 Postage is the greatest expense in any mailing project, whether direct mail advertising, transactional communications, or regulatory notifications. In the USA the cost to send mail is relatively cheap compared to other countries, but that doesn’t mean mailers should spend more than necessary.
The US Postal Service allows commercial mailers to lower their postage costs through a program called workshare discounts. Doing some of the work necessary to distribute and track the mail entitles mailers to pay reduced postage rates. Mailing professionals at your mail service provider (MSP) know how to qualify for these discounts and pass savings along to their clients. The Postal Service requires mail to meet certain criteria to qualify for workshare discounts. MSP’s add value to their services by ensuring client mail qualifies for postage discounts by meeting standards for:
Address Quality The USPS spends about 1.3 billion dollars every year handling mail they can’t deliver because of inaccurate addresses. By fixing addresses in advance, mailers help the Post Office lower their costs. They receive postage discounts in return. Unlike many kinds of business data, mailing professionals can standardize and correct mailing addresses without creating extra work for their clients. Mail service providers use sophisticated software and USPS databases to make sure streets and cities are spelled correctly, proper abbreviations are used, and addresses fall within a range of known house numbers. Once an MSP standardizes and corrects addresses, they compare client mailing files to the National Change of Address (NCOA) database. The software updates the addresses for any individuals, families, or businesses who have filed a change of address notice with the Post Office. The US Postal Service checks the mail for accuracy. If mail exceeds certain error thresholds, the USPS can fine mailers or revoke postage discounts. MSP’s must be diligent in their mail preparation efforts, continually adjust their procedures, and update software when mailing regulations change. Barcoding Intelligent mail barcodes (IMb’s) contain a wealth of information that allow the US Postal Service to route the mail, track mailpieces as they proceed through the distribution network, and more. The USPS must process un-barcoded mail through multi-line optical character readers (MLOCR’s). These machines read the printed addresses, look up information, and spray the barcodes on the mail. When mailers present mail already encoded with the IMb’s they qualify for special postage rates and save the Postal Service time and money. Sortation Sorting mail into a sequence that allows for efficient routing and transportation speeds delivery and saves the USPS a tremendous amount of money. When mailers can present mail trays, pallets, or truckloads of mail already coded and sorted for delivery the Postal Service rewards them for their efforts with postage rate reductions. Preparation Mailing today is a data-driven automated process. MSP’s must abide by USPS rules for how they handle the data, create and package the mailpieces, and transmit information to the Postal Service. Large data files prepared by MSP’s provide all the information the Postal Service needs to track the mail, charge mailers for postage, verify the mail meets all regulations, and perform other necessary actions. Trays and other mail containers must include identifying tags and labels. The days of filling out paper mailing forms and manually preparing the mail have past. Induction Just because MSP’s produce mail in a certain location doesn’t mean it must enter the mailstream at the closest USPS facility. Some MSP’s include logistic services. They analyze the mail and decide if trucking some of it to locations closer to the final destination is more cost-effective than depositing the mail locally. Known as drop-shipping, this tactic earns mailers extra postage discounts. Drop-shipping is most often used for marketing mail with a target in-home date. On a national mailing, inducting the mail locally in each market provides for more predictable final delivery dates. Postage Savings for Clients Print/mail service providers generally pass postage savings along to their clients. Most do not describe postage discounts as line items on client invoices so clients may need to investigate to determine exactly how the service providers compute their postage bills. For repetitive jobs such as bills or statements, MSP’s will often analyze a client’s mailing data to determine the sortation level at which the mail will qualify. Clients with high geographic concentrations of customers, such as utility companies, will qualify more of their mail at lower postage rates than clients who mail to customers dispersed across large areas. MSP’s will quote each client an average postage rate based on the characteristics of their mail. Mail service providers may compensate clients for any additional discounts earned through co-mingling or other extra work they do. They may factor the savings into per-piece prices for printing and mailing. In other cases, such as for one-time mailings, MSP’s might track actual postage paid and pass the cost through to the client. Prices for printing and mailing services might be slightly higher since the MSP won’t be keeping a portion of the workshare postage discounts. You should never pay more for postage than necessary. Overpaying doesn’t get your mail delivered any faster or provide any extra benefit. Call the document delivery specialists at Lanvera to talk about strategies for lowering your postage bill.
