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The Role of a Secure Channel in an Omnichannel Strategy 768 303 Bob Janacek

The Role of a Secure Channel in an Omnichannel Strategy

In previous blogs, we’ve touched upon how using an omnichannel strategy is a great way to provide a better experience for your customers. We’ve also discussed that an integrated, secure email channel is missing in most omnichannel experiences. However, we’ve yet to really dive into the demands for omnichannel and the benefits of successfully implementing the strategy, or provide a real-life example of how a secure channel in your omnichannel strategy can elevate customer experience and make things easier for your organization.

We’ve all heard it before — putting all customer interactions in one place allows you to provide an excellent experience and makes your job easier. But do you know the omnichannel data that backs this up?

Introduction to Omnichannel Strategy

An effective introduction to omnichannel strategy begins with understanding its fundamental concept — the integration of multiple communication and distribution channels to provide customers with a seamless and consistent experience. Today’s consumers expect a unified and cohesive brand experience across various touchpoints, whether a physical store, website, mobile app, social media or even customer service. The success of an omnichannel strategy lies in breaking down silos between channels and departments to improve brand consistency, streamline operations and enhance customer satisfaction.

Benefits of a Secure Channel in an Omnichannel Strategy

Secure channels are integral to the success of an omnichannel strategy, offering a range of invaluable benefits. When customer information is protected, your company will enjoy better customer satisfaction and long-term success.

A secure channel’s significance lies in safeguarding customer trust, reputation, financial stability and legal compliance. With secure channels in your omnichannel strategy, you can use your omnichannel for heightened customer experience management.

Here are a few of the benefits you can expect when you use a secure channel:

  • Improved data security: Secured channels help protect sensitive customer data, which is essential to building and maintaining customer trust.
  • Improved regulatory compliance: Many locations have strict data privacy regulations — one example is the California Consumer Privacy Act. Secured channels help businesses comply with these regulations.
  • Customer trust: Security breaches can severely erode customers’ trust in the business’s ability to keep their sensitive data safe. This lack of trust can severely damage a company’s reputation and loss of business.
  • Fraud prevention: Secured channels are essential to preventing fraudulent activities, such as identity theft or unauthorized transactions.
  • Competitive advantage: Customers are more likely to choose a business that they trust with their data.
  • Unified customer experience: Your customers will enjoy a seamless experience across multiple channels, resulting in improved satisfaction and retention.

Examples of Secure Channels

Secure channels encompass a variety of technologies and practices that safeguard data and communications for your company and customers. Here are some secure channel examples you might invest in:

  • Encryption: Use encryption protocols like SSL/TLS for web traffic, end-to-end encryption for messaging apps or data-at-rest encryption to protect stored data. DataMotion offers secure digital engagement solutions, including secure messaging, secure forms, and secure document exchange, that allow for secure communication between your business and its customers.
  • Virtual private networks (VPNs): VPNs establish encrypted tunnels over public networks, ensuring secure and private data transmission for remote access.
  • Multi-factor authentication (MFA): MFA requires users to provide multiple forms of verification — passwords, biometrics or tokens — before granting access, enhancing security significantly.
  • Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates: SSL certificates validate website authenticity, ensuring users connect to legitimate and secure web platforms.
  • Firewalls: Network firewalls filter incoming and outgoing traffic, protecting against unauthorized access and potential threats.
  • Secure messaging platforms: Messaging apps with end-to-end encryption, like DataMotion’s secure message center, keep conversations private.
  • Tokenization: Replacing sensitive data with non-sensitive tokens reduces the risk of exposing valuable information.
  • Secure cloud storage: Cloud providers with robust security measures, such as encryption at rest and in transit, safeguard data stored in the cloud.

Balancing Convenience and Security for Regulated Industries

Providing an excellent and secure omnichannel customer experience in financial services and other regulated industries is equally important as in retail or e-commerce spaces.

In fact, DataMotion conducted a survey to hear what IT and Financial Services Executives have to say about their own company and their customer communications. Almost half complained about inefficient workflows involving fax and postal mail. They also expressed complaints over limited ways to interact with their customers while maintaining regulatory compliance and the multiple user IDs needed to access their legacy methods of secure document exchange or email encryption. Unsurprisingly, this survey also revealed a desire to see all interactions with their customers in a unified interface.

The push for an omnichannel strategy and seamless interactions in regulated industries has only grown since this survey. If not just because of social distancing and the coronavirus halting face-to-face business and pushing for all interactions to take place digitally, but also because of the generational shift and increasing influence of Millennials and Generation Z.

These generations don’t just want businesses to be “digital-first” — they prefer to do business with vendors whose digital experience is polished and slick. If they have a problem with a transaction, a question about their bank statement or something else, they expect to be able to easily exchange messages and supporting documents digitally in their customer app to get their questions answered. If their problem-resolution experience is difficult, time-consuming or requires too many steps, consumers from these generations especially will not hesitate to take their business elsewhere.

Investing in secure channels for your omnichannel strategy allows your business to maximize convenience for customers and staff while safeguarding sensitive data. You will gain a competitive advantage, and bring a superior experience for all.

Ensuring a Secure, Frictionless Customer Experience

So, tying this all back to omnichannel, how can we meet these demands for a frictionless, digital-first customer experience without sacrificing security and compliance for those in regulated industries? We need to make the customer app or portal part of this omnichannel strategy and allow simplified and secure exchanges of sensitive information between your customers and internal customer service agents.

