The Governance Perspective

Corporate Governance leaders both in the Utilities and Telecoms sectors understand the challenges of ensuring customer communications are technically accurate, clear and not mis-leading. With multiple systems all generating such customer focused output, keeping on top of every document that is sent can be a significant challenge. This is made more so given the close scrutiny of the regulator and the challenge on operating budgets.

Even the most rewarding of investment institutions recognise that their fund managers may occasionally seek pastures new, increasing the importance of full record of all correspondence and client interactions enabling a continuity of institution/client relationship.  Corporate governance, management of risk exposure and litigation defence rely increasingly on preservation of all customer communication ­ whether by letter, e-mail, SMS or call centre interaction. But even if everything is digitally stored, how quickly can the appropriate documents be accessed when needed? Too often, the answer is ‘too long!’

Equally, any communication with customers must follow corporate standards particularly where legal compliance or business rules must be adhered to. However any customer communications management system must be both powerful enough to rapidly deploy any changes initiated by regulatory legislation or business change - and flexible enough to cater for fresh marketing initiatives and personalised customer contact.

The benefits of a comprehensive, responsive and properly implemented Customer Communications Management strategy for corporate governance include:

• Elimination of uncontrolled cost exposure to communication discovery
• Speed to launch global correspondence with material changes
• Downward management of litigation risks
• Easy absorption of necessary legislative compliance terms

In short, control of risk costs, minimisation of management distraction, speed to execute legal and rule changes.

At Icon UK we specialise in creating customer communications solutions, working with organisational leaders and senior management teams to guide them through the right choices to realise significant improvements in customer service, whilst ensuring regulatory compliance and substantial returns on investment - in some cases over 100% in year one…

Challenges

Lack of comprehensive management and capture of communications can result in:

• Exposure to litigation through simple errors in customer correspondence
• Uncontrolled cost exposure for “discovery” of communications in the event of litigation
• Potential loss of complete customer interactions’ picture
• Business impact of time to implement regulatory changes
• Competitive impact of time to deploy marketing initiatives

All leading to additional costs, customer dissatisfaction and negative market image…

Being able to communicate to customers clearly, accurately and relevant way whilst remaining within operational budgets is a key challenge:

• Document content must be technically accurate, drawing together multiple sources of data to present to the customer quotes, projections and scenarios in way that is compelling to the individual and their circumstances.
• Documentation must be clear, unambiguous and well presented, while at the same time being technically correct. This requires careful drafting, with systems that provide re-use of existing approved content. It also enables a clearly auditable path from staff writing customer communications to those reviewing them
• The historic introduction of new products, systems and merger impacts means there is often a complex array of core policy based systems. These can range from the latest web based systems to those over 20 years old. Most have their own document generation tools. Since these are often different, keeping these multiple systems all compliant is costly and time consuming.
• Presenting consistent branding and appearance for documents and electronic communications is challenging due to such complexity and systems duplication. It is too easy to make fundamental mistakes in output processing, or overlook critical system performance issues when implementing changes.

Against the backdrop of these challenges, Governance leaders in this sector need to an enterprise tool that will tackle these issues whilst under the watchful eye of regulators such as the OFWAT, OFGEM and OFCOM. This means not only is their reputation and customer confidence at risk, but they may be subject to fines and loss of operating licences if these issues are not dealt with promptly and satisfactorily.

How Icon Helps

Icon Suite offers Utilities and Telecoms organisations the opportunity to address all these challenges in one solution platform. Practically every type of document can be flexibly constructed from pre-approved templates, incorporating powerful re-use and multi-lingual features. The types of output that can be produced include almost every style possible including Order confirmations, Policies, Statements, Customer Self-Service, Correspondence and Agent Communications.

Different modes of customer engagement are supported: pre-planned, interactive or on-demand across all media types. Through deploying this platform, with transformational change and operational services where required, we help organisations change the way they engage with customers. Customers can benefit from highly personalised, flexible and positive experiences they are pleased to recommend to others.

The use of customer communications management to minimise risk and enhance corporate governance in the Utilities and Telecoms sectors is wide ranging.

Examples include:

• full 360⁰ view of all customer related correspondence, structured and unstructured, even buried in discrete silos, relevant to a particular situation, easily retrievable and easy to act on ­ vital to address litigation
• one local change with global reach ­ add or modify a key term to meet legal obligations and have the term perpetuated through all relevant documents and interactions
• respond to customer requests ­ self-service, call centre or written, with complete audit trail of interactions ­ a one hit response to customer queries helping to eliminate spurious complaints early
• Social Media collaboration is enabled as the ‘command and control’ governance approach of the ‘Systems of Record’ era morphs into the ‘Systems of Engagement’ era, helping a new future to be carved out with personalised but compliant customer communications.

Icon UK can assist in the all areas related to improving customer communications including:

Icon UK’s Customer Communications Management solutions can deliver these benefits ­ and more besides. Companies that engage Icon find they can understand what customer communications are really costing and translate this into a compelling Return on Investment case. By investing in the right solutions they can improve content and policy control, increased customer loyalty and achieve top-quartile performance in customer communications management. In doing so they develop a robust platform for meeting both strategic objectives [such as rapidly re-branding following restructuring] and tactical delivery [such as large scale personalised messaging on a multi-lingual, multi-country, multi-channel mass communication basis delivered cost-effectively].

Some of the world’s largest and leading service organisations use our technology solutions. Call us to find out how we can help your organisation.