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 Baby boomers are still a force to be reckoned with. By 2021 half of the U.S. population will be over age 50 and they will control 70% of disposable income. As financial institutions (FI’s) scramble to appeal to millennials and younger groups that will fuel the future, they cannot afford to ostracize the baby boomers.
Consumers born between 1946 and 1964 account for about two-thirds of America’s bank deposits. The balance of wealth isn’t likely to change for another ten years. The American Bankers Association estimates new products and services aimed at baby boomers could create up to $82 billion in deposits and $443 billion in investable assets. Boomers are a demographic worth pursuing. Avoid Stereotyping Baby boomers don’t think of themselves as “old”. They are still active, working, and embracing technology when it fits their lifestyle. FI’s that categorize baby boomers as “senior citizens” or slow technology adopters are making a mistake. Millennials and boomers share similar views about how they want to interact with their financial institutions. Online banking is a good example. Baby boomers may think of their financial institutions in terms of physical branches and tellers instead of only a name on a credit card or a mobile app. But they still appreciate the convenience of app-based features like remote check deposit, suspicious account activity alerts, low balance notifications, and credit card due date reminders. Some studies suggest the number of boomers that rely completely on mobile apps for banking services will rise by over 50% over the next three years. Design Appropriately Baby boomers pay their bills online and use FI websites and apps to check balances, transfer funds, or do other business. FI’s should make sure these services are available on all platforms and design their application interfaces so they don’t impede the ability of older customers to use them. Include on-screen instructions or tips that clearly show customers what to do next. While a millennial may naturally swipe the screen to find more information, boomers sometimes require more explicit direction. Most of the app designers are millennials themselves. They may not be thinking about adapting their interfaces and systems to be attractive to their parent’s generation. With half of baby boomer banking customers possessing over $100,000 in investable assets, FI’s would be foolish to publish apps that confuse those who are not digital natives. They don’t want to turn these wealthy customers away from the FI’s latest products and services. Earn Loyalty Another reason for shifting some attention back to the boomer population is their loyalty. Customers over 55 years old are inclined to continue doing business with financial institutions they have patronized for years. Ignoring this group by spending most of the marketing budget wooing millennials, however, will try their patience. People in all age groups want to believe companies appreciate their business. In a Gallup poll, nearly two-thirds of baby boomers surveyed said they were indifferent or dissatisfied with their FI relationships. This statistic indicates the emphasis FI’s have placed on pursuing millennials has left the boomers feeling unconnected and unappreciated. Here are a few areas where content and campaigns aimed directly at baby boomers can yield positive results: Investments Identify customers who have accumulated assets worthy of discussions about annuities or other investments and engage them with educational material, retirement calculators, etc. Estate Planning Information about tax advice and trusts can be well-received when directed at high-value individuals most interested in strategies for distributing their wealth. Promote the FI’s estate planning professional services offerings to this group. Mature CD’s Triggered communications allow FI’s to approach account holders at the right time. Push out material featuring tips and advice about what to do with the money in certificate of deposit accounts as each CD nears maturity. Seize the Opportunity Opportunities for improvements abound. FI’s can focus on encouraging their older customers to be comfortable with digital products, prompting boomers to conduct more of their business digitally. This will allow FI’s to track activity, manage relationships, and communicate with their best customers (in terms of assets) more effectively. Financial institutions have two lucrative markets to serve. They should consider re-allocating a portion of the resources dedicated to millennial product development and marketing. A strategic shift today will allow FI’s to grow their businesses now with baby boomers as they continue to attract millennials and build revenue streams for the longer term.  By 2025 millennials will make up 75% of the workforce. This group is famously fickle when it comes to brand loyalty and they've been known to switch brands when a company makes a mistake or they aren’t treated as individuals. What does this mean for financial institutions? What must they change to earn loyalty from their millennial customers and avoid excessive customer churn?
