Customer Communications Blog

In today's economic climate, organizations are vigilant in controlling and minimizing all costs related to managing customer communications. Most importantly, though, the pursuit of these savings should not come at the expense of preserving and enhancing the customer experience.

Technology has impacted the economy in many ways over the last few decades. Take, for example, the New York Stock Exchange in the pre-Internet era. Traders and brokers interacted literally in person, initiating handwritten transactions in a sea of chaos on the trading floor. After each trading day ended, the floor traders would gather up their buy/sell order slips, and it took up to five days to settle trades. Now, however, the exchange manages all of these interactions almost entirely electronically and many trades are settled within one or two days with trade confirmations arriving almost instantaneously.

There’s a giant wave coming, headed straight for health payers, a confluence of adversity that has been in the making for a year or so. Around 27 million people lost their health insurance due to the business impacts of COVID as employers needed to reduce staff just to stay afloat. There are still around 18 million people in the U.S. receiving unemployment benefits.

Tracking metrics is an integral component of any company’s quest to maximize a company’s profitable growth and the overall customer experience. The real trick is in understanding the relationship between these two things.

The customer is always right. Right? Well, as time-tested as that may be, the underlying concept determining customer satisfaction is much more nuanced than someone being right or someone else being wrong. Businesses exist only because customers exist. To put it plainly, without buyers, there is no selling. Narrow down the scope and you find that businesses failing to prioritize the customer experience quickly fall out of grace and even risk going out of business.

A little while ago I wrote an article titled How Cloudy is Your CCM?, where I cautioned that not all “cloud” deployments of customer communication management (CCM) software are the same. Some CCM vendors define that term very loosely.