The Hidden Power of Transactional Communication in CVM

Why Listen

This week on CVM Stories, we sit down with Matthew Tilling, Senior Product Manager at Exacaster, to explore the hidden power of transactional communication in customer value management.

What if your highest-engagement channel wasn’t in typical marketing outlets, but transactional messages like bills, alerts, and service updates? Matthew shares a playbook for unifying these chaotic comms and turning them into a strategic growth engine in CVM.

5 Tips to Turn Transactional Messages into a CVM Powerhouse

What is transactional communication? They are expected messages – like billing or shipping updates – that customers almost always open. Many companies scatter them across systems – but unifying them could turn them into a CVM powerhouse. So, how do you actually do it?

1. Build a Business Case
   Catalog every transactional message from billing, legal, and tech teams to understand the full scope. Tip: use the data to build the business case, highlighting fragmented UX, brand inconsistencies, and the volume of uncoordinated messages.
2. Learn CTO & CMO Language
   This isn’t just a tech project – it’s political. Bridge the gap between the risk-focused CTO and the growth-focused CMO. Tip: position it as a dual win: de-risk legacy systems for the CTO while unlocking growth and consistent CX for the CMO.
3. Run a Pilot Project
   A “big bang” project is risky and could be rejected by stakeholders. Prove the concept first to build trust with both IT and commercial teams. Tip: start with a non-critical flow, like password resets, to demonstrate reliability and personalization potential.
4. Leverage the Channel for Growth
   Once unified, transactional messages could become the highest-engagement CVM channel – the place to deliver measurable growth. Tip: A/B test billing emails, use service alerts for contextual upsells, and add personalized offers to purchase receipts.
5. Measure What Matters
   To show the real value of this powerhouse channel, focus on business impact, not just opens and clicks. Tip: track KPIs such as on-time payments, reduction in support calls, self-service adoption, and incremental sales from contextual offers.

Episode Highlights

• Transactional vs commercial communications
• Why uncoordinated messages hurt CX
• The CTO’s focus on risk & reliability
• Why CVM is the natural owner of the customer experience
• The “no big bang” rule for migrating communications
• How to de-risk the project with a small, low-risk pilot
• Using billing communications to directly improve cash flow
• The importance of change management and getting buy-in

Recommendations for Growth as a Professional

To grow as a CVM leader, look beyond campaigns. Learn to speak the language of IT, finance, and marketing. By showing how CVM can solve operational problems and de-risk the business, you elevate your role from a marketing function to a strategic driver of company-wide success.

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Final Words

Transactional communications aren’t just messages – they’re a strategic lever. When CVM takes ownership, every interaction becomes an opportunity to fix CX, strengthen the brand, and drive measurable growth.

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Matthew: This sounds scarier than it is, because it’s just the way it’s been done for so long. Legacy systems with comms that have been there for ages. But once you start experimenting, I think the opportunities are significant.

[00:00:12] Exacaster: Welcome to CVM Stories, the podcast on customer value management. Together, we explore how companies can be more successful and the customers happier through the use of latest customer value management techniques. Learn key commercial and analytical insights from telecoms, retail, finance and other industries that drive CVM forward.

[00:00:30] Egidijus: Hi, I’m your host, Egidijus. Today our guest is Matthew Tilling. Matthew has a huge experience in customer value management field and now he’s leading CVM platform development. Today we will discuss how to incorporate transactional communication which happens in your whole organization into CVM communication lifecycle. So let’s dive in. So hi, Matt, thanks for joining us today. Uh, today we have a really special topic. We will be talking about transactional communication. And how does it, uh, integrate with CVM uh communication. So first question for you is how do you understand what is it? What what is, uh, transactional communication.

[00:01:20] Matthew: Mhm. So, um, yeah, transactional communication is uh, basically I see it in two ways. You have your commercial communication and you have your transactional communication. Commercial communication is the type of communication that CVM’s deal with all the time. Uh, campaigns, upsell emails, whatever it may be. And then, uh, transactional would be, uh, everything else, which is actually a huge part of the kind of communication landscape. So, you know, maybe it’s like a monthly billing email or maybe it’s a kind of dunning, uh, email, you know, money collection. Maybe it’s, um, uh, your product is on the way. It’s being delivered. You know, anything like this where it’s a transactional moment, you’re just supplying some information without any need to kind of sell something to the customer.

