Times of economic uncertainty challenge organizations and their leaders to respond swiftly, but in a measured fashion. Decreased revenue and an unknown future can prompt these organizations to consider deep cuts to budgets across the board. But indiscriminately cutting costs can hinder any organizations’ graceful recovery from turbulence.
In a recent chat on LinkedIn, Customer Communication Management (CCM) consultants Mia Papanicolaou and Elizabeth Stephen made the case for careful investment in technology during economic downturns. They pointed to an article in Harvard Business Review that explores why organizations that succeed during times of recession are those that invest in technology during the downturn rather than cut costs.
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Consider Outsourcing For Cost Savings and Improved Customer Experience
Economic upheaval often forces organizations to pull back on growth plans and take a good look at fundamentals. By using this time to invest in partnerships that will allow your organization to scale up rapidly, you can emerge from an economic slowdown positioned for lasting success.
In the case of Customer Communication Management (CCM), organizations often leverage a patchwork of products and services in order to manage communications including print, pdf, html, text, and video. This approach is not only inefficient, but it can also result in a disjointed and impersonal experience for customers, who receive frustratingly inconsistent messaging across channels.
Today, digital communications outsourcing is growing at an 8.9% CAGR, as companies look for ways to leverage the latest technology, while cutting costs and improving security and compliance.
By selecting an experienced vendor that takes a platform approach to delivering a personalized experience in the customer’s channel of choice, your organization can deliver a personalized and consistent customer experience across all channels – an approach that is critical for driving engagement, retention and ultimately increasing revenue.
To maximize these benefits, choose a vendor that offers expert services like customer communication journey mapping, to get the most out of your CCM investment. And be sure that your CCM vendor offers flexible solutions, so you can scale up your communications as the market offers you new opportunities.
Invest in Technologies and Services that Reduce Costs
Refreshing your organization’s communication strategy during a quiet period doesn’t end with a vendor review. For best results, you also need to consider the communications themselves – what it costs to deliver them, how well they perform, and what unexplored potential they may have to boost customer experience.
Regardless of broader economic conditions, organizations like yours in regulated industries are still obligated to deliver transactional documents to customers in a timely and consistent fashion. So it just makes sense to make sure every communication you send is giving you the best possible return on investment.
Shifting to a digital-first, cloud-based omnichannel CCM solution with expert support can reduce costs associated with composing and delivering transactional documents in many ways, including:
By encouraging digital document adoption, you drive down costs by eliminating postage and increase online customer engagement.
By enhancing document design, you increase comprehension and reduce costly call center inquiries.
By outsourcing to a vendor that operates, facilities for those documents you must provide on paper, you reduce operational and personnel costs, experience economies of scale and ensure access to the most advanced print technology.
By integrating payment options right into your digital documents, you make immediate payment accessible and appealing, shortening your revenue cycle.
But there are benefits to CCM beyond cost-cutting and revenue optimization, which can help you maintain your customer base, cross-sell and upsell efficiently, and future-proof your organization as well.
Refresh Your Organization’s Transactional Communications to Improve Loyalty and Sell Cost-Effectively
Transactional documents are unique. They are the one type of communication you send out on a regular basis that achieves a 95% open rate with customers, who typically spend 1-3 minutes reading each one.
By switching to fully interactive digital transactional documents, you can take advantage of your customer’s high engagement level by presenting them with rich, interactive options like 1:1 personalized product offers, document explainer videos, and immediate payment options.
By taking full advantage of interactive document capabilities, you can use the documents you are required to provide, to meet business goals like increasing cross-sell and upsell, improving time-to-payment, and building loyalty and engagement.
The Time is Always Right to Invest in Omnichannel Technology
Most organizations today are focused on ways to enhance customer experience, but in many cases they overlook a tremendous opportunity to fully leverage the critical transactional communications they are already sending to enhance the customer experience and boost customer loyalty.
Regardless of macroeconomic factors, enhancing customer communications usually leads to increased revenue and CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), which are critical metrics for any organization. This means that the time is always right to evaluate how well your customer communications are performing, and to explore how the right Customer Communications Management partnership and technology stack can make a difference for your organization and your valued customers.
About Doxim CCM
Doxim’s Customer Communications Platform (CCM) platform enables organizations across various industries to improve CX, increase CLV, and boost operational efficiency. With our CCM expertise across digital and print, Doxim will manage your complex data, eliminate the need for you to support disparate systems and manage multiple vendors, so you can focus on optimizing your communication touchpoints and winning the battle for the customer.
