Customer Communications Management 2.0: Optimizing the Customer/Channel Mix

Posted by Bernie Gracy on December 03, 2009 in Customer Communications

I have had the privilege of working with some of the largest corporations and premier brands in the world in the strategy, conception, design, and implementation of a customer communications management platform. These efforts typically encompassed integrating customer master data, billing streams, regulatory content, marketing and promotional content, and relationship management content in physical and electronic form; and then developing the people, processes, and technology to create, produce, and distribute these communications to literally tens of millions of customers per month. Moreover these initiatives typically involved building coalitions within our customer’s organization – usually Marketing, IT, and Operations.

However, as our Twitter experiment at the World Innovation Forum demonstrated – the explosion of new mobile channels, wireless B2B, B2C, and C2C social networking, global e-commerce, and a fresh look at an enterprise’s brick and mortar retail network are rewriting the rules on Customer Communications Management.

In this economic climate – there has never been a more strategic imperative than optimizing the customer channel mix.

In the early part of this decade two major Infotech advisory firms had predicted that by 2006-2007 companies would shift from multi-channel infrastructure integration to continuous optimization of their customer and channel mix via closed-loop analytics. Some of this has come true. Within Pitney Bowes, we are helping customers optimize the mix of high volume transactional communications in physical and electronic form – helping our customers determine which channel mix provides an optimal return on cost based on line of business, production, postal, and consumer drivers. We are helping customers in retail and consumer banking optimize the customer/channel mix based on drive time decay profiles – helping marketing determine which customers and prospects are within a trade area, and based on product, service, or merchandise categories determine if a prospect’s call to action should be driven to a brick and mortar channel or an online channel. We are helping customers optimize the customer/channel mix by household – developing solutions to consolidate the number of mailpieces to a given address to lower cost. Moreover we are deploying solutions to optimize the marketing mix – creating the ability to reduce direct mail to existing customers by merging targeted promotional content into their bills and statements using our extensive location intelligent transpromotional communication capabilities.

Now with the advent of social networking technology and changes in buyer habits the optimization challenge is becoming increasingly more complex. In the customer optimization scenarios I just painted – our customer is largely in control of the mix optimization. But more and more – it is the customer’s customer who is in control of the mix optimization. What is emerging is the need for participation in numerous buyer communities vs. just optimizing two or three inbound and outbound channels. Customer relationship management which encompassed correspondence, direct mail, e-newsletters, and e-mail now include Tweets and community-based relationship management. Moreover, the concept of a rhythmic monthly customer communication and cyclical or seasonal campaigns must now also encompass dynamic real time ongoing conversations between brands and their community of customers and prospects.

The reality is that businesses will always be faced with multi-channel infrastructure integration as well as continuous optimization of the customer/channel mix – ad infinitum. Innovation will fuel the creation of new channels, new applications, and new business and consumer processes. And economics will fuel the need to create customer and shareholder value by optimizing the customer/channel mix that provides the best return on cost as well as delivery of value.

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Tags: customer communications management, social media