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The all-important customer communication experience

By Suzanne Franco, Surveys Editorial Project Manager at ITWeb.
Johannesburg, 29 Feb 2016
Huinink believes that customer communications is a key topic to cover as part of the digital transformation efforts/strategy.
Huinink believes that customer communications is a key topic to cover as part of the digital transformation efforts/strategy.

Smart customer engagement, in whichever form, is now more important in today's competitive climate than ever. The success of an organisation depends heavily on how well you understand and communicate with your customers.

On this note, Kofax in partnership with ITWeb, is conducting online Smart Customer Engagement Survey during February and March to gain valuable insight into the customer communications strategies within South African organisations.

"An important reason for undertaking this Smart Customer Engagement Survey is to better understand what the key drivers are for our site visitors around their customer communications preferences," says, Jeroen Huinink, Vice President, VP Product Marketing at Lexmark Enterprise Software.

In Huinink's opinion there are a number of factors that can contribute to the success of an organisation's customer communications strategy.

"For customer engagement it is essential to have a clear vision and strategy based on business requirements and business drivers," he explains.

Huinink also says that customer communications should be business owned and business managed.

"Having a single consolidated platform that can support your communication vision and strategy is also an important factor," he adds.

He also points out that there are also a few factors that can contribute to the failure of an organisation's customer communications strategy, such as, focussing on a single channel or single business line.

"It's important to include your channel partners in your customer communications strategy," Huinink adds,"and you should also consider the required cultural changes and involve the line of business managers so it's not an IT-only project.

According to Huinink there are a number of technologies that are currently being used for customer communications within organizations, which includes document composition solutions; output management solutions; print stream management; email campaign solutions and automated email solutions.

"These home-grown solutions are a threat to the digital transformation since they often lack multi-channel capabilities or are hard to manage and maintain which means users spend more time on template and content management than necessary." He adds.

Huinink also believes that customer communications is a key topic to cover as part of the digital transformation efforts/strategy.

"If you cannot reach out to your customer digitally, why would you expect them to respond that way," he says. "An effective digital transformation takes this into account and allows flexibility and a growth-path to digital for the organisation and its customers." Huinink concludes.

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