If you have ever worked in a bar you might recognize the following scenario. It’s your very first shift. The place is filled to the rafters. Your head spins. Orders are coming in right, left and center. As someone shouts “Where are my beers?!”, the tap runs dry. You don’t know how to change the keg. You ask Jim. Jim is busy. You fail to keep up and customers grow impatient. “What’s keeping my Bloody Mary?!” How do you even make a Bloody Mary? You have no clue. Jim does, but Jim has his own orders to fill.
In modern day business Jim is IT, the go-to guy who has to put his own tasks on hold to sort other ones out. Because many of today’s companies and their communication platforms and digital transformation programs are too technology-driven, business users have to rely on IT to make the necessary changes to templates as the tools are too complex for them to use themselves. This severely impedes operational efficiency and heavily increases deployment time to market of customer communications.
User-friendly
So how can you improve operational efficiency in your customer communications? In last week’s blog ‘How to improve operational efficiency in multilingual and multibrand environments?’ we took a closer look at the added value a single communications platform provides for companies communicating in multiple languages and for multiple brands, like car importers which import multiple brands.
Car importers not only communicate for multiple brands in multiple languages, they also have to take into account the communications from local dealers. They want these dealers to maintain close connection with their clientele through customer communications, but only if these communications are developed with the same templates and correspond with corporate branding. However, local dealers often use their own templates to generate customer communications, causing the importer to lose grip on how they communicate and the chances on brand consistency to dwindle.
If these local dealers were to use the same single customer communications platform with the same templates, they could make adjustments to communications specific to their dealership without straying away from corporate branding. As this platform is user-friendly, programming skills aren’t required. Long waits on IT become a thing of the past. As such operational efficiency would increase a lot, while deployment time-to-market would be heavily reduced.
Everybody’s gain
However, a user-friendly communications platform not only benefits business users, it impacts your entire company. But how exactly?
IT is often burdened with template management. Even the smallest of changes require a lot of time and effort, while on many occasions other important tasks have to be put on hold. Decreasing the complexity of your customer communications platform and automating as many processes as possible, will help boost efficiency and increase business empowerment.
Also a business strategy level efficiency is a key factor. Wasting time on small adjustments is a cardinal sin, as this will lengthen your time-to-market. Saving time and expenses while increasing the revenue should be the main goal. As a more user-friendly customer communications platform enables business users to make changes themselves, IT can spend their time more efficiently. As a result, the time-to-market will shorten and customers will hear from you sooner than ever.
Finally, for your sales and business teams nothing is more important than providing the customer with a satisfactory customer experience. As they are usually the ones who do the talking and know how to interact with your customers, it’s evident that commercial employees should always be able to manage communications. Because their IT skills are less developed, it’s key you provide a user-friendly tool to enable them to make changes themselves.
If you have ever worked in a bar you might recognize the following scenario. It’s your very first shift. The place is filled to the rafters. Your head spins. Orders are coming in right, left and center. As someone shouts “Where are my beers?!”, the tap runs dry. You don’t know how to change the keg. You ask Jim. Jim is busy. You fail to keep up and customers grow impatient. “What’s keeping my Bloody Mary?!” How do you even make a Bloody Mary? You have no clue. Jim does, but Jim has his own orders to fill.
In modern day business Jim is IT, the go-to guy who has to put his own tasks on hold to sort other ones out. Because many of today’s companies and their communication platforms and digital transformation programs are too technology-driven, business users have to rely on IT to make the necessary changes to templates as the tools are too complex for them to use themselves. This severely impedes operational efficiency and heavily increases deployment time to market of customer communications.
User-friendly
So how can you improve operational efficiency in your customer communications? In last week’s blog ‘How to improve operational efficiency in multilingual and multibrand environments?’ we took a closer look at the added value a single communications platform provides for companies communicating in multiple languages and for multiple brands, like car importers which import multiple brands.
Car importers not only communicate for multiple brands in multiple languages, they also have to take into account the communications from local dealers. They want these dealers to maintain close connection with their clientele through customer communications, but only if these communications are developed with the same templates and correspond with corporate branding. However, local dealers often use their own templates to generate customer communications, causing the importer to lose grip on how they communicate and the chances on brand consistency to dwindle.
If these local dealers were to use the same single customer communications platform with the same templates, they could make adjustments to communications specific to their dealership without straying away from corporate branding. As this platform is user-friendly, programming skills aren’t required. Long waits on IT become a thing of the past. As such operational efficiency would increase a lot, while deployment time-to-market would be heavily reduced.
Everybody’s gain
However, a user-friendly communications platform not only benefits business users, it impacts your entire company. But how exactly?
IT is often burdened with template management. Even the smallest of changes require a lot of time and effort, while on many occasions other important tasks have to be put on hold. Decreasing the complexity of your customer communications platform and automating as many processes as possible, will help boost efficiency and increase business empowerment.
Also a business strategy level efficiency is a key factor. Wasting time on small adjustments is a cardinal sin, as this will lengthen your time-to-market. Saving time and expenses while increasing the revenue should be the main goal. As a more user-friendly customer communications platform enables business users to make changes themselves, IT can spend their time more efficiently. As a result, the time-to-market will shorten and customers will hear from you sooner than ever.
Finally, for your sales and business teams nothing is more important than providing the customer with a satisfactory customer experience. As they are usually the ones who do the talking and know how to interact with your customers, it’s evident that commercial employees should always be able to manage communications. Because their IT skills are less developed, it’s key you provide a user-friendly tool to enable them to make changes themselves.