Could Postal Delays Lead to an Increased Focus on the Digital Customer Experience?

Beginning Oct. 1, the U.S. Postal Service implemented “new service standards” that could slow target delivery times by about 30%. While this will obviously have implications for online holiday shoppers in the near term, it will also have a long-term impact on how industries like insurance, healthcare and financial services communicate important information to their customers. Wells Fargo even notified customers of the potential interruptions – pointing out that the delivery delays could impact customers’ mailed payments.

As enterprises face disruptions on all fronts – whether it’s USPS, supply chain delays, natural disasters or a global health crisis– it’s critical for businesses to reimagine interactions with their customers—and focus on their digital customer experience.

This post highlights why digital customer experience solutions are key to business continuity, how companies can efficiently reach customers on their preferred channels and how an enterprise cloud-based customer conversations solution can protect the business.

Accelerating Digital Transformation for Business Continuity

The latest development from USPS has the potential to disrupt millions of individuals and companies—and further solidifies how important business continuity and contingency planning are. Constant change and disruptions mean enterprises need to be responsive and agile – something only achievable via digital transformation.

When COVID-19 took hold, 65% of business leaders indicated that the pandemic led them to identify digital-first approaches they could implement quickly. In many industries, employees continue to work from home at least part time while customers now overwhelmingly expect (and prefer) digital-first interactions. Investing in digital customer experience solutions and implementing organizational changes will allow enterprises to put the customer at the center and seamlessly manage the experience across functional areas.

Orchestrating Omnichannel Customer Experiences

With the recent announcement from USPS, companies need to rethink how they get critical information to their customers – and vice versa. Today’s customers expect to be able to initiate conversations on their own terms, making two-way, digital conversations more important than ever.

Every interaction a business has with a customer is an opportunity to shape their overall experience and in today’s always-connected landscape, customers’ expectations are increasing quickly. With the majority of customers more comfortable with digital, they prefer to interact with businesses across a number of channels.

SMS, in-app messaging and WhatsApp are just a few of the channels where customers want to be able to initiate conversations with businesses. Unfortunately, many organizations have siloed tools that only allow for one-way, single-channel communications. This ultimately leads to internal inefficiencies, compliance risks and an inconsistent customer experience. An omnichannel, orchestrated approach, however, puts the customer at the center of two-way, interactive conversations – achievable with a cloud-based platform that optimizes the entire customer experience.

Owning the Customer Experience with Two-way Conversations

Whether it’s USPS or another service provider, relying too heavily on third parties to shape the customer experience poses risk for businesses. And, this risk will only continue to grow. Today, leading enterprises should own the entire digital customer experience, from start to finish.

Conversations between businesses and customers have never been more important, especially as customers prefer a digital-first, personalized approach. And since customers’ expectations will only continue to increase, enterprises must optimize the end-to-end experience to succeed. Businesses must provide the tailored, personalized conversations today’s customers expect. Investing in pure cloud platform that delivers personalized, omnichannel conversations across the entire customer lifecycle is the best way to succeed.

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Customer expectations will only continue to evolve, making it more critical than ever for enterprises to invest in the resources and technology that future-proof their businesses. No one knows what the future holds or what the next disruption will be, but investing in the right technology (and technology partners) that evolves and scales as customer needs change over time will be critical to long-term success.

How can businesses deliver impactful, relevant and personalized conversations at scale? Check out “Deliver SMARTER Customer Conversations in the Cloud” to learn more.