This experience needs to be native in the app. Your customers shouldn’t have to receive a secure email from their bank, and then be taken outside of your app to some other portal to access it. Why is this? Because your employees, and especially your customers, do not want to deal with any extra logins or portals – they should be able to send, receive, and review messages and documents, even those containing sensitive data, in a seamless and natural way.

How can we accomplish this? By using application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate a messaging center behind the login of an organization’s application, customer portal, or mobile app, we can allow all of these interactions to occur in one place. With DataMotion’s secure message center, you can natively integrate the system that your customer care agents use with the portal and mobile app that your customers use – allowing simple, secure and compliant exchange. Your agents and customers can then easily initiate, retrieve and review sensitive exchanges from within the interface they’re already using.

A Real-Life Example of an Omnichannel Strategy in a Regulated Industry

Instead of diving into the details of how a secure message center can fit into your omnichannel strategy, what it is, and how it works, it would be better to provide you with a real-life example.

Below is an actual graph of an integrated message center in use by a large wealth management firm with over 2 million customers. They actively use our secure message center, peaking at about 100 API calls per second. On the left-hand side of this graph, you can see that they reach about 750 new messages or documents per hour. These are messages that are exchanged between the organization from their internal support systems and customers that are logged in to their customer app.

Graph of messages/documents exchanged per hour
Graph of message center access per hour

Over time, individual customer repositories or message folders continue to grow with exchanged messages and documents. This turns a customer’s message center into a personalized knowledge base of their relationship with the organization. In fact, on the right-hand side of the graph, you can see message center access peak at 14,000 per hour. So, for these 750 message exchanges per hour, customers are referring to prior exchanges over 18 times to 1 over sending a new message. They’re often able to find the answer they need in a prior exchange before asking a new question.

There are also other benefits of implementing this secure message and document exchange, which cannot be seen in the above graph. First, this organization’s customers are using the message center twice as much as they were the year before. Despite this increase in usage, the number of support requests that the organization now receives from its 2+ million customers has dropped by 30%. Not only that, but since the beginning of the year, the average size of messages has tripled, indicating that more documents are being attached and exchanged digitally.

So, as the usage of this private message channel grows, the repository of prior exchanges grows, and the customer’s relationship with the organization grows as well. This is because their customers rely on and trust this channel to get answers to their questions – it becomes a familiar touchpoint to them. Not only does secure message center allow this organization to provide a superior customer experience, but this knowledge base aspect has also allowed them to increase the retention of their customers as well.

In Summary

Let’s summarize the key points we covered in this blog:

  • Implementing an omnichannel strategy is important for improving your customers’ experience and helping you retain customers in the long run.
  • Customers are demanding efficient, secure and frictionless experiences with the organizations that they do business with, including those in regulated industries.
  • Secure exchange in your customer app or portal helps you provide a superior customer experience and allows you to make your agents’ job easier, create a personalized knowledge base of information for your customers, and improve customer retention.

Transform Your Omnichannel Strategy with DataMotion’s Secure Message Center

Invest in quality and compliant omnichannel security with DataMotion’s secure message center. Our state-of-the-art platform ensures your sensitive customer data remains confidential and protected across all communication channels. Whether you’re engaging with customers through email, websites, mobile apps or messaging apps, our secure message center guarantees end-to-end encryption and robust security measures.

By choosing DataMotion, you’ll enhance your omnichannel interactions’ security and build lasting trust with your customers. Don’t compromise on data security — take the proactive step to safeguard your omnichannel strategy. Put your data in safe hands by contacting us today.

Updated November 1, 2023

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Improving Wealth Management Client Satisfaction with a Seamless and Secure Experience 768 303 Bob Janacek

Improving Wealth Management Client Satisfaction with a Seamless and Secure Experience

On August 26 and 27, 2020 we are proud to be a part of Customer Contact Week (CCW) at Home. Leading up to the event, we sat down with DataMotion CEO, Bob Janacek to talk a little bit about DataMotion’s involvement in the event and the impact a great customer experience can have on client satisfaction and retention. We will also dive a little bit deeper into the customer experience discussion to focus specifically on why providing a seamless and secure experience is especially important for businesses operating in the wealth management sector. Our questions are in bold.

Hi Bob, I hope you are doing well. Last time we spoke, we talked about the impacts of COVID-19 on businesses and organizations. This time, I would like to spend some time discussing the event we are sponsoring at the end of the month, CCW at Home. Can you tell us a little bit about the event and why you are excited for DataMotion to be a sponsor?

Bob Janacek: Thanks Sarah. Our entire team is super excited to be a part of CCW at Home. It’s the right show at the right time, and we’re right in the middle of it! There are several factors that are all converging on the customer service industry. Consumers have more information readily available to them and as a result, more choice. And they are choosing to do business with vendors that give them a superior digital, often mobile-first, experience. Another factor is social distancing due to the ongoing pandemic. It is becoming engrained in consumer behavior, challenging organizations to up their game when it comes to doing business in seamless, digital ways.

It sounds like this event is heavily focused on customer experience and engagement, something that is very important to us at DataMotion. For everyone reading this, can you briefly explain the importance of customer experience?

