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How to build better customer relationships through enhanced communications and back office harmony.

The Three Cs ofCustomer Engagement

Conduent Business ServicesCustomer Experience Solutions

2The Three Cs of Customer Engagement

For a long time, quality and price were all that mattered to customers.

The traditional model for customer engagement has changed.

Could your product or service perform better than the competition? If not, was it cheaper? If you could answer yes to either of those questions, you’d have customers for life.

Now things are different. Customers today not only care about what you offer, but also how you offer it. The customer experience has become the most important driver of loyalty and retention.

In a world where customers want to know you care about their needs, the way you and your employees connect with them matters more than ever before. And to start making better connections, you need to understand the Three Cs of customer engagement.


The Three Cs are the legs of the customer engagement tripod. If all three aren’t working together, the whole thing comes tumbling down.

The Three Cs

• Customer expectations: what customers believe they deserve if they’re going to do business with you

• Compliance: how well you adhere to industry regulations

• Communications: how you get in touch with your customers, and how they talk to you

Compliance Communication

Customer Expectations

Customer Engagement


Ever since the smartphone introduced the idea of constant access to the world, customers have wanted more.

Now, whether they’re signing up for a newsletter or buying a home, customers expect each transaction to be seamless and completely personalized. It also needs to be convenient—capable of happening anywhere, at any given moment.

That means, if you want to make a real connection with customers, you need to start working on the little things that make you more accessible. If you’re not available in the right channel, or make customers provide the same information more than once, or worse yet offer something they already have, they don’t just see it as a minor inconvenience. They see it as a breach of trust. Are you ready to take care of their needs at every touchpoint?

4

Customers expect you tobe more accessible.

Only 14% of organizations say they are currently running coordinated marketing campaigns across all channels.1

1 http://blog.autopilothq.com/multi-channel-marketing-statistics/


Regulatory compliance isn’t an option. But it doesn’t have to be an obstacle.

The consequences of not meeting compliance are very real: fines, bad reputation, loss of customer confidence. On the other hand, there is an opportunity to build stronger customer relationships through compliance.

The problem is that few organizations really seem to know what compliance looks like. New technology and regulations have turned it into a moving target. While a few businesses will take the risk and shoot for the bare minimum of regulatory messaging, many more do the opposite—especially in highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, utilities and pharmaceuticals.

To truly make an effective connection with customers, you have to clearly define your compliance needs ahead of time so you can give your communications channels enough room to breathe.

5

Compliance demands that you keep customers safe.

Banks alone have paid over $200B in regulatory fines and penalties in the past seven years.2

2 http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/30/misbehaving-banks-

have-now-paid-204b-in-fines.html

$200Billion


Communications are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Customers want compelling content that’s accurate, bite-sized and relevant. And compliance insists it be packed with protections, warnings and validations.

6

Communications struggle to strike a balance.

3 CEM Executive’s Agenda 2016, Aberdeen Group, April 2016

When you strive for one and then the other, it’s like mixing fire and ice: all you get is lukewarm water. The resulting communications are cumbersome and consistently fail to get the job done—if they even get made at all. In some cases, compliance requirements can make it impossible to design communications for a certain channel.

Needless to say, this is frustrating for everyone involved. Brands want to connect with customers in more than one or two channels. And customers don’t want to sift through tons of information just to get to the bottom line.

Your communications need to strike the right balance by keeping both customer expectations and compliance in mind from the get-go. Otherwise, your customers won’t stay with you for long.

58% of businesses use at least eight channels to interact with buyers.3


If you can’t get the Three Cs in alignment, your customers will notice. And they won’t put up with it.

7

Conflict within the Three Cs can lead to a rocky customer relationship.

4 Technology Edition: The State of Customer Service 2015

5 http://www.mgage.com/blog/five-stats-that-prove-the-omni-channel-engagement-trend-is-too-big-for-your-business-to-ignore

“Channel hopping” is something that happens a lot when it seems impossible to design communications for a certain channel and satisfy compliance needs. It’s when a customer tries their favorite channel, fails to get in touch and then tries their next favorite. If they can’t get a hold of you after trying three separate channels, they’ll give up.4 This is a great way to lose loyal customers—and scare off new ones.

