Why am I getting an email about scheduling a vaccine when I just picked up a prescription at that same location and they didn’t say anything about it?
Consumers get bombarded by marketing and transactional communications from businesses. The average person receives about 121 emails per day. One survey found that 63% of respondents reported receiving more than 10 emails from brands every day. However, 49.2% said they only open a few of those emails, and 8% said they don’t open any at all.
When commercial emails and texts are irrelevant, poorly timed or too frequent, they do more harm than good. Inbox clutter annoys consumers and makes it harder for brands to break through the noise and reach people via email or text. According to one survey, the top reasons people unsubscribe from email communications are:
- Getting too many emails from a brand (20% of respondents)
- Irrelevant email content (17.3%)
To tame the communication chaos and improve customer experience (CX), businesses need a communications control system that sends the right messages at the right time via the right channel.
Messaging Misfires: When Customer Communication Goes Wrong
Communication chaos occurs when brands bombard customers with messages that are irrelevant, poorly timed, conflicting or excessive.
Consider these messaging misfires:
Poorly timed: A bank customer receives an offer for an auto loan – one day after missing a credit card payment.
Irrelevant: A cable customer who has never watched ESPN gets an email promotion for a premium sports package.
Conflicting: A customer calls to report a problem with their internet service (something the telco knows about), and the interactive voice response system says, “did you know that you can now do everything online?” – rubbing salt in the wound.
Excessive: A patient receives three email and four text message appointment reminders, asking them to confirm an appointment that was already confirmed.
Communication Chaos Damages Customer Experience, Loyalty and Retention
Disconnected communications displease customers. Customers don’t want to be bombarded by messages—especially ones that don’t interest them. They expect brands to know who they are and what they need—and meet those needs. Irrelevant, mis-timed or conflicting messages tell customers that your business doesn’t know or care about their interests or needs.
According to a U.K. survey, consumers are frustrated by the lack of personalization in retailers’ communications. Most (69%) respondents reported that they receive irrelevant messages from retail brands, and 36% become “extremely frustrated” when companies use incorrect information in customer communication. Almost half (49%) of U.K. shoppers said their inbox gets bombarded, damaging their perception of the brand’s overall service. Almost a third (31%) get annoyed when brands communicate with them via channels they don’t want to use, while 22% are frustrated when they cannot contact brands through their preferred channels.
According to PwC, “experience is all about how an individual feels when interacting with your brand before, during and after a transaction.” If your brand’s communications frustrate and annoy customers, there goes the customer experience—and emotional loyalty. Dissatisfied customers take their business elsewhere. According to the PwC Customer Loyalty Survey, 55% of respondents said they would stop buying from a company that they otherwise liked after several bad experiences, and 8% said they would stop after just one bad experience.
Why Does Communication Chaos Occur?
When notifications create a poor CX, it’s usually due to one or several of these problems:
Data silos. When customer data is stored in different systems [e.g., customer relationship management (CRM), billing, contact center] that don’t share data, it is difficult to create a real-time customer profile that enables the coordination of messages.
Departmental silos. Departments have different–and sometimes competing–communication priorities. Marketing departments focus on planned campaigns, while customer service teams typically communicate to resolve problems. Sending marketing and customer service messages simultaneously is often counterproductive. A bank customer who just received a late payment notice for their mortgage isn’t a great prospect for an auto loan–however low the interest rate.
When several departments are involved in creating customer communications, the review and approval processes are challenging and time-consuming. During the review process, it’s crucial to be sure the next reviewer is looking at the correct version that includes all the previous revisions.
No decisioning engine. When there’s no real-time decisioning engine to run rules and business logic, it is difficult—if not impossible—to deliver the right notifications at the right time via the customer’s preferred communication channel.
These barriers prevent businesses from orchestrating notifications that are intelligent and context-driven—elements required for personalized communications that satisfy customers.
Take Control of Communications With CSG
To communicate effectively and reach the most desirable outcomes, you must control the:
Strategy. Understand the behaviors of your customers and optimize your communication strategy for maximum impact, by using a single platform for all customer interactions to provide a consistent journey with your brand.
Chaos. Never send an irrelevant message again. Send appropriate messages for real-time alerts and planned marketing campaigns. Use predictive artificial intelligence to create messages that are likely to trigger positive customer behavior.
Content. Send consistent, unified messages that match your brand’s voice and tone with shared communication templates. Deliver communications via each customer’s preferred channel (e.g., voice, email, SMS, print).
Message. Send the right personalized message by tailoring each notification based on customer context and decisioning. Draft consistent messaging regardless of channel within a single interface for greater visibility across teams.
Delivery. Trust the execution of your omnichannel customer communications strategy with a reliable engagement platform that delivers consistent messages across channels, in real time.
Tame the Chaos With Communications Control
To prevent communication chaos, you need an air traffic controller for customer communications that sends the right messages at the right time via the right channel, without sending too many or conflicting messages.
At an airport, planes approach the runways from all different directions, with the pilots not knowing who’s landing where. Without air traffic control, there is great potential for a collision or near miss. Similarly, when business communications come from different departments without each team knowing what other messages are being sent–or when–a collision is inevitable.
A customer engagement platform paired with journey orchestration acts like an air traffic controller for all communications. It prioritizes or suppresses messages for individual customers based on factors like recent interactions, marketing campaigns, preferences or real-time signals to prevent sending conflicting communications. For example, the system doesn’t send a “renew your contract” message to a customer who is in the middle of a service journey contesting a wireless bill. Someone who is complaining about a billing error won’t be eager to sign up for another year of mobile service.
Journey orchestration coordinates communication across print and digital channels. For example, banks are required to notify customers when their mortgage loan is paid in full. If the bank can prove that the customer opened an email notification, it doesn’t have to send a printed letter. If the email bounces or is unopened after three days, the journey orchestration (JO) system sends an automatic trigger to send out the mail piece.
A communications control system:
- Integrates customer data to create a unified customer profile across departments and systems that allows for relevant messages that don’t conflict with each other
- Coordinates messages across channels and departments to send fewer, more personalized and impactful messages at the right time
- Streamlines communication workflows across teams, departments and channels by allowing businesses to create, edit and share communication templates and assets in a single interface
CSG Xponent: More Control Means Less Communication Chaos
CSG Xponent, our industry-leading customer engagement platform, combines communications control with customer journey analytics and journey orchestration to guide customers to the next best action. Xponent Communications Control integrates siloed customer data to empower organizations to craft, edit and share communication templates and assets efficiently within a single intuitive interface, while managing the control and execution of your omnichannel communications for the most ideal customer outcomes.
Are you ready for harmonious customer communications?
Learn how CSG Xponent coordinates and controls customer communications for better CX, loyalty and retention.
