CCM can help you “go green”!
CCM is the integrated set of solutions to design, deploy, deliver and manage interactions with customers across your business. CCM software systems provide a platform for the many types of correspondence and conversations that take place between the organization and the customer through many channels and devices.
CCM software supports content types such as letters, invoices, correspondence, marketing materials, policies, statements and welcome kits. To make understanding easier, we have divided communications use cases into structured, interactive and on-demand processes to help business-process pros like you get a better handle on your application needs: Structured processes run in batches, often in large volumes. Structured output is scheduled, consistently formatted and sent as part of a service relationship much like billing reminders, Summary of Benefits and Coverage (SBC) and policy renewals. Interactive processes marry custom content or data with a preset structure. Interactive processes require the human touch, often matching variable customer data with structured templates, providing a more personalized communication. Examples include customer correspondence, approvals/denials and notifications. On-demand processes are triggered by non-human events from the Web, fax, phone, email, transactional systems or enterprise applications. For instance, you visit a website and complete a form. A couple days later you receive a welcome kit complete with a personalized letter thanking you for completing the online form.
Addressing your critical business issues now!
Your business faces multiple issues every day, ranging from simple replacement of copy paper to retaining valuable customers. While some issues are trivial, others are highly significant—they determine whether your business succeeds or fails. These are the critical business issues; the top priorities of your company’s agenda that need to be addressed quickly because they directly impact your success. Most companies determine that they need a customer communication management (CCM) solution after they have identified an overarching critical business issue: poor communications are impacting customer satisfaction ratings. A simple example might be claims correspondence. Your claims representatives may have to “cut and paste” information from multiple applications into a word processor just to generate a claim letter. If they make a mistake, your customers, who are already stressed because it is a claim (and the ones completing your customer satisfaction surveys), will let you know by calling your contact center confused or worse, upset. You’ve just increased your risk, your costs and your productivity, and have put your customer relationship in jeopardy. A customer communication management solution can help make this much easier and error-free.
CCM can help improve your company’s image.
You only get one chance to make a first impression. In business, that impression is the overall customer experience. It’s made up of many individual experiences and encompasses all forms of communication, channels and parties—whether they are employees, business partners or automated systems that act on behalf of the organization.
While the product or service and the price are undoubtedly major factors that influence the attitude of the customer and that peace of mind, investment performance, legal compliance and financial hedging do shape the customer experience. Ultimately these attributes are manifested through a variety of interactions between the customer and the organization. The customer’s impression of your organization is created from a series of communications which ultimately form the sum total of their experience. That aggregate experience is instrumental in determining whether the customer will reorder and/or purchase additional products. And, in an increasingly competitive world where the cost of switching providers is falling, image is everything. The image your business portrays across every touch point is vital to boosting your rankings (e.g., J.D. Powers, HEDIS and customer satisfaction), building brand loyalty and attracting new customers. That’s why CCM needs to be priority number one.
Personalized and Consistent
CCM ensures consistency in all of your communications no matter how they are generated (batch or real time) or how they are delivered (print or electronic). CCM provides greater personalization and accuracy in your communications by using your business data to trigger communications that are tailored to each unique customer. Because we are talking automation, you can produce communications faster than by doing them manually and that means quicker response times that your customers will love.
CCM can help you leverage your existing investments!
Organizations have invested vast amounts of time, money and effort to implement transactional systems (e.g., care management and policy administration) that provide an internal record of customer relationship activities. They have invested even more on extending and strengthening these relationships through sales and marketing activities. Yet, organizations have invested comparatively little on what the customer actually sees—the communications! Communications are a vital link to your customers and a key component in your customer-care strategy. Given the competitive environment for your customers, you can’t afford generic or unspecific customer communications. And you need to be able to deliver communications through electronic channels: fax, e-mail, smartphones and the web; whatever it takes to manage the relationship on a one-to-one basis.
Optimize Legacy Investments
CCM helps you optimize enterprise-wide legacy investments by effortlessly integrating with core business applications, databases and information technology infrastructures. This means that CCM adapts to—not radically alters—your existing, mission-critical customer communications processes. This ease of integration is made possible through open, Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and field-proven technologies like XML and J2EE; which also means you don’t have to hire additional expertise just to get up and running. The result is rapid implementation and integration that delivers an equally rapid ROI. In fact, an ROI in less than six months isn’t outside the realm of possibility.
CCM can help you “go green”!
