All the ways we can connect using technology is, by and large, a huge plus for customer communications and payments. But sometimes, we can find ourselves with too much of a good thing.
Before a company knows what’s happening, it’s juggling an uncoordinated collection of print, digital and payment vendors and solutions that various business units and brands have added with the aim of meeting strategic objectives and improving performance. Mergers and acquisitions only make it more complicated as they bring their own sets of partners and technologies.
It’s not uncommon for one group in a company to manage print customer communications, another to handle customer emails and a third to manage vendor billing and payments. Often there’s duplication and redundancy, such as using multiple systems to create and send emails to the same customer but for different reasons, such as billing, marketing/sales and customer satisfaction surveys.
If this sounds familiar, you might benefit from a digital health checkup. It can be useful before expanding to new digital channels or omnichannel options. Or to ensure your current approach is giving you the results you want, such as delivering a consistent and engaging customer experience across touchpoints.
Size up the current state
Start with a quick inventory of your digital capabilities. What electronic communications and payment choices does your company provide to customers and vendors today? How are you delivering these options—do your brands or business units use different communications and payment platforms? Do you divide up responsibilities?
Take stock of what is working well and what isn’t. Do the divisions of vendor management, roles and responsibilities, workflows and technologies make business sense? Do you deliver a consumer-friendly experience for customers?
Also evaluate the existing state against desired future state and broader organizational goals. Are your current arrangements the building blocks for ongoing innovation and improvements in CX, operating efficiencies, productivity, automation, security and other key performance measures? How do your digital communications and payments programs align with enterprise digital strategies?
Moving forward
Once companies have a clear picture of the health of their digital initiatives, they are positioned to build out or update a cohesive digital strategy, including steps for closing gaps and sequencing the roll-out of new digital services. Check out this other newsletter article Our Suite of Digital Solutions for Expresso Improves CX and Efficiency for strategic ideas and options.
You need to establish goals for your overall digital strategy and for each digital service or channel. Do you want to establish a digital-first approach? Speed up payments? More easily comply with vendor payment contract terms? Reduce printing and postage costs? Increase privacy and security?
A client in vacation ownership recently set out to leverage its emails to increase self-service bookings and promote add-on resort services while simultaneously reducing call-center volume. To do so, it consolidated reservation confirmation and pre-arrival emails for all brands and properties on our Expresso® CCM platform. Since making the switch to Expresso and its real-time, personalized emails last year, the company has seen a 14% increase in owner online vacation reservations, a drop in per-owner call volume and record interest in add-on services.
Integrate into the larger plan
Your digital plan needs to fit into the complete communications and payments strategy, which includes mail, IVR, call-center and other communications and payment channels. Many companies are looking to digitally transform, streamline and automate more of their operations as well as their customer and vendor interactions.
Build out the digital program
A key part of planning should focus on use cases and message types. When we held a webinar about adding text messaging, 84% of participants indicated they would want to use text messaging for payment reminders and bill epresentment.
Track KPIs
In addition to monitoring performance against strategic goals, companies need to track functional markers to gauge the success of their digital programs. For emails, that means open rates and bounces while click-through and opt-out rates are important for both emails and text messaging. Increases in website traffic to payment portals and online payments are useful measures.
We know from our customer survey that our clients are more interested than ever in digital solutions. If you’d like help with a digital health checkup or more information about any of our digital options, please contact Client Success.
