Reprint from Output Links: The first of a six-part series on customer communications management and optimizing the mailstream

Special Interests: Customer Communication Management Series
Unlock the profitability in your mailstream.

16 June 2006

Revenue and Relevance through
Intelligence in the Mailstream

Part One: How well are you communicating with your customers?

By John Schloff
Vice President of Strategy, Product Management and Marketing
Pitney Bowes Document Messaging Technologies

Janet’s mortgage statement didn’t arrive in the mail. She barely remembered her payment was due and mailed it just in time. Of course, the mortgage bank then claimed she hadn’t mailed it at all.

Her conversation with the bank’s call center pushed her over the edge. The representative couldn’t view her entire customer file and reiterated that her payment had not arrived – “Janet, when can we expect your check?”

She had been planning to apply for a home equity loan and her own mortgage bank just earned its place at the top of Janet’s personal “Do Not Call” list. In fact – typical of disaffected customers – she regularly told colleagues, friends and family to steer clear of her own mortgage lender.

Let’s rewind and begin again. Janet receives her monthly statement and has a question about it. She dials the call center and they have the identical statement plus promotional notes relevant to her. The query is cleared up quickly and the call center operator mentions a special promotion on the statement for a new credit card with a one percent contribution to her college alma mater. Janet does not sign up immediately, but saves the information about the promotional offer.

Later that day, Janet mentions the good experience with the mortgage company to a colleague and asks their advice about accepting the credit card offer.

This mortgage lender expands its relationship with a happier – and now more
valuable – customer.

Janet’s story is more than a cautionary tale -- it’s a tale of revenue and relevance.

Customer Communication Management –
end-to-end intelligence makes every contact count
We hear and use the terms, “customer facing,” “customer focused,” “customer long-term value,” “one-to-one customer relationships” and so on. However we express it, enhanced customer relationships are pivotal to building a competitive edge and profitable growth.

As we all know, the foundation of any relationship is communication. The question is this: precisely how do we face, focus, optimize, speak one-to-one and do whatever else it takes to get

the most from customers? Today, organizations around the globe are doing all this successfully through customer communication management (CCM).

CCM solutions unite the digital and physical worlds, improving the flow of data, documents and the mailstream. CCM helps us optimize every customer touch point including mail, online activity, call center interaction and face-to-face transactions. Efficient and effective CCM requires adding greater intelligence throughout the mailstream.

Customer Intelligence
CCM starts with the customer. What do you know about each customer? Is your customer data up to date? All of it? Have they moved? Is their new residence in a flood plane? Has their credit status changed? What did they acquire last month? From what channels? Where does all of this information reside? Is it in one database or many? Customer intelligence helps you get fast answers to all these questions. It provides you the tools to maximize the profitability of every customer by lowering costs, increasing sales and strengthening loyalty.

Production Intelligence
CCM enables the most efficient communications process with the highest degrees of integrity in printing, insertion and distribution. Is your organization maximizing the use of all of its assets? Can you track customer messages from document creation, through the automated document factory, out the door into the postal stream and back again? Do you have the proper management controls and reporting systems to comply with ever more stringent government regulations?

Channel Intelligence
In the CCM model, channel intelligence lets organizations manage their channel preferences. It provides for physical and electronic distribution of customer communications and the management of their analytics. Is the promotion in the transactional mail piece supported by online messaging? Does the online account information match the data at the call center and on the mailed statement? This opens the way to: more consistent customer communications across channels; Web-based customer self-service account management; better first-call resolution for mailstream inquiries; and personalized customer communications.

Total Communications Intelligence
The ultimate objective is total communications intelligence where the organization has a powerful capability to extract maximum efficiency and profitability from each and every customer communication, no matter what the customer, message or channel. Every communication is timely, efficient, accurate, timely, relevant and is an enjoyable customer experience.

When does the communication become your brand?
If most of your customers’ interaction with your company is via mail or online, periodic communications become a big part of how your customer perceives you. In banking, insurance, mortgage lending, credit cards and even telecommunications the brand manifests itself in periodic customer transactions like the monthly statement.

Your customers’ image and opinion of your enterprise, what it stands for, how well it serves their needs and how it can be valuable to them – in effect, your company’s brand – is heavily influenced by this critical communication moment. Applying CCM to enhance the customer experience during the communication is the next step for companies seeking to fortify their brand to build more profitable relationships.

With CCM solutions, enterprises can deliver a more satisfying customer experience that enhances loyalty, but it takes intelligence throughout the entire process to make it so.

The demand for intelligence throughout customer communication management is driven by advanced data technology, competitive use of intelligence and increased customer expectations.

Excellence in CCM demands intelligence across the value chain to deliver revenue and relevance.

About the Author
John Schloff is Vice President of Strategy, Product Management and Marketing for Pitney Bowes Document Messaging Technologies. He provides thought leadership to small businesses and Fortune 100 firms on how Customer Communications Management optimizes the mailstream to create cost savings and revenue growth.