The Challenge

Our client, a Fortune 100 company, was drowning in a sea of customer communication templates.  Over the years, a huge inventory of supposedly “standard” templates had been accumulated, each created to address every flavor of customer circumstance.  There was clutter, inconsistency and confusion (both for the staff who had to navigate the templates, as well as the customers who had to decipher them).

The Solution

We conducted a comprehensive customer communications review – inventorying and categorizing all the templates, then identifying opportunities for consolidation and simplification.  

Among the services provided by Watermark were:

• Correspondence improvement to make the templates more visually appealing and easy to understand.
• Communications simplification which made it easier for front-line staff to find the right template at the right time.
• Technology tool design to support development of a new, on-demand communications generator for use by the staff.

The Results

The outcomes from the correspondence overhaul were compelling across many dimensions.

• Productivity Rose.  The smaller, better organized library of templates, coupled with the new correspondence generator, enabled staff to spend less time searching for (or recreating) letters, and more time actually handling customer inquiries.
• Quality Improved.  Quality reviews demonstrated a dramatic improvement in the professionalism and accuracy of customer communication, as staff were able to rely more heavily on pre-packaged templates rather than on case-by-case letter writing.
• Call Volumes Declined.  The new templates’ plain language construction triggered fewer “clarification calls” from customers, driving down call volumes and allowing the organization to maintain level staffing despite steady increases in business.
• Customer Satisfaction Soared.  Within 18 months, the unit achieved its highest customer satisfaction scores ever (a 15% increase), driven in part by a correspondence makeover that turned routine communications into crowd pleasers.

Ready to turn your customer communications into a Customer Experience differentiator?  Work With Us to get started.

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