Blog
Redefining B2C communications: adapting to customer needs for security and control
In the 1990s, email emerged as a faster, cheaper, and more convenient alternative to traditional mail. Three decades later, it remains an essential communication channel for businesses and consumers, and a requirement for accessing most digital services.
However, the convenience email offers now comes at the cost of security. Clicking on links in an email has become a high-risk action that no business should ever ask its customers to take.
Email inboxes have become both an attack vector and a spam battlefield. As much as modern spam filters offer security, they also block potentially important communications. Meanwhile the spam that does get through causes important emails to be missed or lost in crowded inboxes.
For all these reasons, email is no longer a suitable channel to share information such as invoices, bills, paystubs, or any type of important or confidential documentation.
Putting customers in control
Consumers are increasingly aware of the risks and general downsides of email. They want the option to interact and transact with organisations (from utilities companies, to councils, to their employers) in a more secure and reliable way, without being blighted by unwanted mails, phishing attempts, viruses, and spam.
They also want more control over these interactions. They want convenience, easy access to their documentation and information (which doesn’t involve endlessly scouring inboxes), and a way of communicating that fits into their lives and helps them get things done.
Aided by digital technology, businesses have been responding to a general appetite for empowerment and efficient self-service in so many areas of consumers’ lives – from online shopping and personal banking, to travel and entertainment.
But there’s still a gap in the market when it comes to general interactions between organisations and customers or employees. That’s why we’re convinced that businesses should prioritise a customer-controlled experience (CCX) as part of their interactions strategy.
The importance of an omnichannel strategy
To deliver CCX and improve their customer and employee interactions in general, businesses must turn to a more convenient and secure means of digital communication. Customer apps or other types of digital portal can be the answer for those businesses with the funds and expertise to maintain them. Unfortunately, most don’t have such resources.
Compounding the challenge of turning to a digital interaction solution is the fact that significant percentages of customers or employee bases (including many from older generations) aren’t comfortable with digital interactions beyond email, so must continue to rely on postal services.
So the answer for organisations is to offer customers and employees communications via legacy post and email channels, while transitioning the majority to a more secure digital solution that offers them total control over their information.
A digital mailbox as part of an omnichannel platform
A growing number of organisations are now running their customer interactions through an omnichannel communications platform with a secure digital mailbox at its core.
The digital mailbox changes everything. Documents and communications can be shared with customers or employees in their own secure, private mailbox spaces, which can be accessed online or via an app. Users have sole access to these digital mailboxes and total control over them.
There are no unwanted mails, phishing attempts, viruses, or spam. And all their historical documentation from an organisation can be stored in one place. This means there’s no more hunting through emails or piles of paperwork to check for previous bills, invoices or paystubs.
When a digital mailbox solution of this kind is part of an omnichannel platform that also facilitates easy email and postal communications, organisations can cater to the preferences of all their customers and employees.
In other words, organisations can communicate using channels their customers and employees are used to, while delivering a secure, user-friendly digital communication option, which they can gradually transition users onto.
It’s a strategy employed to great effect by businesses that use the Payreq interactions and transactions platform.
A solution that’s perfect for billing and payments
Payreq’s advanced digital mailbox solution is used by a wide range of organisations to share important information. But the councils, utilities and other service providers that use it to share bills and invoices see some truly game-changing advantages.
It has a range of features that make it easier for customers to receive and settle bills and invoices using any payment method, and to never miss a payment deadline. For example, customers can automate payments so they are made as soon as their bill is received. An impressive 20% of consumers will pay their bill on the day it is received via Payreq.
One platform. Many interactions.
It’s easy to plug the Payreq platform to your existing processes. Your team can simply upload documents then allocate for sharing via the most suitable channel (post, email or digital mailbox), depending on customer preferences and/or business priorities.
All managed from one solution, using one source of customer data.
The Payreq digital mailbox can be accessed by your customers or employees via web portal or an app available via the Apple and Android app store. By sharing information in this way, you’re giving recipients controlled access to important information in their own private space. All interaction and customer information is held in a secure-by-design ecosystem – greatly reducing the reputational and financial risks to your business that come with data breaches.
That’s what we mean by CCX.
The next steps on your journey to CCX
Email is still an important communication channel. Physical mail is for many customers too. But neither is ideal for essential communications. A secure option that puts customers in total control of their interactions with you is essential for all organisations that regularly share important information with customers or employees.
To find out more about Payreq’s role in a broader omnichannel solution, get in touch with one of our experts for a chat.