Bob Janacek: There have been a few surveys done recently on the importance of customer experience as a competitive differentiator. One by a leading analyst firm shows that by next year, 80% of organizations will compete on customer experience, up from only 35% three years ago. We ran a survey last summer, centered around customer satisfaction with data exchange options offered by organizations. That survey uncovered a lot of room for improvement, with many organizations still requiring their customers to use multiple portals and logins to exchange sensitive messages and documents. And even worse, some still require fax and postal mail as part of their business process. Fortunately, there are easy, secure methods to modernize this experience.  Those organizations that do so become more efficient, increase customer and client satisfaction and position themselves for success.

You’re completely right, regardless of what kind of product or service that is being dealt with, the easier it is for customers to exchange messages or get help when they need it, the happier they are and the better off the company is. Now let’s focus in on a specific industry a little bit more, wealth management. Why should companies in this industry care about the experience they offer their clients?

Bob Janacek: Wealth management firms compete aggressively to attract and retain clients. The nature of their business is high touch and customers expect superior service. Providing simple, seamless ways for their clients to digitally interact with them and get business done is one sure way to increase customer satisfaction.

Can you give a few examples of ways these companies can improve their client’s experience while at the same time protecting their sensitive data?

Bob Janacek: One common method is to reduce the number of portals and logins that a client has to use to interact with the firm. For example, most firms offer their clients a customer portal and mobile app. But to exchange messages, they use a cobranded encrypted email system that uses a different portal and is typically not very mobile friendly. Some even use a third portal to exchange files.  Each of these systems requires a separate login, complicates the customer experience and provides a poor client experience. Fortunately, there are easy ways to eliminate these different systems and include their functionality behind the login of their client portal and app.

As an added benefit, integrating a message and document repository in the customer app has been shown to significantly reduce support requests. Over time, as more items are exchanged, the data in the repository grows in value, serving as a personalized knowledge base of the client’s interaction with the firm. It’s almost the same effect as a Slack or Microsoft Teams channel, but in this case, the topic of the channel is the client’s relationship and interactions with the firm.

I think you referenced a good point there, that improving the experience and streamlining client and advisor interactions can benefit not only the client, but also the advisors and the company as a whole, can you expand on this a bit more?

Bob Janacek: Besides benefits to the client, integrating secure message and document exchange into contact centers and customer service functions makes it easier to service customers. It centralizes data in the contact center solution by eliminating the need to use external systems like Outlook and an encrypted email system to exchange sensitive information. In addition, it adds a new privacy-compliant channel to an omnichannel strategy, connecting the contact center to the asset heavily invested in by organizations, their customer facing portal and mobile apps. This secure bi-directional channel allows organizations to dramatically improve client satisfaction, reduce mailroom and fax expenses, and accelerate business processes. As a digital channel, it also feeds directly into automation strategies involving bots, natural language processing and machine learning.

That sounds very exciting, I have one final question for you. For the first 100 people who sign up for your fireside chat on enriching the customer experience with a private, secure communication channel in an omnichannel strategy, we are offering a free pizza. So, what is your favorite type of pizza topping and what is your least favorite type?

Bob Janacek: Well, I’m from New Jersey. And pizza is something we think we’re really good at. The crust is really important. And the sauce too. As far as toppings go, I usually go to either extreme. There’s nothing better than a simple cheese pizza that’s done right. But sometime I’m in the mood for a country pizza, which is blasphemy to many pizza lovers. The one from my favorite place at the Jersey shore has green peppers, onions, mushrooms, black olives, pepperoni and sausage. And a perfect crust. Not good for a diet but definitely good for the soul.

DataMotion CEO, Bob Janacek talks about his vision for enriching customer experience

August 27, 2020 | 1:30pm | The first 100 to register will receive a free pizza on us!

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Securing Customer Data Amidst the Coronavirus Push for a Greater Digital Experience 560 221 Bob Janacek

Securing Customer Data Amidst the Coronavirus Push for a Greater Digital Experience

As we enter into our fifth month working from home during the Coronavirus Pandemic, we felt it was a good time to discuss the impact the virus has already had on some businesses and what lasting impacts it will likely have on businesses and organizations in the future – especially when it comes to improving the digital experiences they offer their customers. We sat down with DataMotion CEO, Bob Janacek to hear his thoughts on the topic. Our questions are in bold.

First things first, I hope you and your family have been staying safe and healthy during this time. Like many other organizations throughout the country, DataMotion has been working from home the past several months. Can you elaborate on how the Coronavirus impacted the way the company works and communicates with one another?

Bob Janacek: Fortunately, DataMotion has always been a cloud-first company, both in our product offering and also in the way that we run our business.  Our customers utilize our cloud-based APIs and software as a service from anywhere, so that hasn’t changed.  And as a company, our employees use cloud-based services to get their work done.  We’re heavily invested in Microsoft’s cloud stack, including Office 365, Teams and Dynamics 365.  Those work just as well for employees working from home as they do from the office.

It sounds like there was a relatively seamless switch for the company to remote communications. I can imagine that some companies, such as those that frequently have in-person interactions with customers and clients, had some trouble adjusting the way they communicate internally and externally. What kinds of challenges have these companies had to navigate?

Bob Janacek:  States have implemented various restrictions to increase social distancing and help combat the spread of the Coronavirus.  Among our customers, especially for those in financial services, insurance and healthcare, the most disruptive event is the reduction or elimination of face to face visits. So, business that used to get done in person, such as opening up an account or CD in a bank branch, or face to face interaction with an insurance agent, is difficult if not impossible. This makes it harder for customers to do business with these organizations, damaging their brand and reputation, and affecting their bottom line.

