Like any good relationship, clear and regular communication is vital in the realm of financial services. Today, your customers have so many choices as to who they bank with or select as an insurer, so it’s imperative that you maintain clear lines of communication with them.
However, the truth is that many financial services organizations struggle to adapt their customer communications to the digital world. While most have achieved some level of digital customer engagement, many core banking platforms don’t natively support digital communications.
That’s where the right customer communication management (CCM) solution can make all the difference.
In this article, we’ll explore the transformative power of CCM platforms for financial services organizations and provide some tips for selecting the right solution for your firm.
What Is CCM?
CCM is a strategy through which organizations streamline and accelerate how they create, deliver, store, and update their communications with customers.
A CCM software or platform helps streamline customer communications to ensure that they’re personalized, interactive, and capable of driving profitable customer conversations. Read our full guide to CCM here.
CCM for Financial Services
Banks, insurers, and other financial services providers generate a variety of communications to interact with their customers. This includes everything from letters, policy updates, account statements, claims correspondence, and renewal notifications to communications about new products and services.
Effective CCM is particularly important for financial services organizations as theirs is a highly regulated industry. There are several compliance rules governing how they use and store customer data – and these are typically complex and dynamic.
CCM offers financial services firms a means to communicate compliantly with their customer through the most appropriate channels, including letters, emails, phone calls, mobile, SMS, social media, and web interfaces.
The Pros and Cons of Using CCM for Financial Services
Let’s take a closer look at the key advantages of using CCM in financial services, as well as some of its potential drawbacks.
Pros
Send Personalized, On-Demand Customer Communications
CCM empowers your service desk or front office personnel to generate and distribute personalized communications for your customers in real-time. You can reach out to your customers without being limited by defined communication schedules.
Grow Your Customer Base
CCM gives you the means to target new prospects and tailor your offers, which increases up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Because you can send quotations and proposals faster, your chances of acquiring new customers are greater.
Lower Your Operating Costs
CCM platforms allow you to automate the generation and distribution of large volumes of complex correspondence while eliminating the need to rely on manual paper and postage, the costs of which can quickly add up.
Enhance Your Customer Experience
CCM gives your customers more options as to how they engage with you, and you can communicate with them through their preferred channels. For example, the self-service features of CCM tools allow customers to access documents anywhere at any time. You can reduce customer wait times and minimize the chances of human error. All this makes for a more pleasant experience for your customers, which in turn will increase your customer satisfaction and retention rates.
Reduce Your Business Risk
As we touched on earlier, financial services is a highly regulated industry. A good CCM platform will help you ensure you remain compliant with the regulations to which you’re bound and that you’re well-prepared for periodic audits.
Reduce Manual Effort
The automation embedded in CCM tools eases your teams’ manual workload. This relieves employees’ stress and drives greater communication consistency and productivity.
Improve Internal Collaboration
CCM provides a consolidated framework that allows your internal teams (such as marketing, sales, and customer service representatives) to interact quickly and easily across various touchpoints using a standardized user interface.
Cons
Cost Considerations
While the right CCM tool will save you money in the longer term, getting budgetary approval for the investment might be difficult in a climate where IT budgets are tight. Over and above the initial outlay, there may be costs associated with integrating the tool with your other enterprise systems.
User Adoption
Bear in mind that not all of your employees are tech-savvy, and while the best CCM tools are designed with usability in mind, you must be prepared to deal with an initial push-back. Many people are uncomfortable with change, so it’s important to support employees as they familiarize themselves with the CCM system.
Lack of In-House IT Expertise
Not every financial services organization has the internal IT skills required to deploy, integrate, and manage a CCM platform. If that’s the case, engaging a CCM consulting partner that can help your IT team step through this process is a sensible idea. This will avoid costly rework and potential user and customer frustration.
Finding the Right CCM Software for Financial Services
CCM tools offer a rich suite of features and functionality. However, at a minimum, we recommend that you look for a solution that offers the following for your financial services organization:
Consolidated Statements
Your CCM tool should support the unified creation of multiple types of statements, for example, bank account and credit card statements, home loan statements, and brokerage statements.
Customer Onboarding Kits
Your CCM tool should make it quick and easy to generate personalized welcome kits for new customers. These kits will likely comprise welcome letters, product and service brochures, and terms and conditions booklets.
Security
In the world of financial services, security cannot be considered an afterthought. For this reason, many firms opt for a hybrid cloud SaaS approach. This allows them to keep their customer and other sensitive data safely behind their firewall while still enjoying the flexibility of the cloud.
Compliance
Look for a CCM solution that comes with pre-built compliance functionalities. This will allow you to avoid the risks of non-compliance, such as financial fines, loss of customer trust, and reputational damage.
CCM Solutions from WayPath
WayPath offers consultancy services and tailored software offerings that put financial services organizations on the fast track to improving their critical business operations, enhancing productivity, and delivering quality services to their customers.
We help our financial services clients actualize innovations, speed up time to market, and achieve tangible business results in a highly competitive landscape.
Our digital enablement CCM solutions, proven development processes, and agile guiding frameworks are perfect for:
- Retail banking
- Corporate banking
- Investment banking
- Mortgage banking
- Cards and payments
- Wealth management
- Insurance
- Exchanges and brokerages
- Loan and credit service providers
- FinTech organizations
- Governance, risk management, and compliance
We’re here to help you transform your customer communications and drive top-line revenue and profitability.
Learn more about our approach or get in touch.