Millennials are more likely to change banks or credit unions than other generational groups. If they have a problem, they aren’t shy about switching their accounts. However, studies also show the millennials are less likely to report problems to financial institutions! This suggests FI’s need to be skilled at identifying potential trouble spots and they must communicate effectively with their millennial customers to ward off negative experiences. Examples might include predictive analytics that allow an FI to foresee credit score changes that might affect interest rates or warning customers about low account balances before they experience overdraft fees. Making it easier to report problems is also a practical strategy for retaining millennial business. This generation uses a variety of communication channels so make sure they can voice their concerns via mobile apps, social media, text message, and email. FI’s obviously need to ensure they employ mechanisms to respond quickly to complaints or issues customers raise through these channels. A Seamless Experience A unified, personalized experience resonates with the millennial crowd. FI’s must continue efforts to combine isolated data repositories so they can leverage information gleaned from multiple customer relationships. Portals that offer customers access to financial products in a single environment can be a differentiating factor that encourages loyalty. Millennials are more focused on convenience than previous generations. They will welcome a unified dashboard where customers can retrieve all their financial documents on demand. Mobile First Mobile must be part of the strategy. Millennials use mobile apps to check on balances and transactions, transfer funds, or originate person-to-person money exchanges. These mobile activities must be quick and easy. This generational group abandons applications that take too long or require too much hoop-jumping to complete a task. A Personalized Experience After convenience, personalization is probably the most important aspect of millennial business relationship nurturing. Data must be accurate and deployed at every customer touch point. Millennials want to feel their FI appreciates their business and knows them as individuals. Otherwise, banking services become a commodity easily replaced by organizations the customers perceive as being different, such as branchless neo-banks. An omni-channel experience is especially relevant for millennial customers. They want to choose how and when they communicate. Be prepared for conversations that begin in one channel but transition to others on the whims of millennial customers. Whether on phones, tablets, computers, or in the branch, millennials expect their historical interactions will be fully accessible and interconnected. Think of customer communications as a platform instead of a collection of vertically oriented pipelines of information. Millennials may be un-enamored with conventional banks, but as they mature and their financial requirements grow, they will need the guidance and support established FI’s can provide. Very few millennials say they are confident about their financial acuity. By providing the frictionless environment the millennials desire today, FI’s can continue growing and nurturing their customer relationships. This will position them as the go-to resource when millennials need car loans, mortgages, investment accounts, or life insurance.  Many direct mail or graphic arts companies process transactional documents as a sideline to their core business, but they aren’t the best choice for producing critical customer communications. The skills necessary to produce direct mail, forms, publications, or packaging differ from those necessary for high-volume printed and digital transactional documents. Be careful about choosing a vendor to handle essential customer touch points like bills or statements. The company that prints your business cards may not be the one best suited to process complex personalized communications for you. All customer communications are important, but highly personal documents that include sensitive data such as financial information come with added responsibility. Service providers creating these documents must make sure they send every physical page or digital image – such as email, SMS and ePresentment – to the right person and they deliver the material on time. Best practices dictate document service companies track the personalized material as it proceeds through the production and delivery steps. Requirements for direct marketing communications are not nearly as rigorous. Consistently performing at the level necessary to handle transactional documents and communications require a different mindset than one normally finds in shops that concentrate on graphic arts or direct mail applications. Two Definitions of Document Quality Communications like invoices, statements, notices, or tax forms are filled with information meant for a single individual. Failing to get the information to the right person or accidentally revealing private information to the wrong person can have serious consequences. Organizations can face regulatory infractions, fines, lawsuits, and damaged reputations. Transactional document processing providers build safeguards into their workflows to prevent data and document integrity errors from happening or to catch and correct them before they leave the building. Document quality has a different meaning in graphic arts and direct mail shops. They are more concerned with details associated with the images, like registration and color, than the integrity of individual documents. Organizations specializing in direct mail will discard damaged or corrupted documents. The industry accepts a certain level of spoilage. Reprinting or re-generating documents rarely happens in such environments. More Transactional Document Considerations Delivery channel preference management is another area to consider. In graphic