Even in this digital era, every organization still deals with vast mounds of paper. The concept of a paperless society has been around since the term was introduced in the mid-1970s. Since then, the options for communicating digitally have grown exponentially, and the green movement has added impetus to the paperless goal. Initially part of corporate social responsibility, greener applications are now being leveraged to drive cost savings and to achieve process optimization. Organizations are migrating processes such as payments, policy administration and bill/invoice generation to green applications. Despite key barriers—customer preference, government regulations, technology infrastructures and cultural resistance—the idea of the paperless customer experience is moving forward, and aggressively. CCM is helping drive the evolution toward the fully digital customer experience. Because it has traditionally involved significant paper usage, business communications have become the primary target for “green initiatives”—with CCM being the technology of choice.
Utilizing pre-approved document templates and direct data integration, CCM removes most of the time-consuming, error-prone, manual processes from the equation, allowing you to drastically reduce production times, production costs, errors and ultimately paper. CCM solutions also allow you to embed graphics, logos, address headers/footers, etc. directly into communications, which minimizes the need for pre-printed stationery and forms.
Compelling communications quickly and easily!
Designing complex, customized communications with both static and dynamic content that complies with regulatory requirements can be a significant challenge. Not to mention the long approval processes and time-consuming interactions between representatives, supervisors, IT personnel and customers. This often results in manual processes that lead to high risk, error-prone communications, slow response times and dissatisfied customers. Not a good thing. CCM can help your organization easily create sophisticated templates for all of your communications. Once developed and tested, communication templates are then stored in a central repository and become the basis for all personalized communications—from claim letters to highly customized policies involving barcodes, images and dynamic tables.
Communications in a variety of outputs and channels!
Customers today expect, no they demand, service through whatever communication channel happens to be most convenient for them at any given time. They may receive a letter, send an e-mail with a question about their letter and then follow up with a phone call or walk into an office. Organizations that don’t have a good strategy in place for dealing with these “channel-bouncing” customers won’t be able to service them effectively and will often wind up feeling the impact in their top line. CCM can help. CCM enables your organization to easily transition from paper-intensive printing and mailing to electronic generation and delivery, including email, fax, web and SMS/text. And, CCM gives you the flexibility to generate communications in real time at the point of need or deferring production to larger, more cost-effective runs.
Whatever fits your unique business needs!
If your organization is like most, you struggle with multiple, disparate communication systems that are old, hard to maintain, produce only one kind of output and make it difficult to deploy emerging applications. You probably have a dedicated system (or systems) just for generating structured communications (e.g., policies) produced in large print runs. You use a multitude of other applications, including Microsoft Word, and manual processes just to generate “ad hoc” communications (e.g., customer service letters). And, you probably have an entirely separate system to produce email communications. So many systems, so much effort, so little time. Yikes!
CCM provides you with options. CCM streamlines your IT infrastructure with a single solution that combines the flexibility to interactively produce highly personalized correspondence in real time, the power to generate structured documents in batch and the versatility to create dynamic communications on-demand. Rapid deployment across your organization is ensured via an open standards-based, service-oriented architecture (SOA) that optimizes infrastructure investments and provides efficient integrations.
Control of all your critical communications!
“Communications” means every document, every fax, every email and every text message your company generates in the course of doing business. “Control” is the combination of technology and strategies that lets you capture communications and content, then manage, store and deliver them in a way that keeps your business processes like claims processing, appeals and grievances and policy issuance moving forward. Simply put, you need to take control of communications and the associated content, and make sure it is available whenever and wherever it’s needed, so that your company can run more efficiently. CCM does just that. CCM helps you automatically store and index all of your generated communications based upon parameters you establish. Robust search and retrieval capabilities allow you to locate communications easily and effectively. And, it’s fully scalable from departmental applications to the management of all of your high-volume structured and unstructured content throughout the enterprise.
Here are just some of the ways your business will benefit from CCM!
Improve customer loyalty — Drive deeper personalization with real-time, data-driven logic that triggers content inclusion/exclusion in your communications.
Save time — Speed time-to-market by easily importing existing communication templates, including Microsoft Word-based documents.
Empower employees — Provide customer-facing employees with intuitive tools (via a standard browser) to produce and deliver ad hoc correspondence right at the point of need.
Ensure compliance — Improve compliance through a central repository containing templates with pre-approved content components (e.g., language, logos and signatures), data-driven logic and pre-configured workflows that easily guide the assembly and generation of communications.
Save money — Cut document costs by embedding graphics, logos, addresses and signatures directly into your communications.
Reduce errors — Eliminate errors associated with rekeying data by pre-populating communication workflows with data directly from existing core applications and databases.
Promote sustainability — Easily transition from paper-intensive communications to electronic, including email, fax and text/SMS.