Organisations that are able to make the break and adopt technologies that enable digitisation of their business processes and customer engagement will move into the digital era ahead of their competitors.
Digital interaction between a business and its customers is not new, but in today’s era of everything online, it has become a business imperative.
Businesses have been using the web for two decades and sending bank statements and other personal documents by email for 15 years. Mobile apps have provided ways to view information and interact, even transact, directly with an organisation for the last five years. The concept of simply moving information from paper to digital is no longer innovative. The new frontier for customer experience in communication has moved to interactivity.
Initial moves to digitise communications saw the migration of traditional print processes to simple reproductions of the print documents in a static format. These were secured and emailed to the recipient or stored for access via a web portal.
That era has passed, and another shift is taking place in the customer communications management arena. The future of digital communication lies in providing an interactive, engaging, and useful digital experience that encourages a conversation between the business and the customer.
The new communication engagement is a dialogue and seeks to provide sufficient value so that the customer can largely service themselves.
For customers, this means the convenience, for example, of having immediate access to a year’s worth of tax documents without having to ask for assistance. Or the relief of having immediate access to an insurance policy when something happens, even if it’s not during business hours.
Today’s consumers are more digitally-savvy than ever before and require a much higher level of engagement with their own data. This is driving the next leap forward in customer communication by enabling customers to interact with a document in a way that allows the user to drive how the information is received, viewed and analysed.
A digital interactive experience will include features that empower the consumer, such as mobile payment options, graphing/sorting of data, digital forms, electronic signatures and for those that still like a physical record, the ability to generate a print version of the data.
A close second to interactivity and perhaps the foundation of the successful digitisation of processes is the absolute security of the personal information at all points in the digital journey. Customers need to be confident that any digital communication channel used to send or receive personal information is secure, and that their information cannot be compromised at any stage during the processing, transmission or storage of that data.
The future of customer communication is undeniably digital, and the future of digital communication is interactive and secure. Engaging your customers with every piece of communication should be a given, not a goal.