Customer receiving Registered SMSDo you believe that your current methods of communicating with your customers achieves the best results?  Think about how you welcome your new customers, how you thank them for their ongoing support, how you respond to their queries, how you collect fees, and how you manage your Debtors when they turn bad.

Do you still think your methods of communicating with your customers achieves the best results?

Way back in 2011, Gartner predicted that by 2020, Customers will manage 85% of their relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human. (Gartner.com – Customer 360 Summit 2011)

You can interpret this any way you deem fit…  one interpretation is certainly that 85% of Customers will only deal with enterprises that allow them to manage their relationship electronically, or turned around, enterprises that do not facilitate the migration into the digital age, risk losing 85% of their Customers!

So let’s ask our question again:  Do you believe that your current methods of communicating with your customers achieves the best results, or are you still telling them to phone into a call center or to visit one of your branches?

Your Customer may well be an individual that watches his favourite TV series on Netflix, books his holiday accommodation on AirBnB and travels to and from his business meetings with Uber. You then politely ask him to visit a branch to resolve a query, as there is paperwork that invariably needs to be signed.  The friendliness of your branch staff no longer matters. The damage to the Customer Experience happened before your first engagement.

The good news is that there are many ways of providing a remedy.  You may even be surprised to discover that digital communication methods are more secure than paper, provide better governance and control than post, and cost you less than your current call centres. For example, Registered Email and Registered SMS are changing the way we send formal notifications.

If the Gartner prediction is true, you have less than 1000 days…