The Marketing & Communications Perspective

The past decade has witnessed increasing interaction between government bodies, the public and service providers. A constant challenge is that of providing accurate, timely and full information flows which satisfy the needs of the public and government alike, and serve both equally. This is also particularly true of departmental correspondence, compounded by the increasing public expectation of being able to select their choice of communications: whether such delivery is by post, email or SMS. These expectations constantly challenge traditional systems and processes for constant improvement in speed and precision.

Marketing and Communications leaders in the Public Sector understand the challenges of ensuring services are presented to service users and potential customers in a way that is both relevant and informative. Optimising the marketing mix has never been more challenging, as channel choice and output media multiply. Finance is pressing down on costs and IT struggles to service your marketing vision in the required timescales. To do these, you need to build organisational capabilities that can effectively deliver the right combination of positive customer experiences at leading cost points.

Many public sector organisations marketing initiatives are too often constrained by speculative cost cases, technical realisation challenges and delivery obstacles. The ease of changing the message, individually or segment-wide, should be as fast and simple as possible, enabling cost-effective communications with customers. This needs attention to proper systems design enabling users to control their output. Whatever the service or product arena, departments interacting with customer/the public need to be responsive to changing trends, new delivery paths and the growing demand of customers to have access to their communications at their fingertips, on their choice of media, at any time.

Challenges

Being able to communicate to customers in an effective and relevant way, whilst remaining within budget is a key challenge. Public Sector organisations need to communicate more now than ever with the Public and other departments. However complex systems can unnecessarily lead to costly rework and delays.

Challenges include:

• Valuable feedback generated via call centre agents, self-service portals and other methods can be difficult to capture, classify and access within a usable ‘corporate context’ without the right systems in place.
• Client Documentation must be clear, unambiguous and well presented, while at the same time being technically correct and certainly not misleading. This requires careful drafting, with systems that provide for powerful re-use of existing approved content, and ones that enable a clearly auditable path from staff writing customer communications to those reviewing them.
• Many have core legacy systems that are many years old, unable to producing acceptably accurate modern documentation in context and across multiple media.

An all too common and time consuming challenge to government departments is that of front line staff not having sufficient access to all relevant records and information concerning a client in need of assistance. Resulting delays are often the touchstone for undeserved criticism and frustration; particularly where a case is under scrutiny needing repeated and timely interaction from numerous parties within and external to the department. At the core of such frustration is the lack of a full view of all relevant correspondence and interactions available to the case officer, or call centre operative, who may be faced with a fragmentary history scattered amongst discrete information stores, document management and CRM systems.

At Icon UK we specialise in managing such challenges, creating customized solutions for each client and working with Marketing and Communications teams to guide them through assessments to maximise desired improvements in Revenue enhancement, Customer Service, Cost reduction and Compliance.

How Icon Helps

Icon Suite offers Public Sector 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 such diverse uses as jury service letters, court attendances, fines, decisions, order confirmations and policies, statements, public self-service, correspondence and agent communications (see ‘Uses’ on Public Sector Overview).

All 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 enable organisations to change the way they engage with customers. Customers can benefit from highly personalised, flexible and positive experiences that they are pleased to recommend to others. And this can be social media enabled too.

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

Organisations 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 by achieving top-quartile performance in customer communications management, develop a robust platform for objectives such as rapidly re-branding following restructuring, or large scale personalised multi-lingual, multi-channel communications 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.