Can you give an example of a customer that DataMotion helped modernize and secure the way they do business in response to the Coronavirus?

Bob Janacek: We’ve helped a wide variety of enterprises during the pandemic, ranging from financial services firms in the wealth management, consumer loan and retail banking sectors to healthcare companies providing services for clinical trials, pharmaceutical benefits and care coordination. In each case, they turned to DataMotion to make it easier to do remote business with their customers. The most common use case is API integration of our DataMotion PaaS to add secure message and document exchange after the login of their customer portal or mobile app, and inside the CRM and contact center solutions their employees use to service their customers.

So, based off of this customer story and other stories that you can think of, what tips or best practices can you give for other companies who are still trying to find a way to do business in this challenging environment?

Bob Janacek: Living through a pandemic is understandably causing people to experience a great deal of stress, hardship and uncertainty. Organizations that are easy to do business with, especially in these challenging times, reduce customer stress, build their loyalty and position themselves to grow. There’s been a lot of talk about the things businesses need to do to adapt in the current and post-pandemic world. Having a high competency in doing business remotely is often at the top of this list. Many leading organizations are taking this opportunity to up their customer experience by offering simple, remote, digital ways for their customers to do business with them.

So far, we’ve talked mostly about how companies have reacted, or are currently reacting, to the shift to work from home that the Coronavirus has caused. Let’s look a little bit into the future now – what permanent changes do you foresee the coronavirus having on the way organizations work and communicate in the long term?

Bob Janacek: The need to remotely support and do business with customers is not going away. Younger generations of consumers expect a mobile-first relationship with their suppliers. We’ve seen the pandemic force companies out of their comfort zone and reimage their business processes for a digital future. This will serve them well in today’s environment and for years to come.

Is there anything organizations can do now to start preparing for these changes?

Bob Janacek: Organizations need to look at their existing workflows and processes and determine which ones can be modernized or at least be offered as a digital alternative. Legacy processes including courier, postal mail and fax are slow and expensive, and can typically be replaced or supplemented by digital equivalents. This is especially effective for organizations that already have a customer-facing app or portal. In this case, offering a richer digital experience accelerates business process, reduces costs, and increases customer retention and revenue recognition.

So, you talked a little bit about a push for greater digital experiences. In recent months, Telehealth visits have become the new norm – do you think this is something that will stick after the coronavirus has subsided?

Bob Janacek: Absolutely. Between driving, parking and waiting rooms, we’ve all spent hours to receive ten minutes of time with a doctor. Telemedicine brings convenience to routine care. It also makes it easier for care encounters to occur, allowing patients to receive care and be monitored more frequently, resulting in better outcomes.

With these visits happening virtually, it’s likely that there’s an increase in doctors and nurses needing to send medical records or other information to patients through some sort of online channel. Are there any issues to look out for in this situation?

Bob Janacek: Telehealth visits often generate clinical information that must be shared with the patient and the patient’s primary care provider. Since this data is covered under privacy regulations such as HIPAA, care must be taken to exchange this information in a secure manner. Physicians typically use an EMR system and prefer to receive this information electronically using Direct Secure Messaging.  This is a secure message exchange protocol built into EMR systems that’s designed to replace fax, saving time and money by importing clinical data in digital form. Patients will typically receive their results in a patient portal or through a HIPAA-compliant secure email system.

Do you have any other thoughts on any of the topics we discussed that you would like to share?

Bob Janacek: Yes, absolutely. We’re seeing a paradigm shift in consumer expectations, driven partly by the pandemic and social distancing, but also by the digital-first, smartphone-first generations of Millennials and Gen-Z’ers. Organizations that evolve to meet and exceed the expectations of their customers will grow and thrive, while those that stick to traditional legacy methods will rapidly fall behind. We’ve seen this disruption happen to eCommerce firms, and there’s no reason to believe that it won’t happen to every firm that services consumers. The expectations of customers are high, as is the need to provide a superior customer experience. For many organizations, supplementing traditional business processes with modern digital equivalents isn’t just a nice to have, it’s absolutely necessary for their growth and survival. Those organizations that have mastered doing business in a remote, digital way, while providing a superior customer experience, are well positioned to grow and thrive today and in the future. It’s a small expense that generates big returns.

As we finish up the interview, I have two more, fun questions to ask. First, are there any new activities or hobbies that you’ve picked up to keep yourself busy during quarantine? 

Bob Janacek: Funny you should ask. At the urging of my son, I’ve set up a three-hole disc golf course around my property.  It’s good to get outside and have a little family competition, but I’m getting beaten regularly because my son is home and has a lot of time to practice. I’m home too, but my time is usually spent on the computer working remotely.

My final question, what’s the number one thing you are looking forward to doing once all quarantine restrictions are lifted?

Bob Janacek: I’m looking forward to freedom.  The ability to go anywhere and visit anyone without restrictions. That would be amazing. It’s the simple things, sometime, that mean the most.

