Business : Improving Customer Communication through Outsourcing

Financial institutions are addressing new challenges as they navigate their way through new regulatory compliance issues as well as somewhat volatile market conditions. In response, many industry organizations have turned their focus to pursuing initiatives that will provide a continual stream of organizational benefits resulting from improved operational excellence and innovation, and at the same time emphasizing a customer-centric approach. One strategy many financial institutions have found effective in improving internal efficiencies is to adopt business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions, including print/mail fulfillment.

By outsourcing these non-core functions, a financial institution is no longer bound to managing and conducting a capital-intensive process that is outside the strategic focus of its business. As well as being a cost-effective option, outsourcing frees organizational resources that can be more profitably applied to innovation and achieving your organization's primary business objectives.

It is critically important to closely evaluate your vendor partner's capabilities to ensure they can meet client communication needs in the areas of agility, flexibility and control. With regular statements and related correspondence being an indispensable communication vehicle between a financial institution and its customers, employing "agile billing"-the ability to maintain flexibility and control of documents while enjoying the cost benefits of outsourcing physical printing and fulfillment-is simply good business.

Insourcing content

When outsourcing customer communications functions, it is necessary to ensure that the benefits do not come at the expense of a strong, customer-centric communications strategy. The key issue to consider is the potential risk of losing the control, speed to market and relevance of documents and messages, especially with the seemingly exponential increase in communication channels over recent years. With a slowly recovering economy and changing consumer habits, building trust and loyalty with customers has never been more important.

Retaining the ability to access and control your organization's data and documents to create effective communications is crucial, because every customer contact presents the opportunity to improve the customer experience, tap new markets and differentiate from the competition. And no one is more knowledgeable about your organization's offerings, your communication strategies and the most impactful messaging for your customers than your own employees. That is why a collaborative approach-what we refer to as "outsourcing with control"-is an excellent approach to take when outsourcing customer communications.

A collaborative outsourcing strategy combines your internal resources-your customer-facing staff-with those of a knowledgeable and reliable external vendor-partner to design, deliver and maintain meaningful personalized customer communications. By drawing upon the energy, ideas and capabilities of both of these spheres, the organization can maintain the flexibility and autonomy to complete interactive, point-of-need, personalized documents to best serve customers while controlling accuracy and costs through centralized production and fulfillment.

Deploying a communications management platform that is easily configurable will reduce the time frame for migration of legacy documents and minimize the risk of brand inconsistency during the transition. An intuitive and easy to use platform also shortens the learning curve for employees and improves the rate of adoption to minimize disruptions during the transition. And, significantly, regulatory compliance can be ensured with the automated ability to include or exclude specific content based on effective dates to support changing regulations. Having the operational dexterity to make simple changes on individual customer communications-and the scalability needed to meet the dynamic requirements of your business-enables rapid adaptation to market and regulatory conditions as they occur.

Meeting customers on their terms

While traditional print mail, including regular statements and correspondence, along with the customer service call center, remain viable and important channels of communication, new media channels now offer many additional ways to convey information and interact with consumers, including mobile devices and tablets, as well as social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Multichannel communications enable a financial institution to reach customers at their convenience, any time of day or night and through the medium they choose. Whether the recipient prefers paper (mail), electronic (e-mail, Internet), mobile devices, or a combination of these channels, being able to meet delivery preferences is essential for enhancing the customer experience.

Putting all of these pieces together to design a collaborative, multichannel communications program raises several important considerations that must be addressed to ensure the program's success among employees and customers. Key considerations include:

Obtaining quality data. Customer information is often created and stored in legacy and siloed front and back office applications, systems and workflows. Gathering and consolidating useful data about customers can be a challenge. Be sure your communications solution can tap into and merge data from these various sources without the need to reconfigure your internal archives and data warehouses.
Integrating all delivery channels. Once you've identified and collected the data required for your program, next is to ensure the ability to coordinate and integrate it across a range of media output channels. For instance, will the next statement for each customer be personalized based on their interests and their preferences? Will it be delivered in their preferred channel? Does it take advantage of feedback obtained through a channel like e-mail? This is a critical aspect of a successful multichannel framework.
Efficiently managing multiple channels. Managing the process, users and roles, interfaces and update methods of a variety of communications channels can be overwhelming. User roles and permissions should be honored anywhere in the framework. Additionally, the ability to manage content-independent of the documents and channels that receive them-is crucial. Be sure your solution has these management capabilities or your organization may find the process and content complexities unmanageable.
Designing for multiple channels. A critical factor for successful multichannel communications is creating flexible content that automatically changes to match the requirements of the delivery channel. Without this kind of flexibility, designing for multiple channels can become a painful and complex process.

Strengthening customer relationships

Particularly in periods of change and uncertainty, meaningful communications can serve as links to strengthen the bonds between a financial institution and its customers. Personalized communications help to build trust and customer loyalty. It's important to recognize this and to consider effective customer communications as a crucial part of your business. With the increasing use of internet-based communications and the proliferation of smartphones and tablet devices, customers now expect financial institutions to reach them via the channels they prefer. Implementing a well-considered customer communications strategy can help you forge stronger relationships with customers by delivering important information to them accurately and more quickly.

By deploying your internal resources and taking a collaborative approach to outsourcing customer communications, your organization can ensure that it maintains control of the responsiveness and relevance of its documents and customer messages while getting them to each customer in the most effective way. Implementing a well-planned and collaborative customer communications strategy with the right vendor partner will ensure that every communication will not only be cost-effective, but will also take advantage of the opportunity to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Michael Watts is COO for GMC Software Technology, a provider of customer communications and output management solutions.

Source: http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=182516

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