No matter what industry you work in: Finance, Banking, Insurance, Healthcare, Public Sector etc. , customer interactions matter. They help companies, like yours, to get a better understanding of customers, their buyer’s journey and their needs. Effective Customer Communications Management products help enterprise businesses to turn everyday correspondence into a long-term relationship. Signs your Customer Communications Management product is no longer doing it’s job:
1. No product releases, features or new functionality
Your enterprise company invested in Customer Communications Management (CCM) products in first place because you understood that you need a set of information technologies to deliver professional, high quality customer correspondence at high volumes quickly and easily.
Time changes and so do your customers expectations.The times of cold communication through boring black-white paper bills and statement, which included confusing, irrelevant, or even incorrect messages are over. Nowadays customers want to have the possibility to chose the communication channel through which they will be contacted with personalized messages which meet their expectations. If your company isn’t able to deliver customer correspondence how, when and where they want, you will lose them.
CCM products need always be up-to-date. Serious provider of CCM products for enterprise companies understand how import it is for your company to always have a strong and reliable tool, which is being maintenanced and which often launches new features, so the product functionality grows horizontal.
If the last released feature of your CCM product is more than 3 years old, you connect with customers,which expectation on quality communications always grows, with outdated tools. If your software provider isn’t developing new versions of the product it might mean, that your legacy system is going out of life. In this case you pay maintenance every year for nothing and your product is no longer doing it’s job.
2. Document generation is complicated and takes too much time
Do your employee waste countless hours on document generation for every delivery channel separately? Do you know what it’s like when documents delivered through different communication channels don’t look the same? Do only employee with IT knowledge know how to generate customer correspondence with your complex CCM product?
Up-to-date CCM products generate documents at high volumes based on pre-approved templates. This way they make sure that your customers always receive highly professional documents on a regular basis and document generation doesn’t take much time. They also offer a user friendly interface. This way single non IT departments are able to create and deliver the needed documents on an as needed basis.
Why this should be important to your company? Because time plays an important role in effective customer communication. A longer response lowers your chance on getting a satisfied customer, or ending the deal successfully. If your competitor responses to this person sooner, you might lose him. If any of these situations describe your company’s working practice, you need to know, that your CCM product is no longer doing it’s job.
3. Omnichannel document delivery is impossible
Today’s customers access their correspondence through different media channels including the traditional ones (print, fax, mail, archive) and the modern ones (email, web, sms, social media). Most of them prefer using tablets, desktops and smartphones to review the e-correspondence. Giving them the possibility to choose the prefered customer communication channels is an example of a reliable and seamless CCM product.
If your CCM product does not allow you to connect with your customers through one of the modern communication channels, or if the omnichannel delivery process is complicated and not effective, your CCM product it’s no longer doing it’s job.
4. The CCM product isn’t what you bought anymore
It often happens that CCM product provider tend to grow, and start buying off competitors solutions. They end up having two different products which have very similar functionality and try to combine them. Then comes a new product release, which includes parts of both solutions. And most of the time this combination isn’t user friendly or cost-effective and doesn’t work as expected. What does this means for your company? Most likely you are going to have to pay for a lot of technical support hours. If your current CCM product is the result of combination of two or more products, isn’t practical and easy-to-use anymore, then it’s no longer doing it’s job.
5. Integration complication
There are many legacy CCM products which require you to transform the company’s data into an XML file before the document generation job can begin. This transformation wastes time and resources. Modern CCM products can work with any data formats and don’t require any manual transformations. They work automatically and are able to deliver customer correspondence 24/7. If your employee still spend hours on extracting, transforming and loading huge amounts of data, which is very complicated, takes time and wastes valuable resources, your CCM product is no longer doing it’s job.
If any of these signs appear in your companies working practice, you should understand that you’re working with an end-of-life legacy product, which is not only not effective, but wastes unnecessary time and resources.