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How to Solve the Disconnect Between Compliance Regulations and Customer Experience 1000 395 Christian Grunkemeyer

How to Solve the Disconnect Between Compliance Regulations and Customer Experience

In the previous sections of this series, we discussed what customer experience is, why it’s important, and how you can achieve it. To recap, customer experience is a lifetime journey across all touchpoints and communication channels. The push towards providing this experience is influenced by the growing spending power of millennials who demand a unique, yet cost-effective experience. To meet these demands, businesses need to use customer data to provide an omnichannel experience and adapt and evolve to meet future requirements. But what happens when a business frequently deals with personally identifiable information (PII) and the customer experience strategy must be in compliance with industry regulations?

A disconnect between compliance and customer experience

Oftentimes, businesses put processes in place to meet regulatory demands – but don’t take the extra time to review the program from the user’s perspective. This may result in a user having difficulty sending and retrieving information, a compliance team wasting time jumping through hoops to review communications, or even worse, accidentally gaining access to information they shouldn’t see! What else? End users may be responsible for remembering to press a “secure” button or forced to remember which “keyword” to put in the subject before sending confidential information – this should automatically happen in most cases.

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So, what should you look for when developing a compliant and user-friendly method of sharing confidential information with your customers and business partners?

Before implementing any electronic communications program, we recommend businesses ask these questions:

  • How will the program impact the users (employees)?
  • What kind of compliance risks may it result in?
  • What impact does it have on their customers?

All three of these are key for successful implementation of the program. If the program works great for employees, is easy for the compliance department to review, but the business fails to make it easy for the customer – then this dramatically impacts the customer experience.

Using a Secure Message Center to solve the disconnect

One solution to this disconnect is a secure message center within a self-service website, customer portal, or mobile app. If implemented correctly, it can provide value to both the business and the customers. Based on feedback from our customers, they want to add more channels to their support process to give customers access across multiple devices and empower their agents to more easily communicate with customers.

While introducing these extra channels is great for increasing customer communications, it often makes it harder to ensure security and compliance. This is where an integrated secure message center comes in handy. By using a secure message center, you can add web-mail, file exchange, and web-form services natively to member service portals and mobile apps. Enable your business to provide an integrated communication channel between agents and your customers – effectively adding another channel in an omnichannel strategy – a compliance channel.

Want to read more? Click a link below to jump to the other segments of this blog series:

Part 1: What Does “Customer Experience” Really Mean?

Part 2: Why is Customer Experience Important – And How Can You Achieve It?

Boost Your Customer Experience with a Secure Message Center

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Seeking to Increase Customer Retention? You Need Seamless Communication 1024 402 Team DataMotion

Seeking to Increase Customer Retention? You Need Seamless Communication

Customer retention and loyalty are paramount for businesses looking to optimize their operations and protect their bottom line.

Attracting your target market and guiding them through the customer journey can be expensive and time-consuming. Investing in the customer base you already have is cost-effective and helps build a positive reputation for your enterprise. Great communication is key to staying connected and fostering meaningful long-term customer relationships.

We are breaking down the value of seamless communication in boosting customer retention and how the right messaging solutions will benefit your business.

The Necessity of Great Customer Experience

Customer experience refers to the way consumers or other companies perceive your business and its offerings. How satisfied they are with your products or service is important for various reasons.

Consumers today are time-stressed and do not want to repeat or re-enter information that has already been shared.  Providing consumers with this seamless and personalized level of service is critical to an exceptional customer experience.

At the same time, consumers have also become accustomed to instant or “near-instant” gratification, often referred to as the Amazon effect.  Today’s consumers expect a high level of customer service and want the ability to get their questions answered immediately while being able to access other information easily.

If you are not providing a high level of service, someone else will.  Ultimately, your customers will find another provider that makes their life easier. The bottom line is a great customer experience means improved customer retention.

Even companies that have not traditionally interacted with consumers directly, such as pharmaceutical manufacturers, are beginning to develop and foster direct consumer relationships. Because of this, these businesses must rethink their customer support strategies and how they wish to engage with their consumers as well.

How Does Customer Experience Impact Customer Retention?

Delivering favorable experiences is critical for boosting customer retention. Consumers are serious about the companies they support and work with. In fact, about 97% of consumers say customer service interactions influence whether or not they remain loyal to a brand, and 60% of consumers turned to a competitor after a negative contact center experience.

Explore some helpful ways to create positive customer experiences below:

  • Offer products and services that are easy to understand, navigate and use.
  • Find ways to personalize customer interactions and make each individual feel valued.
  • Prioritize responsiveness and address customer inquiries promptly.
  • Foster ongoing communication to keep customers engaged and informed.

Enhancing Customer Experience and Satisfaction Through Seamless Communication

Seamless communication is integral to great customer experience. Business partners and stakeholders must work together to make it a reality.

The following are three key elements of seamless communication that businesses should strive toward:

  1. Minimal friction: Make it easy for consumers to reach out to your team. Assess your current customer service strategy and if there are barriers or inefficiencies that you can improve. Eliminate unnecessary steps in your communication processes and aim for the most seamless experience possible.
  2. Consistency across channels: Ensure your business’s messaging is consistent on different touchpoints and mediums. Whether your customers are reaching out on social media, by email or in person, all these channels must offer aligned, unified experiences. To achieve seamless communication, your business should also aim to make the transition from one channel to another effortless and without disruption.
  3. Integration and automation: With the right technology, businesses can integrate their communication channels with their essential systems to deliver the most comprehensive and dynamic customer service imaginable. Automation helps your enterprise better manage communications while saving valuable time and energy.

Seamless communication is the cornerstone of excellent customer experiences, and businesses can benefit from providing positive interactions to ultimately boost retention.

