In today’s world, enhancing your communication strategy has shifted from an initiative “on the to-do list” into a necessity for any business, law firm, or lending organization. Efficiently scaling customer communications requires investment in digital transformation.
Do you know what it takes to get your message in front of your customers through digital channels? Whether you are looking to evaluate your current strategy or jumpstart new communication channels to better engage all your customers, let’s look at the differences between building in-house engagement programs versus working with a partner in three of the most crucial categories for businesses:
- Effective digital solutions
- Personalization at scale
- Email Deliverability
Effective Digital Strategy is More Than Sending Email
Customers are engaging on more digital channels than ever before. Unfortunately, many digital communication strategies are essentially little more than services sending emails on an organization’s behalf. Simply sending mass-blast emails won’t help much if customer engagement is still lacking. Having an actionable plan based on analytics with delegated resources is a key component to optimize any outreach strategy.
If you build it you:
- Need expertise in digital optimization, data science, deliverability, digital experience, etc.
- Have total control over the customer experience
- Lower your risk of vendor “lock-in”
- Specialized digital communications expertise
- Best practice knowledge base
- Technology solutions ready to implement rather than in-house teams building from scratch
Customer Preferences & Personalization at Scale
Communication is at the core of almost all customer experiences and is critical for an organization’s reputation and long-term success. When your communication goal is repayment, offering your customers a lower-friction experience is one way to boost repayment results. Determining what the ideal channel and time to deliver your message and offering different engagement options are key to providing a frictionless customer experience.
If you build it you:
- Build and automate email and/or SMS messaging
- Develop data modeling or digital optimization to engage with customers in preferred ways
- Adapt as customer preferences evolve
- Digital optimization as an integral part of developing and delivering customer communications
- Ability to scale customer communication practices without adding more in-house headcount
Measure Deliverability with Actionable Outcomes
Surveys show 59.5% of consumers prefer email as their first choice for communication, but just because your business sends emails to customers doesn’t mean that your messages make it to their inbox. And if that email never reaches the intended recipient, it doesn’t matter what your message says, which is why email delivery rate and deliverability are critical parts of your strategy.
If you build it you:
- Determine if communication will be through email, SMS, or both
- Develop specific strategies for each channel and stay on top of best practices to ensure message delivery
- Dedicate a team to stay on top of monitoring, adjusting, and maintaining relationships with ISPs and SMS carriers
- Make sure federal and state regulations are being followed in strategy and implementation
- Options for email, SMS, or a mix of communication channels to engage with
- Solutions built with delivery rate in mind—but need to make sure deliverability is tracked as well
- When buying, your company must do its due diligence to ensure every third-party vendor is compliant on all email and SMS regulations
Evaluating Potential Partners: The Retain Difference
Today’s typical in-house early delinquency communication methods will use digital channels like email and SMS, but often will settle for a one-size-fits-all approach or off-the-shelf solution due to resource and/or timing restraints, thereby losing opportunities to better engage the customer. But simply picking a partner like pulling a name out of a hat won’t automatically increase your chances for better engagement and repayment rates. When evaluating a partner, you need to ask how the provider measures up for those key factors we outlined above.
How does Retain by TrueML Products measure up? Let’s take a look:
Effective Digital Strategy is More Than Sending Email
- Improved, digital-first engagement with a track record to prove it
- Best-in-class delivery and deliverability rates
- Designed to engage customers better, leading to more effective outcomes
Customer Preferences & Personalization at Scale
- Patented optimization engine informed by more than a million customer engagements
- Determines the right channel and right time to send your messages to reach the most favorable outcomes
Measure Deliverability with Actionable Outcomes
- Seamless integration with your systems to keep you apprised on deliverability and engagement
- Dedicated Email Operations and Deliverability Team proactively monitors and makes adjustments, assisted by our patented optimization engine
- Fully compliant SMS functionality at scale including opt-out reporting for your consent management