Svp Customer Service - the First Customer Communications Management Sponsors Meeting

You will need cross-functional sponsorship at executive level to ensure the successful delivery of a customer communications management infrastructure. We'll talk about all the SVP roles within the business over time but for today, lets talk about the SVP of customer service and lets talk about outbound communications in this article. (I'll cover inbound benefits in another post).

The Senior Vice President (SVP) of customer service within your business may be one of the biggest benefactors from customer communications management. In a full scale roll-out you are almost certainly going to need to enlist the SVP of Customer Services support.

Customer Communications Management will have a significant impact upon the call centre and the way that call centre operatives will work. Below I set out some of the items of discussion that you should table with the SVP of Customer Service.

Customer Correspondence and Communications (Outbound Communications)

In your first meeting with the SVP of customer service you will need to make her aware of the likely impacts of the following:

• Ability to deliver ad-hoc messages to the customer via a range of channels - not just voice and not just email.
  
• Ability for the company to control and manage the content. Standard paragraphs, greetings, thank you's and so on. Standards of quality can be met.
  
• The need to develop and design communication authorisation workflows.
  
• The need to develop standard, compliant texts for insertion into letters.
  

The ability to give customer service centre users the ability to construct customer communications, to provide standard paragraphs and texts to suit particular situations  and to have them authorised for quality and compliance prior to sending will impact key performance indicators.

The most benefits to be impacted through correspondence applications are:

• The customer is assured of quality, meaningful, relevant content that addresses his needs. This will impact customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Sending relevant correspondence that resolves customers issues will likely reduce further follow up call backs to the call centre.
  
• That by integrating into an overall enterprise customer communications management system, in the case of mail, the cost of postage will be reduced due to participation in the overall mail discount program that the document production centre will be executing.
  
• That by integrating into the CCM system, there will be much higher levels of assurance that the mail item will leave the building - so when a customer calls and says "you didn't send a letter" you can validate that this is not the case - perhaps important in late payment scenarios. Customer Service centre agents will be able to drill down to visual data within the Automated Document Factory reporting system and identify the individual mail piece, when it was sent and by what class of mail.
  
• When using electronic communication channels, query resolution may be faster in fact, almost immediate. Whether a simple message, questionnaire or a short response to say something has been done such as "Your address details have been updated", or, "Your subscription has been upgraded". These all add to the levels of service and care that the customer gets.
  
• All correspondence whether physical, electronic or voice can be automatically stored in the electronic document vault. The document vault will allow instant recall of documents and indeed if desired can make documents available to customers across the web. Should a customer call back, all communications whether inbound our outbound are available to the customer service agent. This will improve query resolution hugely, reducing overall call duration and it will also reduce callbacks and time and resource spent searching for documents meaning that the agent can handle more calls in a day.
  

Summarising the conversation with the SVP of Customer Service you can say:

• Quality & Reliability of service improved - Customer Satisfaction, Customer Loyalty and in hard to differentiate businesses, retention performance.
  
• Customers who use Instant Messaging to communicate with the customer service centre have the benefit of convenience and no long telephone waiting times.
  
• Clarity of communication. Well thought out, clear, plain language, well articulated communication content, will reduce call centre loadings and will less likely sew further seeds of doubt in the customers mind.
  
• There will be a direct impact upon the bottom line due to participation in mail savings programmes within the document production centre.
  
• Customer can choose to speak to an agent without making phone calls. As well as offering convenience, anonymity and minimal interruption to the customers day, it offers a lower cost of service than by other methods of customer communication. No phone calls, no loading call queueing systems, no mail.
  
• There will be a higher level of accountability and audit-ability overall. Tracking data, time data and authorisation data will provide evidence and proof that the company has done its job - should it be needed.
  
• Customers will feel that they have more control over their relationship with your company - Hopefully driving repeat business and greater product portfolio buy in.
  
• There will be a positive impact in respect of call durations and time wasted searching for documents.
  

Hope this helps with that first meeting!

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