Customer Communication Management

Customer Communications is defined as any document, whether electronically transmitted or mailed, sent by a company to a single individual and any relevant third parties. Strategies must address not only the communications policies but constantly changing technology as well.
Customer Communication Management is defined as the seamless integration of accurate data, customized documents and multi-channel delivery with other key internal business processes.

The real challenge lies in matching complex customer service expectations with the required technology.
Some of the prominent issues troubling the organizations in this regard are:
• Being excessively concerned with meeting customer service expectations
• Customers being put off by a firm’s inability to respond accurately on demand
• Senior executive agents, customer service reps, and call center managers being put off by an inability to quickly satisfy customer needs
• Technical inefficiencies frequently running rampant

To handle this, organizations need a system which should enable customer self-service with Web-based technology that creates customer communications in seconds, not days. It should also help eliminate call backs, reduce the overhead expenses necessitated by heavy call volume, and enhance cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. The system should also combine corporate transaction data with dynamic document templates to enable users to create and distribute personalized, one to-one customer communications via one or more channels including web, email, fax, print and archive. It should also provide cutting-edge technology, including low maintenance Web Services solutions, and integrate on demand customer communications with all of the line-of business applications such as CRM, ERP, claims, underwriting and customer service.
The system should also use charts, graphs, proportional fonts and color in one’s customer communications and be able to mirror his business processes allowing users to create a letter in one step, or several steps, depending on one’s needs; thereby providing greater accuracy, productivity and superior look and feel to the customer.
It is here that a Customer Communication Management system can make a difference.

CCM in Financial Services

For financial service providers, attracting and retaining customers has never been harder – or more important. In today’s increasingly competitive environment, sophisticated customers want personalized, comprehensive financial information they can use, when they want to use it and in a format that best suits their needs.

Today’s mass-affluent financial services clients want a unified view of all of their accounts and services from their financial advisors. From the customer’s point of view, this demand seems easy enough to fulfill, but it is daunting for corporations, especially when the information they need is spread across multiple disparate back-end systems.

Enabling corporations to develop effective, consolidated portfolio statements requires a highly sophisticated solution. Corporations need a desktop tool that allows them to access all of the latest data for a particular client and create a personalized, consolidated portfolio statement. The corporation needs to provide standardized templates with proper branding and regulatory languages, as well as the options and processes to support customization where needed.

The infrastructure required to support such a solution is complex. Financial services organizations need a solution that pulls customer data from the myriad back-office systems, and manages it in a format that allows rules-based decisions related to which types of personalized marketing are appropriate.

Finally, another goal of financial services organizations today is to deliver consistent data representations across multiple delivery channels, especially for their mass-affluent clients. With this in mind, printed documents delivered to clients should contain the same data that is delivered electronically through e-mail or web delivery. And documents delivered across any channel must be archived with proper version control and security.