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Smart Communications: Meaningful Customer Communications and Smarter Conversations
James Brown, CEOCould you share an overview of Smart Communications’ journey?
Through our focus on customer communications management since day one, we have had a rich track record of meeting our clients’ needs and requirements. We also have a strong cloud strategy and offer the leading cloud-based platform for enterprise customer communications. Financial services is one of our key industries. We enable financial services firms to make their customer communications more meaningful, while also helping them to simplify their processes and operate more efficiently. For businesses, the need of the hour is frequent personalized communication with their customers and at scale. Some of our customers in the financial services landscape are delivering more than two billion individual communications to customers every year through our solution. Fundamentally, as a company, we believe in modern customer communications management technology that improves speed-to-market, and reduces complexity for our customers so that they can have those highly personalized interactions with their customers.
Our products integrate seamlessly with other pieces of our clients’ existing ecosystem—it could be their current CRM, sales and marketing, or customer experience tools.
What are the challenges that your clients face, which you are able to successfully help them overcome?
Today’s consumers are highly empowered; they can easily and independently look for and compare other options or vendors. If they are not satisfied with their existing vendor, they can switch to another vendor more quickly and easily than ever before.
The challenge is that these consumers expect businesses to deliver highly personalized, relevant, and timely communications, through their preferred channels.
We believe in modern customer communications management technology that improves speed-to-market, and reduces complexity for our customers
They also want the communications to reflect all of the recent interactions they have had, irrespective of the channel—be it speaking with customer service representative or submitting a web form. Businesses need to ensure that they provide a platform that addresses all these customer needs.
In a recent consumer survey that we conducted, 63 percent indicated that they are likely to switch vendors if their communications expectations are not met. Managing communications well in terms of personalization and relevance will enable businesses to achieve high customer retention rates.
What are the solutions offered by Smart Communications to overcome these pain points?
We have a number of solutions for our partners to leverage, based on their needs.
SmartCOMMTM is our flagship product. It helps to streamline and automate processes, and enables customers to reduce the number of templates needed to efficiently and effectively manage consistent communications over a wide range of channels—including print, e-mail, web forms and SMS. SmartCOMM also enables companies to take into consideration a customer’s recent interactions and deliver subsequent, personalized and relevant communications accordingly. Our SmartCOMMTM for Salesforce solution offers similar functionality but with the added benefit of being conveniently within the Salesforce environment. Users can deliver customized editable communications across multiple channels with a single template to address needs ranging from quotes and proposals to contracts. Yet another solution is SmartDXTM, which has the same code-base, but focused on capital markets. SmartDX helps companies simplify trade and relationship documentation for all market participants, across all asset classes and product types and accelerates all documentation processing for both the sell- and buy-side.
Regardless of the product, we help our clients become more productive and improve ROI.
Could you share a recent customer story of how you enabled a client to achieve greater results through your solutions?
We worked with a North American retail bank that used around 60 legacy solutions for managing customer communications. During the process of our implementation, they were able to remove 45 of those, with ours being the key product for their customer communications management. We were also able to help them minimize the total number of templates they were creating for managing communications, from 6,000 to 2,000, dramatically reducing the complexity. Over the course of three years, they experienced considerable savings of $16.5 million. The overall result was improved customer satisfaction, retention, and brand recognition. This case study is a prime example of how our platform can help, quickly drive high ROI, manage complexity and compliance risks, and improve the quality of communication with their customers.
What is the envisioned roadmap for Smart Communications?
Several analyst groups have recognized us, including Gartner, which identified us as a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Customer Communications Management and we were the only cloud solution to receive this ranking.
Going forward, we will remain focused on customer communications management delivering more innovate features that help customers provide the most meaningful customer conversations possible, via multiple channels and in a way that takes advantage of all the valuable customer data that enterprises have available to them today.
