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OpenText Combines Customer Experience Management with Enterprise Information Management to Improve Customer Service
Today, OpenText, a provider of Enterprise Information Management (News - Alert) (EIM), focuses on the key drivers of business success to improve business insight, strengthen business impact, accelerate velocity, address information governance and even provide security. The company specializes in unstructured information - anything that doesn’t neatly fit into the rows and columns of a database like data sheets, word documents, audio files, images and video files.
These days, Customer Experience Management (CEM) is one of the cornerstones of OpenText’s EIM strategy as CEM tools are essential to companies for a number of reasons.
First of all, there is a macro-economic trend occurring where more business is happening online and online is the first place most customers go, so it important that is under control, according to Lubor Ptacek, VP, Strategic Marketing at OpenText.
“There are statistics out there saying that brick and mortar will not disappear completely in certain sectors, but a lot of business has moved to online,” explained Ptacek in an exclusive interview with TMCnet.
Companies are also realizing that customer experience is a competitive weapon, especially in industries where product differentiation is difficult, if not impossible. For example, a financial services product from one bank to another is virtually identical, according to Ptacek, but the differentiation happens through the customer experience that is provided.
As a result, marketing departments are not just in charge of call centers and advertising campaigns anymore, they also act as strategic component to the enterprise.
“It is important for companies to have a strategy to address the new CEM channels because the customer preferences keep evolving, so you shouldn’t have to build from scratch every time a shift appears in the marketplace,” explained Ptacek. “For instance, social media didn’t exist just a few years ago, and today, a lot of customer engagement and customer support happens through social media.”
According to Ptacek, when you are building your strategy you also need an infrastructure that can address that strategy as well as the required agility. OpenText provides a CEM suite that addresses these issues of helping its customers reach their customers through different channels in a cost-effective way.
“Our customers are typically large companies that operate in multinational environments with multiple languages, and want to reach their customers through a multitude of channels. Online, mobility and even paper is still important. Being able to do it all of in a consistent manner is how we differentiate ourselves,” he said.
Image via OpenText
When it comes to CEM, there are more and more regulations being imposed on virtually every industry. Fortunately, OpenText can offer backend support as a lot of its customers are subject to a variety of regulations, laws and compliance requirements with its information governance infrastructure combined with CEM.
“In many industries the way you communicate with your stakeholders may be subject to records management rules. In fact, your company’s Twitter (News - Alert) or Faceboook posts are an official communication with the company and therefore, subject to regulation that must be kept as a record for the next several years. And, OpenText can do these kinds of things very elegantly,” Ptacek explained.
In addition, mobility is also very important for CEM these days. But, there is a difficulty in using mobile devices as a vehicle to communicate with customers, which lies in the multitude of operating systems, screen sizes, form factors and capabilities of each device. “This is an issue that you need to account for, and this is one of the areas that OpenText helps its customers with in terms of making sure with a single investment they can have applications that will natively run on every device models,” he commented.
Obviously there is a huge movement toward online, but the reality is that some demographics are still paper-dependent, and to reach these people business still need to embrace paper. The challenge is that traditional mailers in customer experience are ineffective, as people tend to throw them away immediately.
The one exception is the utility bills that people receive every month because they have no choice but to open and pay these bills. “These have evolved to becoming valuable marketing real estate. The bills starting featuring promotions and marketing messages directly on the bill itself. We help our customers target their audience in a much more personalized fashion,” said Ptacek.
Additionally, multichannel involves a lot of rich media to ensure the customer experience is the best it can be. Managing the media such as pictures, video and audio can be difficult because of the sizes and coding standards of the different mediums. For example, to deliver a picture on different mobile devices, you need different sizes of the picture for each device. That is where digital asset management comes in, and OpenText can provide that in its CEM suite.
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Edited by Rachel Ramsey