Optimizing Customer Communications: You Don’t Have to Choose Between Production Efficiency & CX

This is a guest article from Crawford Technologies, a valued BCC Software partner.

There is no question that organizations understand the importance of operational efficiency when it comes to producing and delivering customer communications. Creating documents to maximize productivity, ensure compliance, and reduce costs has always been a critical priority – and it is even more critical given current pressures. But increasingly as customers show a willingness to walk away from companies that deliver mediocre customer experience, businesses are also recognizing that to maintain customer loyalty and continued growth, they must deliver an exceptional CX. They see that the documents used to communicate with their customers are central to strong customer relationships and therefore play an important role in the CX equation. In fact, according to a recent study from Aspire, organizations that invested in CCM platforms that drive better CX reported 41% faster revenue growth.

Document Re-Engineering to Improve CX

While print and mail organizations typically rely on legacy systems to create customer-facing communications and use document re-engineering to enable production optimization, document producers can also leverage that same re-engineering solution to enhance those communications to be more relevant and personalized to enhance customer experience.

Here are ways communications providers can leverage a document re-engineering tool to efficiently and cost-effectively enhance pre-composed documents to drive both operational efficiency and a positive CX.

Operational Efficiency & Compliance

“Print-ready” files can present a number of challenges for print and mail operations. Without access to the source programs used to compose the documents, it can be challenging to change the format of the documents they receive to optimize print and finishing, to ensure accurate processing, or to make last minute changes to a logo or a legal disclaimer. Document re-engineering software is usually the best, and often the only way, operations can successfully modify documents to address these requirements.

Whether you need to manage the increased volume of small jobs or to split large files to process them simultaneously on multiple devices, re-engineering can modify precomposed documents to help maximize device utilization and productivity.

To ensure accurate and high integrity processing, document re-engineering provides the ability to easily add the right production marks and barcodes, such as a 2D barcode. These same integrity features can enable piece level tracking or file-base inserting, not only ensuring the accurate assembly of each mailpiece and compliance with relevant industry regulations, but also enhancing overall productivity.

Personalization

The same document re-engineering software that enhances documents to optimize print and mail can also maximize the value of those customer communications by making them more relevant and personalized – and the good news is that small changes in the documents can have a big impact on customer relationships. Enhancing or re-engineering transactional communications to ensure the content is clear and easy to understand with relevant charts, graphics, and messaging have resulted in not only improving customer relationships but also reducing calls to customer service which can be a significant cost to organizations.

Postal Optimization

Personalization can not only enhance CX, but it also allows mailers to optimize their postal savings. By enhancing customer communications with relevant personalized color transpromotional marketing messages, mailers can take advantage of the USPS® Personalized Color Transpromo incentive offering an upfront discount through the end of 2020.

Additionally, besides creating higher density mailings by combining jobs, re-engineering solutions can also handle the tricky tasks of extracting address block data for processing by postal software to improve address accuracy and therefore qualify for lower postage rates. This simplifies operations such as address standardization, presorting, and most importantly inserting the standardized data back into the correct document for faster and accurate delivery.

Digital Communications

With the increasing demand for digital communications, organizations need solutions that provide a straightforward method for reengineering and manipulating fully composed data streams to work in modern digital application. This may include eliminating machine barcodes and banner pages, redacting PII information to support regulatory compliance, and adding in additional messaging, graphics, or hyperlinks without having to make expensive and time-consuming changes upstream in the applications that generated the communication.

One Solution to Improve Operational Efficiency and CX

As you can see, document producers can leverage re-engineering to quickly change documents and accelerate the benefits of improved customer experiences. There is no process disruption and document operations can make the improvements themselves without requiring IT resources. The bottom line is that a document re-engineering solution like Crawford Technologies Operations Express is often the quickest and least-expensive path to improved customer relationships.

Operations Express employs advanced internal automation to efficiently normalize and optimize fully composed documents to enable production optimization by adding integrity barcodes, combining small jobs, and generating postal sorting logic. It also supports CX initiatives by enhancing documents with color, logos, graphics, personalized messaging, and more to transform source files into mobile-ready, HTML5 and/or print ready files for distribution via print and digital channels.

There is no better time to consult your CrawfordTech and BCC Software Representative, so we can help find new ways to optimize operational efficiency and improve your CX.