4 Key Ways to Modernize Your Communication Strategy
January 2nd, 2024
Saying that the current workforce is markedly different than previous generations would be an understatement. More than 80% of today’s workers have spent most or all of their work experience in the digital era, where online tools and internet-based communication are the standard expectation for businesses. The same holds true for your customers, which makes developing a modernized communication strategy a must for long-term success.
What Are Modern Communication Channels?
There are more communication channels open to businesses today than ever before. Messaging that might have previously been distributed only via email and physical mailings can now be conveyed as text messages, social media posts, app notifications, and a variety of other channels according to the customer’s needs and preferences. Organizations that equip themselves to communicate via as many channels as possible can maximize their opportunities for making meaningful connections with their customer base.
“ We hear from organizations how difficult it becomes to rebrand and communicate that effectively. The more centralized core, reusable components are, the easier it is to maintain that. Then those communications only need one quick change and it can impact many, many thousands of communications that they’re distributing.“
Expanding the Range of Channels in Business Communications
Broadening the communication channels offered by your business is a reliable path to boosting customer engagement and broadening your audience. There are more channels available for digital customer communication than ever before, and each one comes with a different user profile.
When developing an omnichannel communications plan, it’s important to have a clear definition of your goals, your intended audience, and your overall content strategy. Mapping out all of those specifics will help choose which channels will be especially useful for each message. For example, a promotion that would be appropriate for a post on your business’s Instagram feed will reach a different segment of customers than a promotional email message would.
Omnichannel Communications Are the New Normal
Today’s customer doesn’t rely on any single channel for their communication needs. A transaction might begin when a customer spots an advertisement on a social media feed, continue on to a conversation with a chatbot as they research more about the product, and lead to a confirmation email after they’ve placed an order.
The modern customer communication experience involves multiple channels, and your business needs to be equipped to communicate using all of them. Maintaining consistent messaging, branding, tone, and language across a variety of channels can be a tedious and difficult task when handled manually, but automated omnichannel communication solutions make it simple and easily adaptable depending on your audience.
Personalized Communications for Business
Studies show that customers feel more connected to businesses that personalize their communications. In fact, 80% say they’re more likely to make a purchase from a business that personalizes messaging to match their needs and preferences. That’s a substantial uptick from generic communications.
An automated digital communications solution that allows easy personalization of tone, language, and location- and demographic-specific targeting offers an immediate boost to your communication efforts. Customers who feel that a business is interested in addressing their individual needs are far more likely to continue interacting with that business in the future.
Smart Communications for Business
One of the greatest things about the modern communications landscape is that each communication can simply do a lot more. Documents can include embedded video and audio files. Hyperlinks and buttons within a document can guide customers to more in-depth product descriptions and other helpful features. Interactive PDF forms allow customers to enter information and complete important steps without clicking away from the original document.
Digital customer communications documents that offer more intuitive and interactive features to users are a reliable way to make customers feel more empowered by and engaged with your business, and for your business to collect useful feedback and data analytics. That’s a key building block for ongoing brand loyalty.
Master Modernizing Communications
from Our Thought Leaders
Want to take a more in-depth look at the current state of customer communication? MHC has compelling takes on digital communications from multiple leaders and industry experts. Take a look at the financial side with Kaspar Roos’s webinar on “How to Boost Profitability by Transforming Critical Customer Communications,” or get first-hand customer accounts from MHC CEO Gina Armada’s webinar “Customer Stories of Change and Agility to Achieve Compliance Through Communications.” Take a closer look at some of the biggest developments coming to communications management with our in-depth “24 Communication Trends for 2024” infographic.
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Customer Stories of Change and Agility to Achieve Compliance Through Communications
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Build Modern Communications with CCM Software
For organizations looking to boost the effectiveness of their customer communications, MHC NorthStar CCM software offers a wide range of automated features that can transform your communications processes. Creating a more streamlined, reliable, and compliant system becomes much easier with a solution including:
Easily integrated, flexible document creation tools can eliminate template overload and ensure compliance and accuracy. Scalability keeps communication flowing smoothly whether you need on-demand document generation or high-volume batch communication.
Automation reduces reliance on manual tasks such as document generation, content personalization, and managing delivery schedules. By automating CCM from creation to delivery, your team can streamline document processing while saving time and money.
CCM software allows your business to create and distribute communications for all of the channels that your customers prefer. Maintain consistent messaging and branding when you distribute messages via email, SMS messaging, social media, or print.
