The modern workplace expects more “jack of all trades” than specialists. It’s not a new phenomenon in traditional customer communications management (CCM) for an individual to wear multiple hats – performing more than one role to provide the most value to a business. The roles and responsibilities around data normalization, programming communications layouts and adding business rules, as well as managing the CCM infrastructure and orchestration of communication creation through delivery, are highly technical tasks; putting a heavy dependency on IT teams. Increasing concerns around security, expanding business operations, infrastructure management, cloud deployments, and more, adds to the responsibility of IT, and the cost of operations.
With the shift to cloud based CCM solutions operating with microservices and thin client user experiences, is there a case for business users to take the pressure off IT, and take over some of these responsibilities? The answer in this case can be a resounding yes given the right tools in the hands of the appropriate team members.
How is your business organized today regarding your communication creation?
Customer communication creation tools have evolved quickly, but not all businesses are as quick to adopt newer, timely and cost-effective approaches to this side of their business. For many, the process of communication content management, creation and delivery is still very much the job of a set of specialized folks within the company. These ‘hats’ are template designers, operations teams and IT staff with a myriad of tools and constraints to manage while they make the regular updates requested of them to maintain consistent and relevant content output for the customer. Depending on the size of the company, this approach can become a bottleneck. When business and marketing professionals need to communicate something important to customers, it can be frustrating to wait for IT to make changes—the content is ready, the time is right, but it can’t be sent. Often, when the communication does go out, that window of opportunity may have passed, or the message has lost some relevance. Companies know that the quality, timeliness, and accuracy of those communications greatly impact consumer perception and sentiment.
It would make sense to empower someone else to carry out some of these tasks and duties. So, is there a hat that fits here? Certainly! With many financial services organizations looking to shift their customer communications strategy and update their legacy systems to more modern, often cloud-based, solutions, the opportunity is there to realign your expertise around the tools you use. And modern CCM systems offer that very opportunity to distribute the content experts accordingly.
Having a traditional communication designer create and manage the basis of any communication is still critical. Certain things will always be outside of the scope of a typical business user, such as enabling output delivery channels and configuring data inputs. But a shared environment, tailored to each persona in a communication development and maintenance scenario, allows users to simplify customer communication processes and easily create, change, and personalize marketing and business content within the boundaries of their role. Business users know their communication content better than anyone else. So, if you had a tool that allowed them to contribute that content, manage versioning, design for new channels, map data from multiple systems and apply rules around the same data that your IT developers were using, and do all this within your organization’s regulatory requirements, why wouldn’t you want your CCM hats shared?
What about communication orchestration and delivery?
Involving business users in communications orchestration – the collection of processes required from data receipt through delivery – can help optimize production in a single job run. Trying to get IT scheduled to add new channels like push notifications or WhatsApp can be a challenge with other security or maintenance workload; sometimes taking months. Giving more of this responsibility to an operations team that can manage creating new design layouts for the latest channels, mapping data from new sources to incorporate into designs and configuring the orchestration delivery channel while also testing the new output before moving to production, enables agility in responding to new channel preferences as quickly as possible, improving the overall customer experience.
The natural next step is to give business users real time control over communication job management. The ability to watch for incoming communication payloads, monitor how these jobs are progressing, troubleshoot any errors in real time, generate job reports, and more optimizes operations processes by giving the teams responsible for these tasks direct control. While IT may want to maintain control over the overall CCM systems infrastructure, the data and communications running through it are best managed by the operations teams most familiar with the processes being executed. Additional post job analysis or auditing are also tasks that with the right tools, the appropriate business users can easily access the information they need to report on.
The bottom line? Enable business users to improve customer experience
Business user empowerment is not just an opportunity to take some pressure off IT resources who have a growing list of responsibilities to manage. It is putting the control over the customer experience that is better suited to a business user and giving these personas the tools to react and respond to opportunities that directly impact experience and satisfaction. From being able to quickly pull in new data sources to increase the value and impact of messaging in a communication, to quickly add new communication channels, business users should have the ability to put these changes into daily operations; allowing IT resources to focus on more critical technical and security responsibilities.
See why 9 of the 10 top Fortune 500 life insurers and 7 out of the top 10 global banks use OpenText Experience Cloud for communications. Learn more about how OpenText was named a leader for five years running on the Aspire Leaderboard.