arts and commercial printing applications, customer-specific distribution decisions are not dependent on a variable stored in a customer database. Commercial printers ship finished materials to their customers or send them all out via postal mail. Also, processes for delivering important messages through secondary channels don’t exist. If a recipient doesn’t open an email communication within a certain time period, for instance, direct mail companies rarely print a physical version and send it to the customer’s postal address. Printing companies often won’t know when delivery attempts fail and lack a procedure for notifying their clients of these events. Transactional documents often feature variable page counts. A financial statement for one customer may be one page, but the next customer’s statement might be five pages. To ensure every customer receives all their printed pages, transactional document service providers develop controls to count the pages as they create them. Automated systems then communicate this information to the finishing equipment. Duplicates or missing pages sensed by folding and inserting equipment causes the machinery to stop and report an error or divert the mailpiece for special handling. This level of quality control isn’t necessary in the graphic arts and direct mail world where physical characteristics of all the documents in a job are essentially the same. Specialist of Singe Source Provider? By choosing an outsource customer communications supplier that specializes in transactional documents, companies can be assured their vendor understands detailed document production processes. These companies have developed reliable and consistent production workflows that account for every component of every message. They have systems for re-generating damaged items, and know how to distribute each message through the physical or digital channel each document recipient has selected. Before turning your critical customer communications applications over to the company that creates your marketing materials, be sure they have invested in the behind-the-scenes software and hardware appropriate for the documents they are asking to handle. Visit their facilities and get a feel for the company’s culture. Ask them how they handle damaged documents. Review their processes for tracking all your documents through the production process. Some companies have these procedures in place, but most do not. It’s not worth the risk to turn your most important customer touch points over to an organization unprepared to ensure every message they generate on your behalf protects your organization’s image and reputation.  When it's time to evaluate communication and document providers, the process of comparing pricing from current and competing providers proves to be a difficult task. Each provider may offer a different menu of services and price schedule, throwing off any opportunity to compare "apples-to-apples" unit costs. Invoice line item evaluation can be time consuming and confusing.
Outsource providers bundle services differently. Some quote a single price for printing and inserting a document. Other organizations separate those operations on their invoices. Companies may quote ePresentment as a flat rate or by the image. Tiered prices change when volumes fluctuate. Some service providers charge extra for receiving and storing items such as pre-printed inserts. Others don’t. Still, other document service providers may replace inserts with full-color “onserts” printed as part of the documents themselves. Onserts may be billed separately, or not mentioned at all on price quotes. Outsource service providers add value at different points in the document production workflow. It’s not just the pricing that’s important. Companies must consider the benefits of working with each prospective outsource document vendor. Can an outsource provider enhance your documents? Add functionality? Improve deliverability? Lower customer service costs? Do they handle document composition or must you supply print-ready files? Document service companies can enrich your customer communications in dozens of areas. Added value must be part of the calculation. Added Value The greatest financial benefits of working with one service provider or another may never be evident as details on the service provider’s invoice. Savings in postage, paper, or printing are relatively small compared to the positive impact an outsource vendor can have on their client’s objectives for customer retention, lifetime customer value, or customer experience. Document improvements such as upgraded design or user-friendly online self-service portals reduce client operating costs. These changes lessen the volume of calls handled by a client’s customer service department, increase customer retention, improve cash flow, or promote upsell opportunities. Outsource service providers add value by:
Choosing the right outsource document service provider involves more than an invoice comparison. The most important selection criteria is determining how each prospective vendor can improve your business. What do they offer that enhances the customer experience, lowers operating costs, or achieves other business objectives? Price will always be a consideration when choosing vendors, but the line items on a price list don’t tell the whole story. Today, organizations look upon their communication and document services providers as business partners, not suppliers of a commodity that can be acquired anywhere and are differentiated only by price.  Financial Institutions often accomplish customer communication with a disjointed collection of software, systems, measurement schemes, and data sources. Frequently, FIs purchase or develop these communication systems at different times and by various groups across the enterprise. Predictably, the result is a mixed bag of offerings that may do the job individually but fall short of omni-channel customer relationship goals.