Make sure you’re using the right tone, language, and branding to communicate clearly with different audiences. Our translation and localization features, along with our deep library of reusable content fragments, make it easy to personalize your message to match your customers’ needs.
With interactive web forms and responsive smart documents, it’s easy to build an engaging customer experience. Self-service tools provide always-on availability for customers while also providing your business with valuable, real-time data that offers deep insights into customer behavior.
CCM automation helps your team build more accurate and useful customer journey maps by tracking customer touchpoints across all channels, generating insightful data analytics in real time, and making it easy to segment customers based on their stage in their journey.
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Automate the entire customer communication process, from production and assembly to personalization and omnichannel delivery. Experience the difference with MHC NorthStar CCM. Discover the features and benefits!
4 of the Newest Trends in Modern Communication
Customer communication is undergoing rapid growth and development right now, as new technologies and tools reshape the landscape of how businesses and customers interact. Keeping up with the latest trends in modern customer communication can be a challenge, but it’s a must for any organization that wants to stay competitive. Here are four key trends to keep a close watch on in the year to come.
AI in Customer Experience
Artificial intelligence will touch nearly every element of customer experience in the coming years. AI serves as a helpful tool for communication teams to create a more personalized, proactive experience that anticipates customers’ needs. That enables faster, more accurate communications that can be easily distributed across any channel.
Automation will continue to have a huge impact on the way businesses communicate with customers. Chatbots and virtual assistants are poised to handle a greater portion of communications as their natural language abilities improve. AI tools will enable businesses to personalize messaging on an even greater scale while breaking down communications silos within your organization. Find out more about the 6 benefits of automated communications for business in our blog.
VR and AR in Customer Communication
Businesses are discovering new ways to put virtual reality and augmented reality to work for them every day. From interactive experiences that bring customers up close and personal with an organization’s products and services to scannable codes that reveal unexpected rewards and surprises, communications will continue moving toward a new plane of reality in 2024.
Security in Customer Communication
Ethical and responsible communication is at the front of many consumer’s minds, especially when it comes to new technology. Automated communications offer stronger systems for protecting customer security and data privacy than older methods, which frequently put sensitive data at risk due to human error and inefficiencies.
Want to go into greater detail on these and other major communication trends for the coming year? Be sure to check out our insightful and entertaining list of the top 24 communication trends for 2024!
How to Implement Modern Communications
Now that you’ve seen some of the cases to be made for modernizing communications, how does your organization go about putting some of them in place? Let’s take a look at some key steps toward building a more modern communication system for your business.
1. Define Your Goals
The first step toward modernization is knowing exactly what your organization wants to accomplish. Is your goal to improve customer service? Increase sales? Ensure better compliance? Expand your reach? All of the above? Making a clear, concise accounting of your primary goals is an important step toward implementing the systems that will help you reach them.
2. Create a Communication Plan
Your communication plan should include not just your organization’s goals, but also which audiences you want to reach, which channels you intend to focus on, a timeline for implementing those changes, how to collect and address customer feedback, and any other considerations that might impact how your business connects with customers.
3. Try Out an Automated Solution
Virtually every element of making a modernized communication plan can be made more efficient with an automated communication software solution. Cutting-edge solutions such as MHC NorthStar CCM are available for free demonstrations with guidance from industry experts. In the long-term, investing in more communication automation is likely to yield big rewards.
4. Make an Evaluation Plan
Making the best use of your modernized communications approach means understanding what is and isn’t working. Be sure to have a plan for evaluating the success of each campaign compared to previous efforts, as well as ideas for adjusting and correcting any areas that aren’t working out as expected. This is another area where automation can be a great help, generating real-time data and customer insights that help pinpoint a system’s strengths and weaknesses.
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Agile and reliable delivery of high-impact communications when it matters most. Experience it today! Easily integrated with your business systems, utilizing our cloud-based platform will guide you to communication success.
Team MHC
Team MHC consists of a multitude of roles, functions, and expertise within MHC. With extensive combined experience in accounts payable and customer communication management, Team MHC has a unique insight into how to empo wer people using solutions that streamline processes while enhancing customer communication. Working alongside field experts in various industries and company sizes, Team MHC has garnered impressive thought leadership knowledge that we are excited to share with our readers. Including Aragon’s 2022 Women in Tech winner Gina Armada, CTO Dan Ward, VPs of Finance and Customer Service, and other talent that runs the spectrum of technology ability, Team MHC offers a mastery of skills to benefit our customers and prospects alike.
