Building customer confidence

Opinion 2010-03-19 09:39

Companies that can quickly deliver personalised, relevant content using the channel that customers prefer — whether print, email, web, mobile or social networks — can capture greater loyalty and reduce the chance that customers will take their business elsewhere.

Once upon a time ... there was print, and the telephone. Now, customer relationships must be managed over an increasingly diverse range of communication channels, with mobile internet and social media being the latest additions.

For many organisations, just providing personalised communications using print media has been challenging enough. Ironically, while personalised print has been around for many years, interest in what is now called TransPromo (using transactional documents for marketing and promotional purposes) has peaked in recent times as print industry feels the impact of substitution from electronic channels and looks to exploit the potential of digital printing.

The advent of the internet brought the on-line channel, and mobile phones introduced SMS messaging. And now, with the real-time web, social media, smart phones and 3G+ mobile networks, there are a wide range of potential customer touch-points, each with their own nuances, user interaction characteristics and possibilities. Strategies must be expanded to incorporate social media, mobility, and markedly different consumer cultures.

The challenge with multi-channel is not the growing number of channels per se, but the fact that the interactions must be managed across all channels, and that interactive real-time channels change the dynamics of customer communications.

Maintaining context

Without context, the immediacy and relevance of dynamic communications is lost. As the level of personalisation in customer communications increases, so does the risk of losing customer confidence if it is not done right.

To maintain context, it’s not enough to manage a single-customer view of enterprise data. It’s also necessary to maintain a single customer view across all communication channels and communication history. This customer-centric view is key to any effective CRM strategy. It has major implications for the way communications (and campaigns) are developed and managed across the enterprise.

As communications move toward being conversations, context becomes critically important. The theme of “customer conversations” has been talked about for some years, but the immediacy that characterises digital touch-points such as mobile and social media demands a conversation. So does the shift in the balance of power, away from marketing toward the customer, whose attention must be earned through conversation.

With the right approach, personalised multi-channel communications can be the cornerstone of a strategy to drive growth through customer retention and customer advocacy. Insurers should be developing their customer communications capabilities and platforms as a key element of their business strategy.