The Operations Perspective

Operations leaders in both the Utilities and Telecoms sectors understand the challenges of ensuring that operational delivery with good customer 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
• Bridge the IT and Marketing gap, ensuring both are on the same wavelength
• Ensure that there is a central repository of communications for both efficiency and audit
• Work towards overcoming compliance failures and reduce timescales for the “OK” of documents

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.

For many, 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!

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, Operations leaders in this sector need to an enterprise tool that will tackle these issues whilst under the watchful eye of regulators such as OFGEM, OFWAT and OFCOM. This means that Operational Efficiency is not the only concern; reputation and customer confidence at risk if these issues are not dealt with promptly, satisfactorily and systematically.

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. Structured, Interactive and On-demand output types can be produced and include Proposals, Quotations, Order confirmations, Policies, Statements, Customer Self-Service, Correspondence and Agent Communications, etc. (see ‘Uses’ on Telecoms & Utilities Overview).

Different modes of customer engagement are supported 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 benefit from highly personalised, flexible and positive experiences they are pleased to recommend to others. 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:

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.