Partner centric cloud ecosystems – It works!
All organizations use third-party providers in the communication supply chain to deliver customer communications on their behalf. Outsourcing these activities can save money, but most businesses struggle with vendor management and inefficiencies that result with no visibility to the organization. This drives up costs and drives down brand quality. What is needed is a unified approach to customer communications.
Remove the Silos
The current approach to vendor procurement of customer communications management has left companies with mixed messages, inconsistent customer experiences and costly marketing campaigns that often fall short of the mark. The reason for this is that most businesses buy and consume services in siloed areas; using an isolated internal buying processes for each department. This means a separate contract for billing services with one vendor, while email services, social services, marketing automation, creative and design, or direct mail may be contracted with a list of other vendors. Each separate procurement process and additional vendor relationship drives up costs overall, and eventually leads to over-spending, over-management, and overlooked savings and improvement opportunities.
A Penny Wise and a Dollar Dumb
The traditional procurement process of going to bid and finding the least-cost-commodity provider may seem like a good savings strategy, but such an approach can hurt organizational performance. Consider the old adage: a penny wise and a dollar dumb. As a result, the landscape of partner ecosystems is being turned upside down due to the proliferation of cloud services and service brokering platforms.
Cloud Communications
Cloud-based Customer Communication Management (Cloud CCM) providers are taking very sophisticated approaches to customer profile and persona information to drive additional higher value services to the enterprise through data analytics and business process improvements. But more importantly, these approaches help the business leverage the partner processes already in place and thereby drive down costs associated with siloed procurement. Data associated with customers, prospects, onboarding and cross-selling is being disseminated and passed to multiple vendors contracted for one service.
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