By Sienna Quirk, Product Marketing Director at Smart Communications
At Smart Communications, we love any excuse to connect with our customers and future customers! In September, I had the pleasure of meeting many of you at one of the largest SaaS conferences in the world, Dreamforce. As a product marketing director, there is nothing I enjoy more than learning about the challenges and pain points stealing efficiency from the diverse companies in the Salesforce ecosystem. Today, I want to share a little of what I heard about today’s evolving challenges around customer communication.
1. Timely & Relevant Customer Communication: Companies are struggling to communicate with customers in a timely and relevant manner that keeps up with the pace of today’s fast-moving always-on communication expectations. Email, and Twitter, and print, oh my! With more channels, faster customers acquisitions, and higher customer expectations it has become difficult to manage the sheer volume of communication needs and to scale at the pace of customer expectations.
2. Multi-Brand Communication: Communicating across brands is cumbersome and often involves duplicated efforts to get the same message out within the appropriate brand guidelines to different customer bases. This can result to hundreds or even thousands of templates – talk about a headache to manage. If you work in an industry with changing rules and regulations, keeping templates current is not only necessary, but the lack of doing so could put your company out of compliance resulting in steep fines or worse.
3. International Business Scale: A multi-national landscape demands the ability to communicate the same message across not only multiple brands, but many languages as well. This could result in a need for different language capabilities and alternative ways of compiling data for languages that require a right to left or left to right sentence structure.
4. Document Generation Tools Just Aren’t Enough: Basic document generation solutions are great for basic communication, but they lack the ability to really connect with customers. Companies want to personalize their message and make a real connection with their customers. After a claims call, or when working closely with a customer on a deal, business users often need the ability to personalize and customize their standard template to include that personal touch that connects your business to its customers. Without that extra level of engagement, you run the risk of losing the emotional connection that brought that customer to you in the first place. No one wants to be talked at instead customers want to feel like you understand them and what makes them unique.
5. CLM’s Are Too Complex: Document generation may not be enough, but Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions are too much. Companies want the ability to redline and negotiate a contract or proposal, without the complexity of a full lifecycle management solution. CLM’s are expensive and hard to implement and manage as your business scales. Basic document generation often lacks the full set of features that allow companies to personalize, collaborate, and negotiate on the quotes, proposals, and contracts they create every day to drive their business forward. No one wants to buy more than they need and instead want a communication solution that offers more features, without adding more complexity.
The answer to address these challenges can be as easy as a trip to the AppExchange. The best advice I can give is to make a list of the where your company struggles with their customer communication.
- Do you need to communicate across multiple channels, brands, and languages?
- Would your documents benefit from personalization that goes beyond the standard template?
- Do you often need to collaborate internally or negotiate with third parties?
- Is it important that your users have a seamless experience in Salesforce?
If you answered yes to any of the above, SmartCOMM™ for Salesforce might be the right solution for you. If you missed us at Dreamforce this year and want to learn more about how we can help simplify your business communications, contact us today and learn how you can start scaling the conversation with your customers.
SmartCOMM for Salesforce™ dream team at Dreamforce 2018!
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