Legacy customer communications will be part of existing processes which may operate within product servicing silos depending on the way that the enterprise structures customer service operations, e.g. different brands, products types, etc. The first task is to establish the scope of the investment in change and what transformation of the operating model is desired over the near term (~3 years), mid-term (3 - 5 years), and long term (5 - 10 years).
The first step on this journey needs to establish the new model solution ready for scaling and this will only gain commitment from the organisation based on a compelling plan for a substantial return on the investment.
Return on investment in customer communication management is commonly driven by two main factors:
- Centralisation of control and management of the content used to create personalised communications, and usually the production/composition of those communications
- Scaling of the solution to an optimum scope and volume of production
The benefit case for investment will likely rest on the optimum scope and scale to provide a return within 3 to 5 years. The strategic alignment of this investment will rest on the ability to scale this benefit outwards and upwards, taking on more use cases (brands, products, and processes) and delivering increasing volumes of communications (cost per “impression”, or page of composition, is likely to reduce with scaling up).
Only once short term and medium term benefits have been realised will it be possible to make the case for the final transformational step. However, this transformation will have been facilitated by the previous changes.
Short term benefit realisation
Taking the initial scope of brand/products/processes and evaluating the cost of the current solution provides a baseline for measuring the returned benefit and will be important in evaluating the cost parameters for any proposed new solution.
The size of the optimisation opportunity can be derived by analysis of the communications from all the processes that are within scope for the initial phase.
Identifying where content can be shared and composition personalisations and customisations can be driven by data and composition rules, rather than requiring separate templates, will provide the efficiency savings and the reduction in management and maintenance that will be achieved in the new solution.
The automation of personalised communications is achieved by using shared content and utilising the customer data to drive individual compositions via composition rules for that communication type (or template). Once this has been developed it can be driven at large scale according to the processing resources available to the platform. This has the most impact when replacing manual compositions but can also have a substantial affect when replacing already automated compositions within policy administration systems which offer customer communication management as merely one of their capabilities, especially if many systems’ communication composition are migrated to a single, central customer communication management solution.
Medium term benefit realisation
Once the initial investment has migrated the core processes to the new platform solution, the platform itself can be scaled upward and outward to deliver more benefits against the original baseline. The use of a programme of delivery can define a consistent measure of the expected benefit realisation against a baseline evaluation of the existing processes.
A design authority with clear roles and responsibilities and a service contract should be used to ensure only processes that will benefit from migration to the platform are included in the programme portfolio and that designs conform with the solution architecture and best practices that have been established. This will protect and facilitate benefit realisation, and a log of the benefits delivered should be reported on a regular basis to the key stakeholders according to agreed metrics as established in the original benefit case from the implementation phase.
The design authority will report to a board of the main stakeholders and will itself consist of:
- Solution Architect
- Programme Manager (or their delegate)
- Project Managers (business and technical as relevant to the meeting agenda)
- Product Owners (for an agile delivery model, as relevant to the meeting agenda)
- Security Architect
- Head of Risk (or their delegate)
- Data Owner/Steward
- Business Owners/Stakeholders (or their delegates)
- Business Analysts (as relevant to the meeting agenda)
- Subject matter experts (as relevant to the meeting agenda)
The design authority could be federated within each business team or organisational devision in some models. There are pros and cons to both centralised and federated/distributed governance models that will depend on the enterprise. These are beyond the scope of this discussion and will be addressed elsewhere.
Long term transformational benefits
Trends in consumer preference are pressing organisations to change the way that they communicate with their customers, even as concerns about data security, identity theft, and fraud are tightening regulations and increasing the threats and consequences of breaches due to poorly managed communications. Enterprises that can manage these risks while responding to consumer preferences will differentiate themselves from their competitors.
Platform solutions that facilitate the assemblage of communications into a “conversation history” provide a rich substrate for growing a coherent “experience” for the customer. This enables the enterprise to respond to consumer expectations as it offers broader knowledge of the customers’ needs and thus clear courses of action, but it also uncovers additional revenue opportunities for the enterprise. It is important to note here that inbound and outbound communications need to be joined and this moves beyond the outbound composition capability and requires referencing and integration with inbound communication management solutions, crucially, across different communication media.
In highly regulated industries with complex products there will always be requirements for complex, many-page document composition, no matter how personalised and customised, but the delivery of these will likely shift to digital “in-app” and portal style methods. However, the opportunity for complex documents to become the centre of follow-on conversations, possibly including video media (“explainers”, video chats, seminars, etc.), will open up new growth areas for the enterprise that takes advantage of them.
Customer Communication Management platform vendors will need to lower the barriers to developing these capabilities by forging partnerships to extend their own platforms and offering out-of-the-box integrations to the main players in the in-bound communication and archival and retrieval market (document, voice/video call, and chat). Choosing a customer communication management partner that already has a strategic road map that supports these opportunities is essential if the investment is to continue to be fruitful in the long term. Successful digital transformation will also depend on it.