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Winning Markets – How Customer Communications Management drives competitive advantage. October 18, 2008

Posted by Julian Bradder in Uncategorized.
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4 comments

I have already talked about the use of statements for cross selling purposes. Premise 1 is that by building on existing customer relationships, it is possible to enhance the value that customers can gain from your company by showing them relevant offers that encourage them to sign up for more of your companies products or services. Premise 2 is that for most businesses, the statement and its viewing forms one of the larger elements of the relationship between the two parties.

But think of the extra knowledge that additional sales brings about the customer. Every order that you receive from you customer gives you a greater level of knowledge about that customer, it enables you to further enhance your offers, perhaps with the advent of data modeling and advanced data management integrated with customer communications techniques even tailor offers on a one to one basis.

Another great by product of developing the relationship in this sophisticated manner is that each time that a customer extends their relationship with you, they move one step further away from you competitors. The philosophy of your company should be that more knowledge of that customer brings more opportunities with each interaction.

In the current information economy, knowledge is everything. The easier you make it for your customers to do business with you, the greater your understanding of them and they will enhance your ‘permission’ to extend their relationship with you.

We now have relative maturity in CRM (Customer Relationship Management) markets, the opportunity to enhance the CRM proposition as a result of the evolution of today’s suite’s of customer communications solutions renders us with tempting and powerful promises.

With pressure now upon companies to deliver more environmentally friendly ways of communicating with prospects and customers, the powerful features of  fully loaded customer communications management suites as offered by the likes of EMC Document Sciences,  HP Exstream, Pitney Bowes Group 1 and Xenos mean that companies have new ways to reach and develop the customer relationship.

For me, the challenge now seems to be achieving full integration between digital media channels as well as print. The rise of social networking and social media on the internet also seems like it is going to become an important marketing tool for companies.

I feel that currently the digital and traditional communication channels are in a state of early convergence. The recognition is there of the need to bring the platforms together, to create dynamic rapid communications with customers. It is almost like the old story of ERP leading to CRM which is similarly heading towards CCM.

I feel that the route to success in this lies in getting good solid data extraction and content management infrastructures in place. In parallel build a mail piece / document creation facility that is capbable of putting the power of communication in the hands of business users. Ensure open API’s in all that you purchase and make sure that content can be driven to your chosen ‘message distribution; platform easily and routinely. Strongly consider the benefit of a system that can exist in a service oriented architecture. Component re-use is going to give strength to any system in this arena.

The opportunity is for business to move at a faster pace, to be able to react to market changes swiftly and to let customers who particularly need to know quickly about new and relevant offers. I think that I would recommend that all companies establish a review of their current customer communication infrastructures and assess the gap between that and much of the discussion on this website. The potential is significant and those that get the hang of this early are likely to reap significant rewards in terms of customer lifetime value.

Consolidating Billing Applications – One bill / statement for one customer October 14, 2008

Posted by Julian Bradder in Uncategorized.
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1 comment so far

Many end consumers are perplexed. They deal with one company but get 2,3,4 sometimes even more bills or statements through their letterbox. In fact some consumers get 1 bill for every product they have with a company! I feel that this can only succeed in fragmenting your customer relationship. I mean how confident can this customer be in your businesses ability to manage a complex product on your behalf when you are seemingly incapable of summarising your customers financial position?

Let’s look at this from the perspective of the billing company. With the average cost of a mail piece around £0.36 – £0.40p ($0.64c) it is seriously increasing its costs particuarly if the company has been succesful in cross-selling practices!

Let’s say a company sends out 2m bill mail pieces per month to a customer base of 1.7m. Then lets say the company has been successful in cross-selling an average of 3 products to 30% of those 1.7m people. This number is 510,000.

This means that 510,000 mail pieces are candidates for a mail piece consolidation approach.  If we were to divide this number by 3 (the number of products sold to each of these 510,000) then we can expect to reduce the number of mailpieces by 170,000.

This equates to a net saving of 61,200 per month or £733,400 per annum.

Now it is quite likely that the reason for so many billing systems relates to the legacy of company acquisitions each having it’s own infrastructure and perhaps just too expensive to pick apart and rebuild. Perhaps, it could also be because of a companies sheer size and its inability to join two projects meeting essentially the same goals.

Certainly in terms of the customer relationship the resolution lies in smart use of a combination of ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) and document composition tools. ETL can grab, de-duplicate, apply data quality process to data from multiple systems (Extract) and can in turn aggregate and transform that data a standard schema for use by the composition engine and hardware systems within the document factory.

The document composition engine is able to recognise a multi bill from the data and follows a set of rules for the construction of that document.

Whilst the business case example above is very simple and doesn’t take into account a number of factors such as the ability to physically finish say a 25 page envelope, it does serve to illustrate just how quickly return on investment can be gained from a smart and comprehensive approach to customer communications management.

This can be achieved through the use of document composition and ETL tools. ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) allows the aggregation of data from multiple systems, data hygiene,data transformation and unification and presentation of data to a schema, a schema that will be familiar to the customer communications management enabled document factory.

Following the schema, the document composition engine will be able to create individual documents for multi product customers. A single mail item, with excellent presenation that continues to sell the value of your company to the customer.