So why is this so important to the telecommunications industry? For starters, the focus on customer retention has never been greater and having poor quality data can greatly hinder your customer relationships and influence customers to churn. For example, sending a promotional mailer to a current customer encouraging them to switch to your service shows them you don’t truly understand your customer base and which products they already have.  In addition,  your marketing costs increase with no ROI to show for it!

Besides quality, the location of customer data is another concern. Often times data exists in multiple databases which makes it difficult to track all customer interactions  throughout the organization. It becomes extremely difficult to compile, tabulate and analyze the data to turn the information into actionable insight. The goal is to create a single, integrated view of all customer activity, tracking all customer interactions across channels and touchpoints and make that data available to all stakeholders. Doing so enables you to achieve a 360 degree view of each customer, enabling you to precisely target products and services to current customers, acquire more profitable customers, reduce marketing costs, improve customer satisfaction and maximize lifetime value.

Do you have a 360 view of each customer? How would your rank the quality of your data?

Check out this free whitepaper which examines how inaccurate data can impact customer relationships and how implementing a multi-phase process can help feed cleaner customer data into enterprise solutions to maximize ROI for telecommunications providers.

Why the shift towards a customer centric model? Well for starters the focus on customer retention has never been greater, as telcos continue to slug it out for keeping customers on their network. By being customer centric at each interaction point, telecoms can communicate the messages most relevant to a particular customer and create a customized experience that shows the customer that you truly understand their needs.

Pitney Bowes Software Teams with Industry Leaders

The CMO Council, Pitney Bowes Software, and marketing executives from leading telecom providers teamed up for a three–part series to discuss new requirements that will aid in creating effective retention marketing strategies and enhancing the customer experience.  The CMO Council, is an organization dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought leadership and personal relationship building among senior corporate marketing leaders.  Together we hosted a series of webinars to bring the telecom marketing community together to discuss enhancing the customer experience by analyzing past customer behavior. The series is now available on-demand.

Optimizing Value and Indentifying Your Most Valuable Customer 
Featuring: AT&T – VP of Marketing, Business & Home Solutions  

The Evolution of the Customer Driven Offer
Featuring: MetroPCS – VP of Advertising & Brand Development

FirstCare’s offerings also included government programs such as Medicaid which meant the Company required a document management system that could ensure the accuracy of member ID cards and policy documents, meeting stringent federal healthcare specifications.

After conducting a market survey of available providers, FirstCare decided on our EngageOne Communication Suite, providing the Company with a single flexible environment for all aspects of publication design and review. As a result, FirstCare saves time, resources and money by catching any errors on the ID cards prior to printing.

To read more on how the implementation of DOC1 and e2 Vault has helped FirstCare visit:

http://www.pbinsight.com/resources/case-studies/details/firstcare

• One of the most interesting points is that more than 50 percent of health plans will invest in trigger-based communications to prompt consumers to take action.
  • Trigger-based communications use data analytics to detect a consumer’s current status, and automatically initiate relevant communications to inspire consumer action.
• According to the study, only 50 percent of health plans surveyed indicated that their organizations considered consumer communications a strategic initiative.
  • However, they also report increasing investments aimed at better consumer engagement
  • The absence of a coordinated communication strategy becomes a liability as health plans execute more and more communications from multiple departments and business units.
• Other key findings include:
  • Process integration and multichannel delivery are top of the agenda for healthcare IT execs, supporting the move from paper and phone to more diverse channels.
  • Health plans have not adopted efficient and cost-effective communication models and are not yet leveraging new channels preferred by consumers.
  • The concept of a senior corporate executive responsible for managing and executing an enterprise-wide coordinated communication strategy is only just emerging.

To read Health Payer Communications:  Strategies for Engagement, please visit http://slp.pbinsight.com/info/idc-survey.

We’ve found that engaging consumers in the most effective and relevant ways and improving member behavior are critical focus areas for health care organizations.  Health care organizations are constantly challenged at the enterprise level in focusing and coordinating their customer and member communications.

