The importance of touchpoint flexibility in customer communications
With 86% of consumers willing to pay more for better customer experience (CX) and 32% abandoning a brand because of a single, poor experience[1], improving CX has become a vital goal for most enterprises, overtaking product and pricing in importance. Indeed, according to Gartner, it is where two-thirds of businesses now strive to compete[2].
When it comes to marketing and acquisition, the power is increasingly in the hands of the consumer. The growing number of technologies and communications channels at their disposal means they can choose when, how and where they learn about a brand and purchase its products and services. Providing engaging customer experiences across these technologies and channels is essential to remaining relevant and competitive.
Increasingly, success relies upon marketers being reactive and flexible around customer preference and touchpoints. Today, this means developing flexible frameworks that can cope with all the touchpoints on the customer journey and which can react to changes in a customer’s channel preferences and behaviours.
Indeed, brands need to create relevant experiences at every touchpoint, across all channels. To do that, they need a comprehensive understanding of the customer and their communication preferences in order to offer the personalised experiences that keep them on the brand journey.
The role of data and channel preference
Data and channel preference both play a key role in improving CX. When it comes to data, companies need to adopt a business-wide approach, unifying data from all touchpoints in order to create a journey map of a customer’s end-to-end experience.
Only in this way can brands deliver consistency and fully understand how to provide better personalised experiences going forward. Brands that achieve this will benefit from the improvements in customer satisfaction and the growth in sales and retention that follow.
The role of channel preference is equally important. Today, touchpoints happen across a wide range of channels, devices and applications. With print, email, social media, messaging apps, chatbots and more to choose from, brands that wish to provide consistent and seamless experiences need to manage the entire customer journey, understand the communication preferences of individual customers and be flexible enough to react when these change.
Ensuring a clean transition
It's a significant challenge to develop a customer communications infrastructure that unifies data to provide journey mapping, offers insights to enhance customer experience across touchpoints, and sends personalised messages via a customer’s preferred channel. Organisations also need to approach and implement regulatory change quickly and in real time to ensure they remain compliant.
Paragon Customer Communications’ OnePlatform overcomes those challenges to provide brands with a comprehensive Customer Communications Management (CCM) platform that is easy to implement and requires minimal IT development and restructuring.
Consolidating multiple data sources into a single system and even integrating with legacy technologies, it enables companies to centralise the management of their inbound and outbound customer interactions, giving them total control of their brand, content and compliance.
Importantly, it provides the flexibility to deliver personalised communications across multiple physical and digital channels to enhance CX and accommodate customer preferences, while allowing teams to access their communications and make changes in in real time, whenever they need.
From a compliance perspective, its centralised approach unlocks new levels of visibility that can help simplify document audits and ensure communications stay on the right side of industry regulations.
Centralising these processes and having a single overview of all communication efforts and compliance can empower localised regions or departments to react and work with changing market conditions, adapting to regional and industry-specific regulatory changes to ensure compliance in real time.
What’s more, by working in partnership with our experienced team, we can ensure a clean transition to your new CCM platform, offering everything from full transfer to a fully managed service.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnewman/2020/06/23/4-actionable-customer-experience-statistics-for-2020/?sh=61e9f18c1a84
[2] https://www.gartner.com/en/marketing/insights/articles/key-findings-from-the-gartner-customer-experience-survey