Integrating Technology for Enhanced Customer Interactions

Your business can create an omnichannel strategy and elevate customer experience through a secure message center application programming interface (API) integration.

API integration will help your enterprise streamline your customer communication efforts and daily operations while also offering:

  • Data synchronization
  • Automated workflows
  • Real-time notifications and alerts
  • Self-service capabilities
  • Third-party integrations
  • Collaborative tools

The Role of a Secure and Unified Messaging Platform

A unified messaging platform helps businesses deliver outstanding customer service by helping them respond to inquiries faster and personalize important interactions. These solutions support your customer service representatives and can take a lot of responsibility off of their plate so they can focus on delivering the best experiences.

Anytime you are interacting with your customers or other businesses, keeping your communications secure is a must. Unified messaging platforms often have robust security features, like:

  • Encryption
  • Authentication
  • Access controls

Those in highly regulated industries, such as health care or financial services, can benefit from using these platforms to fulfill essential regulatory compliance standards. Tools like message archiving and audit trails make it easier to manage your records and meet important criteria.

In addition to improving security and compliance efforts, a unified messaging platform can offer the following for businesses:

  • Centralized communication: Your enterprise can simplify customer interactions with a localized hub for all your communication channels.
  • Streamlined management: These platforms make managing your messages painless. Your customer service team can easily organize, filter, search and archive messages from different channels, helping them boost productivity and deliver faster results.
  • Time-saving capabilities: Your business can leverage a unified messaging platform to save time on nearly every aspect of your customer communications, from offering real-time support to fostering quick, informed decision-making.
  • Integration: Another asset of having a unified messaging platform is integrating it with your business’s other systems, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) solution or a patient portal. Connecting your messaging with your essential business systems will streamline workflow efficiency and simplify data sharing.

Implementing Effective Customer Communication Strategies

Explore the following strategies to enhance your business’s customer communications and interactions:

  1. Prioritize clarity and transparency: When interacting with your customers, avoid using confusing technical jargon and overwhelming them with information. Instead, aim for clear, easily understandable language. Be honest and upfront about your business’s products and services.
  2. Respond promptly: Find ways to manage your customer communication efficiently. Responding to inquiries in a timely manner is essential for delivering positive experiences, and it helps your enterprise demonstrate a commitment to its customers.
  3. Use personalization whenever possible: Anytime you include personal details about a customer or tailor your communication to their specific needs, you enhance the customer experience and inspire greater loyalty.
  4. Offer different communication channels: Every consumer and business is unique. Offering different means of communication, like email, texting, online chats or video calls, allows you to meet the customer where they are and suit their particular preferences.
  5. Reach out to customers regularly: Effective communication is consistent. Regularly share relevant updates with your customers to keep them actively engaged and connected with your business.
  6. Train your team: Your customer support team should be well-versed in effectively utilizing your business’s communication systems and general customer service best practices to ensure they meet the highest standard.
  7. Collect feedback: Ask your customers for honest feedback about their interactions with your business. You can find valuable opportunities for improvement and learn what exceptional customer support looks like to them.

See DataMotion's Secure Messaging Center in Action

Seamless communication plays an integral role in building positive relationships and customer retention. DataMotion helps businesses in regulated industries leverage the power of efficient communication with our secure messaging center.

DataMotion unifies the solutions and applications your enterprise uses for connecting with your customers to deliver the smoothest experience possible. With our all-in-one application, you get the versatility and flexibility you need by connecting with your back-end systems, including call centers, email or case management.

Are you interested in seeing DataMotion’s secure exchange in action? Contact us online or start your free trial today!

Updated April 16, 2024

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Why is Customer Experience Important – And How Can You Achieve It? 768 303 Christian Grunkemeyer

Why is Customer Experience Important – And How Can You Achieve It?

In the first part of this blog series we discussed what customer experience means. To recap, customer experience is a lifetime journey across all touchpoints and communication channels. If your organization can provide excellent customer experience and meet your customer’s expectations, then you will see greater customer retention and growth for years to come.

Millennial Growth and Expectations

So, why do we talk so much about customer experience and why is it important for your company to provide a great experience? To answer that question simply – it’s about evolving technology and constantly changing customer expectations – especially from millennials.

Every year, millennials spending power continues to grow. In fact, the millennial generation recently overtook the baby boomers as the largest adult population group in the United States making them the future of your company’s growth. This begs the question – what do millennials want?

According to Lexington Law, they want a unique, cost-effective experience with great customer service. That seems like a no-brainer – don’t we all want that? In addition, Lexington Law also states that three quarters of millennials will switch to another brand if they have a negative experience and 67% believe it is their responsibility to share feedback to a brand about their experience. However, if you’re able to provide them with a positive experience, then 60% will remain loyal to your brand and they will be more likely to share that positive experience.

So, what does that mean for your company? If you can provide an excellent customer experience, then this group is much more likely to share that positive experience AND remain loyal to your brand much more than previous generations.

Finally, according to a report by Microsoft, 63% of millennials begin their customer service interactions online. Making it essential for companies to have an easy, online method for customers to get help when they need it.

Utilizing Customer Data to Meet Demands

In order to deliver a positive experience, we believe it’s important for companies to provide their customers with a seamless, digital experience across various platforms and channels. In fact, NICE inContact reported that 93% of surveyed consumers want a seamless omnichannel experience, but a shocking 73% gave companies a poor rating on their ability to seamlessly switch between channels. This means that many companies are struggling to meet the demands of their customers – leading to unhappy customers and a negative impact on their bottom line.