It is our goal at the event to share with attendees how our customized solutions can streamline the document creation and delivery processes, facilitate compliance, and enable personalized multi-channel communication delivery and analytics to influence patient and member behavior while improving outcomes.

If you are at the World Healthcare Congress and would like to learn more about our solutions visit Pitney Bowes at Booth #304 or visit our website at www.pb.com for more information.   Also, you can learn more about the World Health Care Congress at: http://www.worldcongress.com/events/HR12000/

]]> http://blogs.pb.com/pbsoftware/2012/04/16/customer-communications-strategies-and-solutions-at-world-health-care-congress/feed/ 0 http://blogs.pb.com/pbsoftware/2012/04/09/more-secrets-to-reducing-churn-back-to-cutting-weight/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=more-secrets-to-reducing-churn-back-to-cutting-weight http://blogs.pb.com/pbsoftware/2012/04/09/more-secrets-to-reducing-churn-back-to-cutting-weight/#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:36:00 +0000 Phil Sidoti http://blogs.pb.com/pbsoftware/?p=11289 A few months ago, I drew an analogy between focusing in on “super foods” for more effective weight-loss efforts, and on “super customers”—the ones who are primed to be positively persuaded to do something different.  That earlier post demonstrated how you could cut back on unproductive communications expenses—and I had promised to revisit this topic:

The best “weight-loss campaigns” combine both diet and exercise.

The best retention efforts focus on the right customers—and they maintain smart regime that trims the fat from retention expenditures to generate greater ROI.  Like any good exercise program, this regime has got to be a right fit for the company and its customers:  neither too strenuous nor too lax and quite disciplined.  In business terms, it’s a paradigm shift from a campaign focus to one that looks longer term at customer lifetime value.  In exercise parlance, you may want to think of this as a change in company lifestyle.

This new company lifestyle is more customer-focused

It prescribes communications in moderation and in a disciplined fashion, adhering to customer preferences for frequency and channel, and limiting them to areas that are truly relevant to the customers they address.  Even with the company’s best customers, this means not taking the standard “Sure, why not?” response to every campaign through every channel.  By taking a more measured approach, the goal is to strike a balance that neither strains nor neglects the customer relationship—but instead tones it up for optimal performance.

This is important for two reasons for this approach:

1. If you send too many messages, you dilute the power of the ones with highest potential.
2. The bigger risk: if you send too many messages customers may physically or mentally opt-out altogether.  Opt-out cuts off your communication stream and therefore, the potential for future sales.

You can learn more about the risks of opt-out through this article in Chief Marketer by my colleague Jeff Nicholson to understand how this can really reduce customer lifetime value.

Now, to apply moderation and discipline in ways that really work requires taking a more holistic view of the customer relationship.  Most companies are organized in silos… for different channels, for different lines of business.  The issue: this fragmented approach provides a fragmented view of each customer—and a fragmented, disjointed perspective on customer needs.

Claims of customer centricity have been bandied about a lot by the telecommunications industry.  And, to quote Forrester, “Customer experience optimization is the key to business success in all industries.” However, fitness measures, such as customer trust, are woefully low; and research indicates that only the biggest telcos are making customer experience improvements a focal point of their regime.

A first personal training session at the gym starts with a physical assessment of fitness and questions about what you want to accomplish with your exercise plan.  Making much needed customer experience improvements can be approached much the same way: looking at an organization across the board, sizing up its strengths and weaknesses, and coming up with a plan that is going to make its customer relations look, feel and be more productive.

Usually, this means getting down to basics with a coordinated approach to improving overall health; and the basics for better relationship health are comprised of:

1. Better data
2. Better, faster data sharing across the organization
3. Better use of that data in analytics for smart customer segmentation, careful messaging prioritization, and real-time decisioning that can direct customer conversations, and establish effective customer dialogues

Many telcos feel that these changes require the equivalent of major surgery; but, like fitness programs, there are ways to manage these changes in a modular, scalable fashion that will help to very significantly change organizational lifestyle, and customer experience.

