Logistics and Transportation Firms Go for Quality Service

Liberalization and deregulation of the EU market has opened the flood gates for companies seeking to compete against the German railway industry. Newly established and foreign firms are increasingly on the attack against former state-owned railway enterprises directly on their home turf – while passengers are demanding better equipment, furnishings, comfort, information, and service.

Sector profile

Privatization and liberalization of the traditional railway industry has drastically stiffened the competition, allowing customers to pressurize competitors and pick and choose from among them.

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Challenge

It carries over five million passengers daily, who do not hesitate to make demands. Customer service staff thus end up producing up to 12,000 pieces of service correspondence daily to help resolve individual requests, expectations, suggestions, complaints, and problems. Manual processing of each query or correspondence would be totally out of the question.

This corporation has thus set up a team of 600 agents who use the legodo software, which features:

• Centralized editing to compose and manage texts in conformance with the CI.
• Alternative suggestions of texts used by agents, based on classification.
• Custom printing via a centralized system.

Highlights & added value

The legodo software allows centralized management of templates, texts, and images and enables customer service to automatically combine these to produce personalized correspondence.

When responding to a query, an agent uses legodo to access all the data on that customer stored in the company’s CRM system.

This approach offers numerous advantages:

• Standardized processes lower response times and costs per query.
• Maintenance of documents and templates by the responsible department relieves the IT unit from having to create complex templates.
• Documents are composed efficiently with all the proper predefined elements and information stored in the CRM system.
• Responses to customers are more personalized and different output channels are integrated.
• Customer communications are managed both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Over 600 employees of this leading service provider use the legodo software to produce more than 2.5 million pieces of customer correspondence annually.

Potential to Optimize Written Correspondence

This is an excerpt of our study report entitled, “CRM Expertise for Communicating With Customers,” which you may download by clicking here.

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Conventional solutions for customer communications are substandard

The time-to-market is the key factor that determines the success of a product and consequently that of related communications with customers. Therefore, an enterprise must coordinate its regular business activities with the IT department and quickly institute changes in its business processes. However, overlapping/conflicting processes could unduly delay internal processing, jeopardizing cost-effective communications with customers.

Responsive communications instead of mountains of paper

The time lost is in direct proportion to the rising volume of daily correspondence. Along with mountains of letters, the volume of correspondence via email is also exploding. In fact, emailing has become a burden in modern-day communications, more so than letters. A single email message seems to get less and less notice in this era of information overflow. The best way to draw the attention of a customer is succinctly put by the following maxim: send the right message, to the right person, at the right time, in the right context. The challenge faced by contemporary communications seeking to meet the needs of customers is to fulfill each element of this maxim.

Software for communicating with customers

The demand for new software for communicating with customers has risen, since conventional methods are unable to cope with the growth. At the same time though, users often strongly oppose new and highly specialized software. Instead, they demand their familiar MS Office Suite applications, and thus tend to shy away from learning new programs. It’s no wonder that most enterprises still continue to operate as before, a situation that calls for innovative solutions in the field of customer communications. The legodo communications platform is one such solution.

This is an excerpt of our study report entitled, “CRM Expertise for Communicating With Customers,” which you may download by clicking here.

Two Key Reasons to Have a Customer Communications Management (CCM) Platform

Every enterprise has its own reasons to set up a customer communications platform. The two most common grounds for such an action are elucidated below.

Interactive documents add value

Interactive documents can generate significant added value for an enterprise. This is quite evident, considering how many cases would benefit if a trained user needs only a few inputs or selections to modify or personalize a document. And that too without any programming whatsoever.

Few companies have so far been really active in this field. Modifying the content or layout of documents is a task typically assigned to the IT unit, which is expected to do this under its own budget and schedule. This approach, however, seriously undermines the expectations of customers, who simply want real-time communications. In response to these demands and the opportunities to gain market share, many vendors have now expanded their services in the field of interactive documents.

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The most common cases concern a uniform corporate image, which means having to prioritize the use of pictures, logos, brand-specific elements, the overall layout, and content in all correspondence. With regards to content, the key aspects are the degree of personalization, language, and contact information.

Multichannel management is cost effective

One of the crucial factors in CCM is the delivery or output of documents via electronic channels. Enterprises strive to fulfill this expectation of their customers via the following two fundamental approaches:

• Expanded processing options that facilitate dynamic creation of interactive documents, while clearly keeping templates, the content, and channels separate.

• A standard multichannel management strategy

Multiple channels allow customers to indicate their preferences on how and via which channels to communicate with the enterprise. This enables you, the enterprise, to tailor your approach to the needs and lifestyles of your customers, especially since people are now connecting with each other in new ways. Morgan Stanley Research found that over 800 million people connect on the Internet via social networks like facebook. Email, social media, and mobile apps have long since become common practice. Customers wish to interact with companies too over such channels.

Cost optimization also plays a decisive role in meeting the needs of customers. Therefore, multichannel solutions are becoming more common, driven by the growing importance of customer service.

CCM provides a central platform for an enterprise to control all correspondence via print, email, texting, social media, and Web portals. Systems for data handling and processing can easily be integrated into such a platform. Past projects have proven that realigning all communications can often help drastically chop the number of IT systems required: the outcome – synergies and optimized costs.

Coming soon in Part 3

In the last part of this series, we will focus on technical solutions in the field of CCM.