What FIs need is a single plug-in that can access all their systems and provide a modern and easily navigated customer interface. The source of the documents should not matter. In many banks and credit unions, customers may encounter branding inconsistencies or cumbersome integration as they try to locate information or access documents associated with their accounts. As customers interact with the various systems, they will notice the differences. Customer experience improvements may require heavy IT support, causing organizations to find themselves behind the times and slow to react to new products, new technology, or brand refreshes. The customer experience is even more confusing when inconsistencies occur among communication channels. For some FIs, identical information they deliver via the web, mobile apps, or on paper may vary in appearance and functionality. Digital Document Access One particularly challenging area is digital document access. Customers attempting to view their transactional documents or correspondence frequently access the data via a document archiving system. While highly efficient at storing and indexing large volumes of documents, the creators of these systems don’t always optimize them for end-user operation. Customers may face retrieval roadblocks when archive systems do not generate user-oriented indexes or they restrict selection and sorting criteria. Also, archiving systems don’t always capture important communication components such as regulatory notices or marketing information companies insert into envelopes when they deliver the original documents on paper. Third party documents just add to the ePresentment challenges. When customers must access a third party website to retrieve certain documents, the original company loses control over branding and presentation. Sending customers to another domain is risky. Customers may fail to return. Difficulty with online document access dampens customer enthusiasm for eAdoption. Organizations have learned they must offer added functions and relevancy to wean customers away from paper documents. Hard to find PDF versions of printed pages served up by document archive software deliver little added value and so offer no incentive to turn off paper. Plugging into All Systems Fully featured ePresentment goes beyond the basic functionality provided by common document repositories. Whether documents are generated by a core application for billing and statements, correspondence applications, or a CRM, the customer experience should be the same. Comprehensive solutions like Lanvera’s ePresentment platform deliver these capabilities and more. In the Lanvera ePresentment system, document retrieval and viewing methods are consistent across all devices, using a mobile-first approach. Filtering and downloading processes are easy and familiar, removing the confusion and frustration a patchwork collection of applications sometimes forces upon end-user customers. Customers may view even third party documents via the Lanvera platform, keeping the original organization in full control of the customer experience. With built-in integration, companies can manage the ePresentment customer interface themselves, without relying on their vendors to make changes associated with branding or regulatory requirements. Building customer communications integrated with all enterprise systems from scratch is a huge project. Electronic presentment solutions with plug-in capabilities allow companies to provide their customers with a rich customer experience without re-designing every system that generates customer-facing documents.  Let’s face it, delinquent payments are a problem for most businesses. Oftentimes, a customer will make an honest mistake and simply miss a payment. Other times, they will actively avoid you. Managing the revenue cycle can also prove difficult when you are competing with multiple other monthly bills customers receive electronically and via USPS.