So, how can you meet these demands and provide a positive experience? Start with the channels you provide to your customers. Many companies offer several ways for customers to contact them and have exchanges. How well do these channels really work together? Is it easy to switch from one to another – not just for the customer but for your employees too?

Finally, simply meeting today’s demands for a seamless digital experience is not enough. As customer expectations change and evolve, so will your customers’ experience. Your company must have the ability and flexibility to adapt to future requirements to keep that experience great, and customer retention high.

We’ve discussed what customer experience is, why it’s important, and how you can begin to address your customers’ demands. But what if you work in an industry that’s heavily regulated? How can you meet these regulatory demands without sacrificing the customer experience? Stay tuned for the final part of this blog series to find out.

Want to read more? Click a link below to jump to the other segments of this blog series:

Part 1: What Does “Customer Experience” Really Mean?

Part 3: How to Solve the Disconnect Between Compliance Regulations and Customer Experience

CAN’T WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT PART OF THIS SERIES?

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Health Insurance, Social Distancing and Customer Communications 600 237 Team DataMotion

Health Insurance, Social Distancing and Customer Communications

Health insurers are facing great pressure to modernize the way they do business.  With the advent of COVID-19 and social distancing, the need to do business remotely requires a new set of competencies centered around improving their digital competency.  Fortunately, the changes that can make the most difference are ones that are easy to implement. They’re centered around simple and convenient methods to securely exchange documents and messages between your employees and their customers and partners. Competency in this area of digital communications is the expected baseline of customers and partners going forward.

In remote and stay at home environments, traditional methods such as fax, postal mail and mail rooms are either not available, or are inefficient and impractical, putting a company’s revenue and profitability at risk. Wherever there were personal touch points in the past, companies will need a corresponding digital strategy.  As insurers’ staff shift to working remotely, more aspects of their workflow with customers and partners must be digital. Tools like fax and paper forms are just not as practical in a typical home office – whereas convenient secure methods for digital collaboration and document exchange would be.  Those companies that embrace new digital ways of doing business will succeed.  A recent study from Salesforce says about 20% of consumers use portals to communicate with insurers. We believe all aspects of digital business will go up. Consumers expect organizations to provide them with a modern experience to handle not only routine transactions, but also those that have exceptions.  Offering secure document and message exchange, especially if it is integrated into the customer portal or mobile app, provides the simplicity to delight while simultaneously getting work done.  A solution that integrates into the systems already used by employees, such as Outlook, or contact center and helpdesk ticketing systems, provides a simple, seamless experience that increases productivity.

When handling health-related data, there has always been the need to protect PHI. Secure communication is an integral part of how insurers interact with their members and is an essential element for a great customer experience. The need for solutions that not only meet compliance requirements, but which are also easy to implement and use, is critically important. Data security and regulatory compliance shouldn’t get in the way of a great digital experience for employees, customers, and partners.  By succeeding in these areas, you will have a significant competitive advantage over those organizations that treat today’s environment as business as usual.

Ready to learn more about how your organization can modernize the way they do business and improve their customer communications?

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Digital transformation and clinical data exchange 768 326 Team DataMotion

Digital transformation and clinical data exchange

Digital transformation is all the rage these days and with clinical data exchange, the healthcare industry is no exception.  Numerous government and industry regulations in the last 10 years have “forced” providers, payers and vendors to step up and start implementing digital technologies to replace old paper based ways of working with health care data. Think HIPAA/HITech, Meaningful Use, and more recently MACRA, MIPS and the 21st Century Cures Act.

As often happens with transformative or cultural change – which this surely is – some components are quickly embraced, while others find many roadblocks in their way. As the health industry marches toward digitization, the roadblock we most often hear about is around interoperability – AKA – health clinical data exchange. How do we most effectively and efficiently exchange health data to obtain the best quality of care for the patient – when they need it?  What are the tools we have today to get us closer to interoperability and remove these roadblocks for exchanging health data like patient communications, medical records attachments, referrals and consultations with diagnostic attachments? These are frequent questions.

Finding the path to interoperability roadblock removal

Sometimes the best way to find your own way is to ask others how they got there.  So, let’s do that.
We have a customer who is an integrated health delivery network that has patients making continual transitions from acute care to long-term care, from acute care to visiting nurses, from acute care to home health services – you get the picture.  With all these transitions of care exchanges they had several digital data exchange needs including:

  • Easing electronic health information exchange across an integrated delivery network in compliance with federal health information privacy and security requirements
  • Maximizing workforce productivity by securing Protected Health Information with automated high accuracy content filtering
  • Mobilizing clinical data exchange with referral partners in accordance with national standards

The large volume of patients transitioning to new facilities required a very quick exchange of clinical documentation so it arrived at the network provider before the transitioning patient did.

Tools are available today

Using the health data exchange techniques of email encryption and Direct Messaging that are available today, this customer was able to meet these requirements and achieve on-time delivery of patient information for these frequent transitions of care.

Get more information

This is just one example using tools available now to get past health data exchange roadblocks. You can get more details and download the entire case study for this customer in our resource library. For more information on health data exchange techniques take a look at the whitepaper “21st Century Data Sharing Techniques for Healthcare Delivery Transformation Success”.

