Brexit and Its Impact on Customer Communications

The political and economic uncertainty surrounding Brexit – The UK’s exit from the European Union – is leaving thousands of organizations with a plethora of unanswered questions surrounding the possibility of significant commercial impact as well as an inability to adequately to prepare for the unknown. Not only are companies dealing with the impact of leaving the EU, but they are still nowhere close to finding out the exact method of the exit, with a no-deal option still very much a real possibility.

Yet, despite so many unanswered questions, forward-thinking companies can respond to the uncertainty around Brexit by preparing for the one thing that they know will definitely come – change. This change is going to manifest itself in a variety of methods —the way that companies communicate with their customers, regulatory and compliance standards changes, as well as significant shifts in governing body oversight.

With companies in the midst of significant digital transformation efforts and a renewed focus being firmly placed on customer experience, interruptions caused by Brexit have the potential to destabilize a lot of the stellar work that has gone into improving companies’ relationships with their customers. Customers will look to the brands that they do business with to provide them with a clear path detailing how Brexit will impact their ongoing relationship and require a clear communication strategy via their preferred channels of choice.

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Even before Brexit, a Thomson Reuters study shows that financial institutions in the EU need to implement 44,000 regulatory changes per year; that’s one every 12 seconds.

Cost of Compliance 2018, Thompson Reuters

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It’s clear that Brexit will provide both challenges and opportunities to leading insurance and financial services organizations – both regulated and non-regulated – regarding their relationships with customers, internal stakeholders and regulators. As forward-looking organizations prepare for the upcoming raft of changes, leveraging a more modern approach to customer communications can empower businesses to move with both speed and agility – helping them to better navigate the uncertainty that lies ahead. Below are a couple of questions organizations should ask to help understand if it’s time to rethink your customer communications strategy.

Have I recently performed a health check to ensure that I’m ready for the upcoming changes?

Our Professional Services team can help to perform a health check on your SmartCOMM implementation. A health check will help to determine if your current set up is optimal structured to adapt in a quick and agile fashion to the upcoming changes, as well as answer common questions such as, “Have I got too many layouts?”, “How should I structure my CMS?”, “Am I optimally using all of the capabilities of the platform?”.

How do I remain compliant and maintain consistency across communications?

As a result of Brexit, some organizations will be impacted by legal entity changes requiring updates across thousands of different communication documents. Taking full advantage of a centralized relationship map with shared content will identify exactly where each content asset is currently being used and allows updates to be made once and shared across all dependent communication templates.

Can I leverage editions in order to maximize my agility when building template content?

Template Editions, which replaced Manage Channels in the SC21 release, allows organizations to build flexible, multi-dimensional templates driven by data. What this means is that a single template can automatically display content that has the right branding, language, legal language based on jurisdiction, idiom and even preferred channel based on a single piece of data. The advantage that this provides organizations responding to Brexit means that templates now don’t have to be duplicated or copied (which adds significant overhead in resources and complexity), rather just a new edition created.

Am I effectively collaborating on communications across multiple stakeholders?

Depending on Brexit’s outcome, customers could become subject to existing British laws or will remain part of current European laws and protections – all of which will need to be communicated to customers in a timely and consistent manner. Collaboration across IT, legal and compliance, marketing, customer success, and line-of-business owners will be imperative to achieving the required alterations to communications.

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One insurance company is saving thousands of hours a year through business user ownership of their templates.

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It’s clear that if and when Brexit occurs, it will just be the beginning of a multitude of organizational, economic, political, and jurisdictional changes for organizations. Being able to effectively navigate these changes in an agile fashion to maintain transparency and trust with your customers through this period is going to be a strategic imperative for every organization.