While there are plenty of good strategies for collecting the money your business is owed, it doesn’t have to come to that. Here are Seven Ways to Get Paid Faster through the use of your business-critical communications: 1. Have a clear call to action (CTA): Show your customers exactly where they need to go to pay their balance. The CTA should be eye-catching so the customer not only sees it, but is compelled to read and act. When you clearly state exactly what you want your customer to do, it takes out the guess work and encourages an action on their part. 2. Use color: Adding color to marketing messages can increase engagement rates by up to 42%. And not only that, the addition of color can actually aid in improving your customers’ memory. Studies have proven that color can help people process and store images more efficiently than black and white, so by adding color to marketing, customers are far more likely to not only read, but retain your messaging and be more inclined to act upon it. 3. Make it convenient: According to a recent Federal Reserve survey, roughly one-third of consumers and three-quarters of businesses expressed willingness to pay a fee for payments that have faster availability to the payee. Offer an online invoicing process with the ability to pay online. An automated billing system will "ping" your customers until it shows the invoice has been paid. There is something to be said for having an automated process performing the follow-up for you! 4. Be polite with your language: While it may seem unimportant, adding lines such as "Thank you for your business" and "We appreciate your timely payment" positively reinforces the relationship you have with a customer. Be nice, and they just may return the favor. In fact, a recent study found that a simple "please" or "thank you" can increase your chances of getting paid by 5%. 5. Specify payment timelines: If a bill needs to be paid within 14 days, be sure to list this on the document. Also list if there will be a charge for late payment and how much the charge will be. Give your customers and clients as much information as humanly possible. 6. Utilize incentives: Beyond motivating payment with late fees, try positively incentivizing customers to pay you early. Incentives might include a 1 to 2 percent discount if payment is received within a specific “early” time frame. Consider offering future discounts, credits, gift certificates or merchandise as possible incentives. In the end, you’re saying thank you for making that payment a priority. It’s rewarding your customers for their business, increasing their loyalty, and helping you get paid. 7. Keep open lines of communication with customers: Oftentimes, when people have not paid, they do not realize it. Sending a simple automated email reminder to customers can go a long way. Part of the value of an email reminder is that it reinforces your relationship with the customer and provides an opportunity to engage. Use the email reminder to create an open dialogue with clients, providing them with a sense of security and comfort. Interested in using your transactional documents to influence speed-to-pay? Click here to learn more or contact us for a demo.  According to NFCC’s Financial Literacy Survey, roughly 1 in 4 U.S. adults do not always pay their bills on time. Depending on where your business falls on the priority scale of all the monthly bills your customers receive, it is inevitable that many of your customers will make late payments, or even skip payments altogether. Here are four steps to better billing that will encourage your customers to pay you on time, or even early:
1. Offer convenience. A recent Pew survey reported that nearly three in ten adults say the most common way to they take care of their regular monthly bills is by an online or electronic payment. Furthermore, the Federal Reserve has found that roughly one-third of consumers and three-quarters of businesses express willingness to pay a fee for payments that have faster availability to the payee. The best way to cater to this need is to implement an online invoicing and payment process. An automated billing system not only gives your customers easy access to their bills and the ability to pay, but can also be set to send your customers friendly email and SMS reminders. 2. Communicate a clear and colorful call to action (CTA). Adding color to messages can increase engagement rates by up to 42%. Additionally, color can aid in improving your customers’ memory. Studies have proven that color can help people process and store images more efficiently than black and white. By adding color to your CTA, customers are far more likely to engage and pay their bills. Try orange or another bright color! According to QuickSprout, orange CTAs boost conversion rates by about 32.5%, and red CTAs boost conversion rates by about 21%. The CTA should be eye-catching so your customers are compelled to read it and act. When you clearly state exactly what you want your customer to do, it eliminates guesswork and encourages action. 3. Be consistent. Consistency is key to your customers knowing exactly where to find their balance each time they receive their bills. Online and printed bills should be identical, making it easy for your customer to quickly scan their bill to find how much they owe and when they need to make their next payment. 4. Utilize Incentives. Try positively incentivizing customers to pay you early. Incentives might include a 1 to 2 percent discount if payment is received within a specific timeframe. Early payment rewards work particularly well for companies you are billing that have a separate accounts payable department. In fact, they tend to cut checks first when they see incentives for early payments. To learn more about how to optimize your billing and increase the amount of on-time and early customer payments, contact Lanvera today.  Robots are taking over our jobs! *Cue Chicken Little*