To learn more about improving customer relations for better ROI and extended customer lifetime values, you can find much more on this topic in this webinar: The Secret to Reducing Churn.

Click on the link to register: http://www.insurancenetworking.com/web_seminars/-29883-1.html

While the customer communications landscape is evolving, we’ve been offering our expertise to help companies take full advantage of both existing and emerging technologies. Some of the solutions we’ve been highlighting at our booth include:

Our presort services that can help organizations expedite First-Class™ letters and flats and Standard Mail®, increase postage discounts, and gain visibility into the movement of their mail.

•  Our SendSuite® Live solution, the first scalable, web-based shipping management program designed for the desktop, mailroom, or warehouse to help customers manage shipping costs, provide visibility into their shipping operation, and enable greater efficiencies by integrating into e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and eBay.
•  Finally, we’ve been discussing our solutions in color printing, mail finishing, sorting, and software solutions, which can help high volume mailers discover ways to lower costs and add value to each mail piece to better connect with customers. The recently introduced Reliant™ Sorting Solution, for instance, can process a variety of incoming and outgoing mail for reduced costs.

We’ve had a great time discussing our mailing and shipping innovations with some of the attendees. To learn more about our growing suite of customer communications management and mailing solutions for businesses visit: http://www.pb.com/services/Print-Management/Customer-Communications-Management/index.shtml

Hosted by Insurance Networking News, “The New Age of Customer Centric Marketing” webinar series will focus on helping insurance carriers acquire, serve and grow their customer base.

Click on the link to register: http://www.insurancenetworking.com/subscribe/series.html?product_id=29881&requested_product=29882

Results announced last week from an international telecommunications study echo this:  “Operators see bundled services—where the customer can choose their preferred content, third-party services, voice and data services—as a commercial necessity.”

Not a surprising turn of events as bundling is convenient for customers and a better financial bet for telecommunications companies.

The challenge, however, lies in marketing bundles better.

Today’s customers are none too happy with the service they receive from their telecoms.  Some have been slammed by overage charges; most find themselves confused and frustrated in the face of the hundreds of different bundle options CSPs present.  The fact is that past experience has left many consumers gun shy.

Issues with bundling and price confusion are, in fact, the key reasons that consumers express a lack of satisfaction with and mistrust of telecommunications companies.

So what’s a smart telecom to do?  Put its data to work!

Customer Bundle Optimization is a process that automates the business of matching customers to bundles. For existing customers, it taps into past usage patterns, queues up key questions, and helps telecoms to align bundles with customer needs—in a way that telecoms can clearly articulate to customers. For new customers, customer-supplied data inputs can drive real-time recommendations that better align with customer needs.  Overall, this automated approach to ensuring that customers get what they pay for—and pay for what they get—is advantageous to telecoms and consumers alike.

Customer Bundle Optimization, like other smart analytic solutions, focuses on lifetime customer value—not a quick revenue boost or “hail-mary” save in the face of customer attrition.  It enables both proactive and reactive retention efforts; and, it helps start new relationships off on firmer footing.

Think of it this way: telecoms today can have literally hundreds of different price/product packages, bundles that can even vary by the day. And each consumer can have so many different preferences and needs. Asking a rep (or a customer for that matter) to manually pick the right fit?  They’ll find it daunting, frustrating, and tough to get right.

With less than half of consumers in a recent study answering positively about their telecommunications providers when asked whether they feel satisfied with the treatment, the relationship and service they receive, and competition increasing as industry growth gets more focused on data, telcos are facing an important challenge.  The risk is commoditization. The opportunity lies in service differentiation via customized bundled offers.

Already, some of the largest telcos have put bundle optimization solutions into place with significant success.  It’s worth more than a look, and this whitepaper is a good place to start: Defending Revenue through Customer Centric Pricing: Leveraging Customer Behavior Modeling to Optimize Bundled Offers