By: Brent Haumann, Managing Director, Africa
In the battle to retain existing customers and gain new ones, customer experience (CX) has become a much bigger differentiating factor than product or price.
And at the heart of every good CX strategy is effective customer communication. That should be obvious. At its most basic level, customer experience is the relationship a customer has with a company and you cannot build a relationship in silence. While many companies understand that, they often fail to speak with a single voice, and this fractures the customer experience.
That does not have to be the case. Every communication a customer receives should be consistent in brand and tone. To avoid a fractured CX, a single view of customer communication is vital.
What is a single view of customer communication?
In order to understand what a single view of customer communication looks like, it’s worth differentiating it from a single customer view.
As defined by Brandwatch, “a single customer view is an aggregation of all data an organization has on a particular customer, presented to give a clear overview of them and their specific data.”
A single view of customer communication, meanwhile, means having overarching visibility of all the messages sent from the organization, as well as the aggregation of data about the communication it has sent to that customer.
Organizations that have a view of how the customer interacts with each communication have much greater insight into the next best offer to be made or communication that should be sent.
Touchpoints, journeys and life cycles
Any organization that plans to achieve a single view of customer communication must understand the various customer touchpoints, journeys, and life cycles. Starting at the point when a customer first becomes aware of what the organization could offer them, all the way until the end of their engagement, is referred to as the customer life cycle.
During that life cycle, they’ll go through a number of phases that can be broadly separated into an awareness stage, followed by a purchase stage, then a service stage. These individual phases are commonly referred to as customer journeys and are made up of lots of customer interactions, referred to as touchpoints. Some of these touchpoints can be identified as ‘moments that matter’ – interactions that can make a large and lasting impression.
Breaking down silos
Because of the structure of most traditional businesses, it can be all too easy for communication to become fractured. This is as a result of different departments communicating with customers, dependent on where they are in their lifecycle with the business.
And customers expect that all communication they receive from one organization, regardless of the intention, channel, type or journey, to be consistent.
It is therefore critical that any customer communication strategy includes the goal of removing silos based on organizational structure, message type or channel. If the silos can’t be removed, at the very least, they should be hidden from the customer.
Admittedly, integrating disparate systems and platforms to create a single view of customer communication isn’t easy, because data sources reside in different systems, messages are sent via different platforms and managed by separate departments.
It is vital that your CX technology stack supports a single view of customer communication.
About Striata
Striata provides strategy, software and professional services that enable digital communication across multiple channels and devices. We are experts in message design, generation, security, delivery and storage.
Clients choose our technology and services to encrypt, send and store confidential documents; execute integrated marketing campaigns; and distribute high volume electronic communications.
The world’s largest financial services, utility, insurance, retail and telecommunications companies trust us to achieve unrivalled results in digital adoption and transformation, as well as keep their customers’ personal information secure (we’re ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certified).