Does your organization need help getting past the clinical data exchange roadblock?
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Fintech & Insurtech – Competing on a Great Customer Experience 600 237 Team DataMotion

Fintech & Insurtech – Competing on a Great Customer Experience

Is a great customer experience required to grow your account base, and retain accounts in financial services? As the world shifts to a ‘digital first’ orientation – financial services organizations and insurance companies are under pressure to improve the online customer experience, particularly in the face of ‘fintech and insuretech’ startups that use it as a competitive advantage to take market share – and keep it.

Gartner, the world’s leading research and advisory company, recently published the Gartner 2019 Customer Experience Management Survey:

“As part of Gartner’s 2019 Customer Experience Management Survey, executives at 56 financial services firms were asked the extent of what their firms competed/compete/will compete on the basis of CX two years ago, today and in two years. While only 34% of firms said they almost completely or fully competed on this basis two years ago, 59% said they do today and 80% said they will in two years, which is an incredibly rapid shift.”

Graph of degree to which institutions competes or will compete on the basis of customer experience

Source: Gartner “Enhancing Customer Experience Maturity in Commercial Banking,” Financial Services Business Leader Research Team, 13 December 2019.

Again – in two years from now, 80% of the respondents expect that they will be competing almost completely/completely on the basis of the customer experience.

As PWC notes in this new report – Financial Services Technology 2020 and Beyond: Embracing Disruption – fintechs and other new market entrants  “typically offer a better customer experience….” – as a competitive advantage.

HOUSTON – DO WE HAVE A CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE PROBLEM?

Given the onslaught of Fintech and Insurtech companies – which arguably are founded on simplifying the user experience through mobile tech (the ‘Apple–ization’ of finance if you will), what do we believe traditional players / incumbents should do to improve customer experience – especially the online experience?

Ying yang symbol to display how to provide a seamless experience for customers

One area worth investigating is the linkage between your self-service options (portal, app, website) and your customer service channels. Often times self-service options are siloed with limited, or no connection to customer service channels.  That can make it difficult for your self-service customer to get help when the portal does not deliver what they need.

Digital self-service is great for providing an optimal customer experience – until it’s not. Then the customer looks for an easy way to ask for help via a quick message. If that choice can be made readily available in the user interface of the app or portal – great. If it is a channel that can also include rich context and document or image sharing as well – even better. And if the channel is completely integrated into your back-end support infrastructure (core platforms, CRM, contact center, etc) – you’re golden. Unlike many solutions that improve the customer experience, this can be a relatively easy, painless way to move those experience scores up and make you a hero.  Who doesn’t want that!

Want more data to support providing these seamless digital banking or insurance channels? Check out this whitepaper. Want an implementation guide to help formulate a solution? Check out this guide.

Need a great customer experience to grow your account base and retain accounts?

Talk to us to learn more about how we can help your company.

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What Does Patient Engagement Really Mean? 600 237 Team DataMotion

What Does Patient Engagement Really Mean?

We often hear terms such as patient engagement and they become the latest “term du jour”.  But what does that really mean and what is your organization doing to help promote such activity?  Is patient engagement a part of your organization’s strategy to maintain customer loyalty and grow your business?

Patient engagement is much more than just offering a portal or app that your patients can use to schedule appointments or see their latest EOBs.  Patient engagement is more about a philosophy – a way that your organization will interact with your patients or members.  This interaction needs to be bi-directional.  Providing your patients with access to their health information may also be a part of this strategy.  However, patient access to their data is not enough.  What is critical is the need to help patients by engaging them and making sure they understand what their data is “telling” them.

The idea is to provide patients with the necessary information, guiding them and ensuring they are engaged with their own care, and making the right choices. This will lead to better outcomes and ultimately to a lower cost of care.  This level of engagement requires that providers are active participants.  By gaining a holistic view of the patient, then you, the provider, will become an active partner in the patient’s care.  The need to run duplicative tests can be avoided. The ability to remind patients if they miss a prescription refill will help in establishing your organization as a trusted partner in the patient’s care.  Some patients will obviously be more active participants than others, but if you are able to provide them with things like educational resources or support groups – this can also lead to a richer experience for the patient. The result – they will view your organization as their trusted source for their health needs.

Patient engagement requires patient data

In our “information everywhere” world, patients can be easily overwhelmed with data.  In today’s technology invasive environment, with wearables and the many health apps that are designed to help us, how do we make sense of it all?  The need to pull together the many sources of data available to us as providers or as patients is leading to the advent of yet another enabling technology – the personal health record.  The idea of a personal health record is not necessarily new, but we now see various technology companies, foundations, pharmaceutical companies as well as payers contributing to the personal health record, making it easier for the patient to truly be at the center of their care.  These technologies are more user friendly to the patient and the provider.  These applications make it easier to both collect and transmit personal health records, which when fully aggregated, can lead to greater insights for care management. They should also be particularly useful to everyone concerned with chronic disease management.

The bottom-line?

As a member of the health care ecosystem, the question you now need to ask is how will I engage and bring further value to my patient? What technologies can I enable for my patients to make true patient engagement a reality for my patients?

We believe that as this push for greater visibility and data access grows, DataMotion is well positioned to be the conduit for much of this communication flow.

How did one organization use DataMotion Direct Secure Messaging to improve care coordination, provider satisfaction, and CMS quality metrics?

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