Even if you don’t get to that point, a failed interaction puts you on thin ice and makes it harder for customers to trust you in the future. That’s why it’s so important that you identify and eliminate friction between communications, compliance and customer expectations wherever it occurs.

Businesses that successfully employ a consistent cross-channel marketing strategy enjoy a 13% annual improvement in customer retention rates.5

13%


Friction between the Three Cs is 15 seconds of benefits followed by 45 seconds of potential side effects.

8

Look for what isn’t working.

It’s 40 pages of updated terms and conditions when you try to download a game. It’s a request to fill out yet another form with the exact same information as the one before it. It’s employees scrambling to find information that’s been spread across multiple departments.

Once you start looking, it’s not hard to spot. Keep an eye out for anywhere there’s a lack of channel optimization, low customer satisfaction or a high number of complaints. Disproportionate customer service costs and employee difficulty resolving customer requests the first time are also pretty good signs something’s not quite right.


Friction between the Three Cs has one cause: back office inefficiency. It can take a lot of forms, but the root of many external communication problems typically comes back to that.

9

Get to the root of your communication problems.

• Organizational Silos Isolated silos prevent your employees from planning communications that keep both customer expectations and compliance in mind from the beginning.

• Ineffective Workflows When documents are spread across multiple departments, or approval processes are manual or confusing, it makes it much more challenging for employees to do their jobs.

• Fragmented Processes and Poor Process Design The more disconnected your processes, the more likely they are to gum up the works and frustrate your customers. Information bottlenecks and unnecessary slow business bring the customer experience to a crawl.


The best way to get your external communications back on track is to re-engineer your internal communications and processes. By breaking down barriers between isolated silos and departments, you can address both compliance requirements and customer expectations from the start.

10

Start building healthier communications structures.

Sometimes it takes a fresh set of eyes to see where exactly things break down. That’s why you should conduct a Communications Advisory Service audit. Through a series of personal interviews, discovery workshops and assessment studies, we are able to provide a thorough analysis of what’s working for your business and what isn’t. We identify collaboration gaps, technology disconnects and all the places where improvements can be made.

Here’s what a CAS audit can do for you:

• Provides a roadmap for improvement and innovation

• Identifies resources that are needed for your communications strategy

• Highlights weaknesses in structure and processes

• Helps incorporate automation for streamlined efficiency


The Three Cs—customer expectations, compliance and communications—are central to customer engagement. And they’re constantly changing. We can help you reduce friction and increase efficiency by giving you the best tools for the job.

Your Partner for Improved Customer Engagement

We provide a roadmap for improvement and innovation—identifying the resources you need for your communications strategy, highlighting where your structures and processes can improve and helping you incorporate automation for improved efficiency.

The result? You can harmonize the Three Cs and put them to work building better, stronger relationships with your customers.

Key Benefits:

• Greatly reduced risk of non-compliant messaging

• Improved internal processes for an optimum customer experience

• Reduced overhead due to fewer calls that result in expensive human touches

• Greater accessibility to data

Start making a real connection, deepening customer loyalty and increasing lifetime value today.

Find out how you can sign up for a CAS audit today at www.conduent.com.

© 2017 Conduent Business Services, LLC. All rights reserved. Conduent and Conduent Agile Star are trademarks of Conduent Business Services, LLC in the United States and/or other countries. 05/17 CNDT122 BR893

About Conduent

Conduent is helping change the way the world works. By applying our expertise in imaging, business process, analytics, automation and user-centric insights, we engineer the flow of work to provide greater productivity, efficiency and personalization. We conduct business in 180 countries, and our more than 140,000 employees create meaningful innovations and provide business process services, printing equipment, software and solutions that make a real difference for our clients—and their customers.

Learn more at www.conduent.com.

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