In all seriousness, new articles surface weekly discussing how FinTech (an economic industry composed of companies that use technology to make financial services more efficient) will affect the financial job market- specifically retail banking- in the coming years. The Wall Street Journal, for example, recently released an article entitled “Citi: Technology Could Cost Two Million Bank Employees Their Jobs.” In this article, the author discusses the latest Citigroup report, which claims that retail banking automation could take over 30% of the banking jobs across the U.S. and Europe within the next ten years. The report lists 2006 as a reference point, citing that bank employment has declined 2% annually within the past decade and could very well accelerate to 3% annually over the next. Forrester Research estimates that automation will dislodge 22.7 million jobs by 2025. Those estimates, coupled with Citigroup’s report, means that about one tenth of those job displacements will be from retail banking. Most studies show that production, customer service, office and administrative jobs will be among the first occupations to be completely taken over by technology. Furthermore, bank teller positions clock in at a 97% likelihood of being fully automated within the next twenty years, according to BBC.com. Basically, any job that does not require empathy such as social workers, nurses, therapists, and psychologists will be less likely to remove the human element. This will provide most banks with a more cost-effective way of serving customers, but has many employees worried that they will be replaced. However, there is a silver lining! THE SILVER LINING CNN Money states that “For a century and a half, computers, machines and robots have created more jobs than they have destroyed.” If history repeats itself (which it always does) the rise of FinTech will not create a job deficit as long as the market continues to adapt and mature. Bank branches will morph into a more advisory and consultative space rather than mostly transactional. For banks that want to utilize their current employees in the future, a good practice would be to conduct an internal survey on a quarterly or biannual basis in order to better understand each individual’s strengths, weaknesses and goals. This will aid branch managers in training staff to expand their skill sets for better adaptability to future technological advances.  According to Forbes.com, among Millennials who bank with one of the megabanks, four in 10 said they would purchase the subscription services from their bank. By expanding services to non-financial offerings, both banks and credit unions become more valuable to a large population sector.
Today, millennials have surpassed Baby Boomers as the nation’s largest living generation. With an estimated 75.4 million millennials in the United States (according to population estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau), businesses have been scratching their heads trying to discover the best way to engage them. Based on research and Lanvera’s 30+ years of experience in delivering business-critical data, here are two demands this generation has when it comes to the way you communicate with them: 1. Millennials Demand Digital A decade ago, almost all web browsing took place on desktop and laptop computers. Now, smartphone popularity has rapidly changed the technological landscape, and in turn, consumer expectations. And millennials are leading the charge. According to a new report from comScore, computer use is dropping off quickly as mobile devices encourage new types of interaction. In fact, many millennials don’t use computers at all, instead relying entirely upon their smartphones. According to CCG Catalyst Consulting Group, 92% of millennials say they would choose to work with an organization for its digital services. Millennials are accustomed to accessing data at any given point from any mobile device or computer. To keep up with changing demands, it is imperative to partner with a communications vendor who offers innovative solutions such as SMS and email delivery, as well as direct access to documents on your ePresentment platform. 2. Millennials Demand Personalization According to USC Dornsife, 62% of millennials report that personalized brand engagement is more likely to make them a loyal customer. Millennials, as well as other generations, want and expect the personal touch and collaboration that one-on-one communication allows. Many businesses are already placing ads on social media networks and other websites, allowing users to click and instantaneously be directed to a chat window with the brand. With your business-critical communications, you can implement a few strategies to capitalize on this movement, such as live chat features between customers and your organization, as well as providing direct links from your ePresentment to popular social media platforms to enable quick sharing of information. Conclusion For more helpful statistics about millennials, visit goldmansachs.com and leadscon.com (an expanded aggregation of stats). With millennials and other generations, it is always a best practice to keep an eye out for trends and statistics that can help you understand customer demands and expectations when it comes to your business-critical communications. |
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