In our information age, customers assume you will only provide them with content that is timely, relevant and meaningful. This expectation is now so much part of the overall customer experience itself, that if you don’t do so effectively you are in danger of losing their hard-won loyalty. It’s a similar picture from a service and after-sales perspective, where customers expect staff to have access to the complete picture, without having to provide the same information over again.
Given the spread and diversity of content, the most effective way to approach this challenge is to move beyond conventional enterprise content management. By cutting through the cacophony of information ‘white noise’, with a move to a content services platform, organisations can safeguard future flexibility, while ensuring high-quality information is available wherever and whenever it’s needed.
To successfully implement such a system involves five critical steps.
One: Tailor the system to your customers’ experience.
Customers are looking for you to interact with them in ways that are not just responsive, but also appropriate. This could mean creating an easily accessible information hub through which visitors can source the context-dependent content they want, at a time of their choice. Setting up a content services platform, for instance, that uses smart integration to connect data, systems and processes throughout your organisation would also remove the information silos that so often compromise office and inter-departmental productivity. Additionally, customer-facing employees could make faster, better-informed decisions because they now had a more comprehensive information picture in front of them.
Two: Use digital transformation to accelerate your business processes.
To maintain any kind of competitive distinctiveness, businesses must constantly adapt to the ever-evolving behaviours and preferences of their customers. That requires a commitment to continuously improving internal processes through a programme of digital transformation. So, if your team needs to use multiple systems to acquire a clear and complete understanding of your customers, it’s time to review how this can be done more effectively. One major step forward would be to implement an intelligently connected system to give your organisation the freedom, flexibility and responsiveness it needs.
Three: Power up with intelligent automation.
If you want to connect more effectively with your customers then you must better anticipate their information needs. You can only do this if you have a platform designed to improve the speed, accuracy and transparency of your organisation’s processes, procedures and practices. So, to cultivate more meaningful customer relationships, you need to seek out innovative intelligent automation technologies that make the most of built-in logic, intelligent routing and machine learning.
Four: Maximise the potential of cloud-based technology.
By using the cloud-based solutions not only you will save money, time and resources but also be able to deliver the increasingly higher service standards required to create the richest customer experience. So, whatever your organisation’s size or sector, it is important to make the most of this powerful technology to create faster, more tailored responses, as this will take your business to another level. If you are unsure about what’s achievable, investigate how other organisations within and outside your industry are already employing ‘cloud thinking’ to enter new markets, streamline their processes and handle issues of information security and regulatory compliance.
Five: Benefit from others’ expertise.
Such is the speed of digital change that no organisation can afford to introduce non-optimal technology that could actually result in longer delivery cycles, lengthened learning curves and downgraded service levels. The most effective way to prevent this is to get help and advice from those with a proven track record of delivering effective solutions for complex challenges. This is not a time to be reinventing the wheel or learning from your own mistakes.
If you don’t want to be left behind by competitors, then you must evaluate whether as an organisation you have a sufficiently complete information picture of each of your customers. If you don’t, you will increasingly struggle to interact sufficiently fast or effectively with them. That will make it even more difficult to establish or maintain the positive relationships that lead to exceptional customer experience.
The five steps above provide a strategic and practical framework for reshaping how your organisation manages customer information, whatever sector it’s in.
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