By: John Zimmerer on February 18th, 2020

The Beauty of Simplicity

Customers no longer have to drive to brick and mortar stores as often. They’re online interacting with multiple platforms. The challenge for many businesses is in balancing the need for meeting customer demand with profitability, where digital transformation puts businesses ahead of the game.

Simplifying Innovation

Digital transformation allows for simplicity in infrastructure: enhancing customer experiences and inspiring entirely new business models, as well as improving the overall employee experience. Automated responders (read: chatbots) can answer basic questions; captured data enhances business by tailoring your content and experience to every customer. As a result, customers have an experiential perception that they are receiving more value from your business, increasing the impression that the brand truly cares.

Take Sephora for example: customers can view previous purchases online while making, tracking, and canceling new orders from the comfort of the web. By delivering this online capability, Sephora allows front-line employees to address more pressing customer concerns that may require more time and concentrated attend to address.

Simplicity is essential to digital transformation. If companies can't simplify, then they cannot keep up with the market. They cannot innovate.

CCM can simplify customer and employee experience Simplicity lends elegance and confidence to both customers and employees.

Simplifying CCM

In the past, companies only saw customer communications management as a cost of doing business—ie, to meet a legal or regulatory requirement—versus as a means to facilitate a customer journey. In today’s digital-first world, companies now view CCM as a vital vehicle that adds real, measurable value to customer experience, improve customer loyalty and increase customer lifetime value.

The more effective and easier a customer’s interactions with your company, the more positive associations they have with your brand. Forrester found that ease, effectiveness, and emotion build customer loyalty. Even in a digital age, word of mouth is still the key to growing a brand; your goal through your CCM should be to minimize frustration, disappointment and annoyance.

This simple elegance should also extend to your employees. Alleviating unnecessary or overcomplicated processes and increasing employee engagement positively affects the customer experiences; conversely, a negative work culture and employee experience adversely impacts the customer experience. Reducing employee stress by providing simplified productivity tolls adds value to their experience at work and ultimate translates positively as they engage with customers.

Now, almost all customer-facing representatives within a company can focus on healthier customer interactions without the need for programming skills. With simplified CCM systems, you can look forward to:

Increasing satisfaction and ease of use to help the customer get what they need
Using simplified templates/communications distributed across multiple platforms
Shifting to the cloud to reduce high maintenance costs of antiquated CCM systems
Consolidating CCM tools across the enterprise
Supporting a wider array of customers communication channels
Creating smarter and automated personalization
Supporting bidirectional customer interactions via mobile app, link or website
Implementing easy-to-use but powerful authoring tools for nontechnical users to update communications and reduce communications time
Rationalizing legacy content and templates
Improving customer relationships through better CX

Simplifying Technology

Simplicity also remains top of mind with enterprise architects (EAs).

As part of digital transformation efforts, many EAs are moving systems like CCM to the cloud, reducing the number of CCM systems, re-architecting processes, and realignment of CCM workloads. What they need is a solution that combines the functionality for today with the flexibility to address future needs.

Currently, your CCM software may already integrate with content stores, data sources and a few delivery tiers. But with the right solution, your EAs will be able to integrate the core capabilities of a robust CCM solution—personalization, automation, and reusable content—with your customer portal, mobile application, and whatever comes next for presenting content to customers.

Adopting a CCM solution like INTOUCH® helps on both fronts. Its cloud-native architecture allows enterprise architects to consolidate customer communication workloads on a smaller set of applications, and its user interface becomes a boon to business users' productivity.

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