- United Kingdom
By Malcolm Netburn, chairman and CEO, CDS Global
The success of most organisations is driven by how well they manage their customer relationships. This hinges on maximising valuable customer information and communication, which will drive marketing and sales initiatives, influence company decisions and determine how your company succeeds with its customer base.
Most organisations are unable to effectively collect and take advantage of the information they have. Currently, many companies have databases, spreadsheets and customer service files all housing customer data in different locations. To add to the problem, electronic and paper-based information and payments are being delivered to organisations through several different channels, making it difficult to get a handle on customer data.
Information about your customers becomes cluttered, scattered, incomplete, unused or lost entirely. There is lost efficiency due to manual processing while issues created by unconnected databases and lags in enterprise systems result in inconsistent service and lost revenue opportunities.
Having a consolidated view of customer relationships is critical to understanding customer buying habits and tendencies, and allows organisations to create greater brand value and generate new revenue opportunities. Unlocking the value of this customer data, however, is a challenge for many organisations.
The key is to quickly capture complete and accurate data at the time of remittance or order processing. This supplemental remittance information can improve the timeliness and accuracy of payment processing, helping to eliminate costly exceptions and speed their resolution.
By effectively capturing customer data and processing payments, organisations can work toward achieving a 360-degree view of their customers. This process provides high data availability and usability because the information is getting into the hands of those who need it: customer service representatives, marketers and decision makers. By getting the information in the right hands, it enables proactive customer service, drives marketing initiatives and helps corporate leaders make better decisions.
According to AIIM's 2006 Industry Watch study Capture and Imaging Technologies: The On-Ramp to Effective Information Management, the top reasons why organisations have implemented scanning and capture technologies are to improve efficiency, productivity and customer service and to ensure compliance. Though these have always been important reasons to integrate data imaging systems, it is important to note that there are undervalued opportunities that are not fully recognized. organisations must begin to leverage customer information to show leadership, increase competitive advantage and improve financial performance. Only then will you enhance customer relationships, drive revenue growth and strengthen your brand.
The foundation of customer data can be divided into three main segments: traditional, advanced and innovative. Traditional methods rely on information captured during remittance and order processing. This information allows for personalised correspondence with customers, tailored offers and the ability to make better corporate decisions to enhance marketing, build new revenue streams and identify cost saving opportunities.
More advanced customer data acquisition starts when an analytical database and additional customer data sources are combined with traditional customer management systems. Using an analytical database, this additional information can be used to further personalise contact with the customer. Communication methods ranging from phone to e-mail to online all allow businesses to identify customers across channels, enhance Web navigation and messaging, dynamically create up-sell and cross-sell opportunities through multiple channels, and develop additional service offerings. This additional customer information also drives better business decisions. For example, customer service representatives can better assist customers by knowing their preferences, such as the reason, method and frequency of contact or payment method. This allows them to see the "person" behind the data.
Truly innovative organisations will realize the importance of engaging in interactive communication with customers and investing in emerging channels to exchange information and offers. From blogs, wikis, text messaging, and instant messaging to online discussion boards and social networking, employing the use of evolving communication media is crucial for continued success into the future.
Unlike personal social networking that often revolves around MySpace profiles and YouTube videos, business social networking drives customer traffic to your Web site for reasons other than bill payment. It means offering your customers interaction with each other and your brand through your Web site. By doing this, organisations can find out even more about their customers through page visits, downloads and information that they provide. This will also strengthen your brand relationship, provide paid involvement opportunities, increase partner value through advertising and utilise a new channel to exchange information and offers.
Interactive communication opportunities have already opened up through the use of business blogs and wikis. Sending promotions via text message, providing customer service through instant messaging and employing the use of evolving communication media will increase opportunities for contact. It will also develop a community experience, enforce your brand, create a more personal relationship with your customer and allow you to reach new generations of customers. These younger generations consist of tech-savvy consumers who are more in tune with emerging communication methods. They are doing more business online - often forgoing the use of more traditional methods.
In line with these new ways of communicating comes the emerging channels, including mobile technologies and intuitive applications that tailor content based on your preferences using intelligent recognition. The enhanced integration and synchronization of these applications allows all of these emerging channels to communicate with each other, providing an even more interactive and consistent customer experience.
There are many ways to integrate new technologies and systems into data capture and processing to unlock the value of your customer data. Handwriting detection and recognition during processing sees and reads text on receivables, saving substantial time and reducing manual keying. Mark-sense recognition allows customers to choose options from a list, complete a survey or answer interest questions. This is valuable data to collect.
If necessary, sophisticated recognition can send the piece to an operator via image for manual processing. To eliminate manual sortation, classification keying allows documents to be sorted electronically using a predetermined series of potential options. This limits operator decision making, provides a consistent sorting function and can be customised by document to maintain accurate and consistent business rules.
Employing the use of recommendation systems (cross-sell/up-sell applications) is simplified with accurate and accessible customer data. Of course, the more customer data that is captured, the more effective the recommendation systems become. These systems deploy unique messages and promotional offers for customer service representatives with personalised offer scripts created on the fly. These offers can be provided through several channels to make up-selling and cross-selling more effective by reaching the customer through their desired contact method, whether it is phone, e-mail or Web store. Recommendation systems increase your revenue and provide near-immediate results without requiring sales training for customer service representatives.
Customer interaction through the Web can be addressed in numerous ways - even at the point of purchase. In the past, managing your e-commerce environment could be extremely cumbersome. Now, unique Web stores can be created efficiently based on templated models. Development of these template-based stores eliminates the need for technical support and provides the flexibility to allow marketers to test offers and access instant reports to determine effectiveness. Changes to dynamically generated content and offers can be made with the click of a button.
Offers can also be provided to customers after the sale using e-mail confirmation up-sells, which send a personalised offer along with the e-mail order confirmation. This creates a revenue-generating opportunity while providing a standard service to the customer.
In addition, there are several other ways to use customer data to present customer information and drive revenue growth. Variable data applications can take customer interaction to the next level by dynamically generating full pages of content based strictly on customer data. In a Print On Demand environment, a great example of this has been shown through the creation of tailored customer portfolios for 401(k) information. Publishers are also able to increase ad sales by providing advertisers with demographics and consumer-based information, showing exactly what market the ad is reaching.
Very important to every organisation is the appropriate dissemination of customer information to ensure that solutions can be introduced to reach business goals. Using advanced applications, all of this captured customer data can effectively trickle up through an organisation, feeding information management systems and helping organisations become more predictive, intuitive and proactive about their customers. This allows companies to make sound, confident marketing decisions, knowing that their data is fresh, accurate and accessible.
Most organisations have the desire but lack the means and ability to support these functions internally. The systems are expensive and result in significant overhead costs. Instead, many turn to outsourced solution providers, making their operational challenges significantly more manageable. By building agile data management architectures, these providers are able to combine secure and flexible imaging, data recognition, auto-classification and on-demand archiving and delivery that bridge legacy systems and processes, without having to replace your current systems.
In addition, these organisations can serve as strategic partners, providing guidance and consultative services to manage and maximise campaigns. By partnering with providers who have the systems in place to reliably manage this function, organisations are able to spend less time on operational processes and campaign management and more time on what matters most: enhancing the valuable customer relationships that generate revenue for their business.
Malcolm Netburn is the chairman and CEO of CDS Global. View a PDF of his PowerPoint presentation on Unlocking the Value of Customer Data, which was originally delivered at the 2008 TAWPI Payments in Transition conference.