The Operations Perspective

Operations leaders in the Public Sector understand the challenges of ensuring that operational delivery with good service is balanced by efficient cost management. Allowing customers to choose their communications channel preferences, for example, can also enable significant savings as data entry tasks are performed by customers rather than staff.

Overcoming correspondence challenges means ensuring that the ways you communicate with customers is relevant, timely and via a route they prefer. To do this staffs need the ability to compose, send out and retrieve your customer documentation quickly and efficiently working within tight budgets. But you also need to know how to:

• Reduce manual interventions and handoffs across teams and within processes
• Quantify the true costs and opportunities of print and letter-production
• Maintain a central repository of communications for both efficiency and audit
• Overcome compliance failures and reduce document production timescales.

With Icon UK, all these challenges can be tackled head on.

This is particularly true where organisations have growing and changing requirements in supporting the burgeoning interactive aspects of how they communicate with their customers: even more so with the growing demand for delivering accurate  customer correspondence and key business messages to a multitude of new channels - from web to mobile to iPad - and no longer simply the printed word.

The way forward has many options: the rationalisation of disparate systems, particularly if the organisation is running more than four solutions trying to achieve the same purpose; replacement of technology that no longer delivers; redefining operational processes for greater efficiency; and responding proactively to new directions with thought leadership and innovative solutions.

Managing these in the face of growing demands for supporting ever larger customer bases, cost reduction and expectations of shorter deliver times is a challenging occupation; Ask Icon UK about how to make it easier!

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 processes, rework and delays.

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

• Exposure to simple errors in customer correspondence
• Uncontrolled cost exposure for “discovery” of communications in the event of litigation
• Potential loss of complete customer interactions’ picture
• Impact of time to implement regulatory changes
• Freedom of Information exposures, costs and poor public perception

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 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.

Against the backdrop of these challenges, Operations leaders in this sector need to an enterprise tool that will tackle these issues. At Icon UK we specialise in managing such challenges, creating customized solutions for each client and working with Operations teams to guide them through assessments to maximise desired improvements in Efficiency, 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).

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 provides many forms of industrial strength enterprise document solutions.

Icon solutions offer:

1. Process mapping & case flow analysis to identify & quantify issues and propose solutions
2. Appropriate benchmarking so the scale of improvement opportunity is known
3. Plans quickly in place to defines the ROI of a print-and-content rationalisation path
4. Cross- departmental coverage so all users can look in one place for view of customer
5. Business units the confidence of well-vetted, compliant communications
6. One repository provides that everything is in one place and re-use of assets increases

These in turn drive excellent efficiency ratios.

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.