With the fast-changing environment of Customer Communications Management (CCM), reliably sending the right message to the appropriate target at the right time, using the right message channels and of course, at the right place is no longer an added value but a necessity to survive. The organization can become tainted with a chaotic proliferation of fragmented documents that slows down organizational operations and heightens regulatory risk as the organization grows.
Templates Management at Scale requires document editing to the next level. It needs a sophisticated integration of governance, reuse strategies, and automation.
The Crisis of Scale: Why Governance Matters
The majority of enterprises start out with a few templates in CCM. But with the increasing product diversification and the growth of markets all over the world, that handful of people can easily become thousands. In the absence of a Content Governance Framework, there is a Wild West of communications in which branding is inconsistent and legal disclaimers that are outdated live in the forgotten PDF footers.
A powerful Content Governance Framework is the constitution to your communications. It defines:
- Ownership: Who is able to create or modify templates?
- Lifecycle: At what time should a template be retired or archived?
- Approval Workflows: Before a message reaches an inbox of a customer, it must be signed by legal heads, brand heads and departmental heads.
These rules can help organizations turn their CCM into a disciplined and scalable engine, rather than a series of ad-hoc activities.
Strategic Reuse: The Power of Modular Design
The trick of dealing with thousands of templates is not dealing with thousands of templates, but just dealing with hundreds of modular components. This is referred to as a Template Reusability Strategy.
Modern CCM professionals do not construct a distinct document in each situation, but rather Scalable Content Templates. These templates are constructed with snippets or objects- standardized headers, footers and blocks of data driven logic which can be reused in any type of document.
Benefits of a Modular Strategy
- Efficiency: Change a logo or a legal disclaimer once, and it updates across the entire enterprise.
- Consistency: All the departments have the same pre-approved language.
- Speed to Market: It is possible to launch new products faster, by not having to build them but by assembling existing modules.
Pro Tip: You should consider your templates as LEGO sets. You do not have to have a new set up each design, you just have to have a more efficient method of arranging the bricks.
Centralization via the Template Management System
In order to implement these strategies, companies need to leave the use of local files storage and adopt an exclusive Template Management System (TMS). A TMS offers a source of truth so that version control nightmares of accidentally using Invoice_v2_FINAL_OLD.Docx do not happen anymore.
In a TMS, tracking is the most important. To manage internal processes, teams usually use an inventory tracker template to review which templates are active, which are being phased and those that need to be updated immediately because of regulation changes. This is an essential visibility when it comes to large-scale Enterprise Content Management Automation.
Automation: The Engine of Modern CCM
Automation is the bridge between having a plan and executing it at scale. Template Automation Tools enable the dynamical addition of customer information, logic-based content selection (e.g., “If customer in California, add Privacy Notice A”), and automated multi-channel distribution.
These tools when combined with your CRM/ERP, will make sure that the right message is sent to the right person at the right time without any manual efforts. This is where the services of implementation of CCM come in. These experts will assist in closing the disconnect between the old data engines and the new output engines so that your Enterprise Content Management Automation is not only fast, but also accurate.
Measuring Success and Performance
Scaling communications is also a management of people and processes underlying communications. To ensure high standards, most companies employ employee performance tracker to keep a check on the efficiency of the template design team.
- What is the time taken to transfer a template between draft and production?
- How bad are automated outputs?
- What is the frequency of reuse of reusable components?
These metrics give the data to be used to refine the Content Governance Framework with time.
The Path Forward: Implementing Scale
To overcome template sprawl in your organization, there are three steps you can make on the way to maturity:
1. Audit and Consolidate
Check your template of inventory tracker to detect duplicates. You will probably discover that 20 percent of your templates will serve 80 percent of your purpose in case they are rewritten as Scalable Content Templates.
2. Invest in Expertise
Don’t go it alone. Working with CCM implementation services will make sure that your architecture will be implemented to work in the future. They will be able to install the technical base of Template Automation Tools that your internal team may lack the capacity to install.
3. Culture of Governance
A Template Management System is as good as those who use it. Create the culture of the importance of the Template Reusability Strategy rather than the fixes made one-off.
Conclusion
Scaling customer communications is a marathon, not a sprint. With a good Content Governance Framework, Template Automation Tools and a Template Reusability Strategy, your organization can transform a complicated liability into a simplified asset.
Less is more in the realm of CCM. Fewer and smarter templates translate into increased compliance, reduced costs and, most importantly, an easier to understand and more uniform voice to your customers. Need to clean up your communication stack? It is time to begin to consider your templates as a strategic ecosystem, but not as a set of documents.