hundreds of organisations and commercial businesses across North America and Europe, companies which rely on fast, accurate and hyper-personalised messaging for their customer bases. By integrating with core administrative technology systems already in place, and placing the communications framework in the hands of the experts already in the enterprise, they are delivering new standards of service to their chosen markets.

Using the expertise you have

To realise the technology’s benefits (we cover just a few of those benefits below), any customer communications system must be run and managed by the people at the core of the business: line-of-business professionals whose bread and butter is the day-to-day running of the organisation. These are the people who represent a significant investment to the company and are the in-house experts whose knowledge can be leveraged to everyone’s advantage.

It makes sense to place the tools and facilities in the hands of the experts organisations already have on board. So, rather than push the oversight of customer communications technology to the IT professionals (who have had their own challenges over the last few months), equipping the experts with the right tools has to be a sensible decision. That means the environments on which teams are already fluent should also be those where communications strategies should be planned and executed. By placing powerful systems alongside existing tools (like Microsoft Office, SAP, Oracle, DocuSign and Salesforce) and using the same methodologies, the line-of-business professionals can leverage the power at hand quickly, easily and at scale.

Employees can pull together letters, emails, SMS, faxes and electronic documents from on-brand templates and template elements. Personalised messages in multiple formats all get created and managed from one place. Quickly, teams will develop their pools of resources held in the Eloquence CCM platform, from which they push out carefully-tailored messages to defined subsets of customers or prospects.

Keeping the balance and getting ahead

As companies and organisations come out of what’s been probably the most difficult period in their histories, it’s more important than ever that the messages placed in the hands of customers portray the core values of the sender. That means a baseline level of excellence founded on high service levels, fast response times, and accurate, personalised, relevant data.

By pulling in information from all available sources (existing service-oriented architectures, for example), existing customers and clients will continue to be offered excellence, with new product offers and potential improvements to what they might receive. As reputations grow, and with the help of integrated data flows from existing technology, new lines of business will bring new customers.

With scale come challenges, and maintaining a focus on the customer used to get more difficult – often to the point of unmanageability. But the latest generation of CCM systems means that the right message, created by the right people in the organisation will reach the end-users, quickly. Companies will find that savings from reduced printing costs will accrue, as will customer satisfaction metrics. By combining different communication channels (including SMS, fax, email, letter and so on), customers’ personal preferences can continue to be honoured, and the organisation’s values maintained.

Technology need not be the chosen weapon of faceless institutions determined that one size should fit all. With the best that this new generation of services has to offer, personalised, multi-channel communications are helping organisations support and inform their customers, and allowing company values to translate into messages that matter.

To learn more about this rapidly-developing sector in business technology, keep coming back for more features about customer communications management, or check out Cincom Eloquence for the detail you’ll need to explore further.