Your bank statement, your credit card statement, your mobile bill are all customized. They not only reflect your monthly consumption of the service, but are also personalized for you. Think of a scenario when you have specific value added offers that are customized and personalized for you as per your usage patterns; offering discounts on services and lifestyle products that you use the most. It would certainly be a delight, right?
Now take a step back and wonder how such customization is possible; how it that the offers are so personalized for you is. Are you constantly being monitored, or your behavior is predictable? No there is nothing to worry about, and nobody is monitoring your personal spending habits. It is purely an application of Communication and Marketing Services (CMS) that provides this precise level of customization using a set of criteria that can trigger an offer that is more relevant to you, without subjecting you to a deluge of mindless offers. All this is possible without encroaching on your privacy. Particularly in the industries that have a good amount of customer transactional or profile information, CMS can play a transformational role in improving the efficiency and efficacy of your communication. From leading retail chains to telecom to insurance to banking and credit cards, companies have deployed CMS to provide customized offerings that lead to customer delight, lift revenues and profits, and drive customer advocacy.
CMS & CMCS are trends that marketers globally are fast catching up The booming Indian economy, increasing consumerism, entry of global brands in the country, and investments from foreign investors are taking a giant leap. Soon, we are likely to witness an even more intense marketing clutter across categories. In order to stand out in the clutter and have a captive audience which is an advocate of your brand, you would need customization at an individual level.
By making the company's messages more timely and relevant to prospects, organizations can set their communication apart from competition. This helps in the communication and marketing processes, whether it's creating, implementing and analyzing direct marketing campaigns, working alongside your agencies or cost-effectively producing signages. This can be attained via effective multi-channel communications at every touch point: Web, mobile, email, direct mail and fulfillment, social media and in-store signages. This service is globally known as Cross Media Communication Services (CMCS).
What we would increasingly notice is the constant chipping away of traditional routes and mass discounts and offers being replaced by customization and personalization. Given the fact that all of us are consumers of services from multiple utility companies and the CRM programmes that various retailers / service organizations maintain for their customers, there is a lot of customer data that is already available.
Most of these organizations also communicate regularly with their customers via regular transactional statements, such as an electricity bill, credit card bill, telephone bill, bank statements to offers and loyalty point statements from the retailers. This is where the change is taking place. By transforming document processes, marketers can help improve quality and clarity. So customers are happier, less likely to call with questions and the service representative is free to perform higher-value tasks. These changes in document processes have helped leading retail brands worldwide establish a more personal connection with their customers and improve the way they communicated.
CMS offers cost savings on campaigns
All organizations want to strengthen their relationship with their customers – increase consumption of their services, increase revenues and improve customer retention. The best marketing communication delivers clear and relevant messages in preferred formats and in time to be acted upon. They are a unique combination of creative, management and logistical practices. It is essential to help clients create effective communication that looks one of a kind, but is backed up with several efficient processes. By controlling expenses, increasing management visibility and releasing resources from non-core tasks, companies can uncover pieces of their behind-the-scenes communication processes and systematize them to better support and power effective marketing communication.
By introducing a new technology platform that improves data management and offers a single point of contact in the document supply chain, CMS can help up to 30 per cent reduction in document production costs. CMS allows marketers to use regular transactional statements into a powerful communication tool to drive their objectives by customizing the communication to the customer thereby making the offering more relevant to that particular customer and dramatically enhancing the probability of the customer to act on it.
Analyzing and improving communication processes not only helps provide an excellent customer experience, but also benefits the business in other ways as well. For instance, when coordinating and consolidating communications created by disparate departments within the organization, the company can realise savings on mailing costs. This is literally changing the way executives now address long-standing and emerging business challenges for advertising as well. CMS enhances the efficiency of enterprise communication to its customers, and at the same time delivers customer delight.
For B2B, but actually B2C
Today's digital age is more ubiquitous than ever; with increasingly interactive and unconventional formats the desires of the consumer are ever evolving. Consumers are getting used to choosing their own content and getting them tailored as per their expectations. Customers are looking for a consistent brand experience across all channels, whether it's print, Web or mobile. They want their communication to be efficient – with information that is easy to understand and act upon and geared toward their preferences. This means not only delivery preferences, but purchasing preferences.
Enterprises of all sizes have implemented a wide range of technologies to improve or simplify document processes especially for their consumers. Data from customer responses can streamline fulfillment processes and optimized customer on-boarding, delivering an outstanding customer experience at every point.
According to industry analysts, about 50 per cent of documents used to conduct business are in paper form and intelligent capture enables the content to be extracted, processed and stored in a way that it can be readily found for reuse and repurposing. It also enables the content to be merged with digital content into a single workflow. By managing any, or all, of communication and marketing processes companies can uncover savings, increase effectiveness and improve the return on marketing investment.
Field advertisement and billboards are always conventionally thought of. You make bill-boards, hoardings, do ATL and BTL activities and conduct roadshows on the spot. But will this trend continue? Maybe not for long. Six months after a large telecom giant outsourced its CMS requirements, the company realized that it were actually saving on its advertorial costs without any major changes in the existing process.
Customization is the next big thing advocated through big data analytics in diverse sectors soaked into services businesses as it establishes a more personal connection. Today, many corporates are proving a point – busting the myth by challenging the norm.