[00:02:07] Egidijus: For me, it’s a super funny part that, uh, usually when we think about communication with consumers, it’s, uh, all about CVM, you know, it’s like, oh, this CVM team spams the consumers, etc. but when you think deeper, it’s like almost all departments in the organization, they send their own communication to the to the clients. Yeah. So could you list some examples.

[00:02:31] Matthew: Yeah. I mean so we already listed one. So there’s typically like a finance team with a with a billing sub team. And they’re normally the ones who are in charge of this billing. Uh run if you like. And normally it is this big run and uh yeah. So they have their own communication standards and communication principles for this billing run. But then you have like product teams who want to send updates about products or want to send new information to customers. Um, there’s, there’s like loads of teams uh, internally legal team for example, also has, there’s loads.

[00:03:00] Egidijus: And even, uh, you know, technicians, they send their own, uh, communication about like, oh, no, sorry we disconnected you.

[00:03:06] Matthew: Yeah, we had an outage and such and such an area.

[00:03:08] Egidijus: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So this is like when you start thinking it’s like everybody communicates with the clients. So, uh, the the key question here now comes is, so why should we think about, uh, coordinating this communication?

[00:03:22] Matthew: Um, yeah. So I think the, the issue is, as we’ve said, typically when we talk about, uh, things like customer experience, we’re always because we’re in this kind of CVM world, we’re always thinking about, uh, the types of communication that we’re giving. You know, we’re thinking omnichannel pull, push channels, etc. what we rarely talk about is the 80% of all the of the communications which are not under this umbrella, uh, which we’ve just listed. So the result for the customer is you will have times where because those communications aren’t coordinated. It just results in a poor customer experience. You know, like the example we were discussing earlier is if a customer has just complained about their internet going out in some region, you maybe don’t want to send them, uh, a cross-sell email the next day saying, hey, we think you’re a great fit for such and such a service. So I think it’s about customer experience in the main. Um, but then, you know, also from the business standpoint, there’s a kind of operational, uh, complexity when you have these two teams running these types of communications or, you know, many teams often through 2 or 3 separate systems, um, that itself reduces, uh, creates an operational load. You know, you have these teams that have to run these systems. They have to maintain these systems. Uh, they have to they’re responsible for the end to end delivery of those communications. Um, so I think there’s a benefit from the customer side, but also there’s an operational benefit as well, I think.

[00:04:50] Egidijus: Yeah. Me as a, let’s say consumer. Uh, I always laughed when I get a random message, you know, from some technical guys, which, uh, clearly does not represent the, the brand voice or other things. So, uh, I think it’s really important to, uh, align those. Now, is there a correct way how to manage these, uh, all this communication. So should, uh, CVM to, uh, team do this should be there, uh, separate teams. How do you think about that?

[00:05:27] Matthew: Um, I think, uh, it’s very rare that you would have a situation where a CVM team could manage all of these communications, but I think it’s not like black and white like this. Uh, there’s typically kind of this gray area in the middle where it’s about. Okay, what team is responsible for what part of end to end delivery? Um, the main, the main benefits that we talk about customer experience are yes, orchestrated across all the communications. So it’s consistent, um, consistent tone of voice. So you just touched on this consistent design branding. These are the things where the benefits can really be felt. And therefore you want to kind of give control of those parts to your domain teams. Let’s call them billing team, legal team, whoever the actual creation of the messaging can still be done by a dedicated team for this kind of communication, you know, like transactional communications. So I don’t think there’s like one one size fits all model. There’s there’s it’s kind of like a maturity curve that teams will go on when they attempt to do something like this. Um, and it really depends on, you know, operational flexibility, agility, readiness, appetite for risk and things like this.

[00:06:44] Egidijus: So, Matt, let’s play some roles now. Okay. Um,. Um, I can easily imagine the situation where like an upset customer, uh, complaints that he got, let’s say, um, a random message from a random department. And then in the company there is like a initiative. So marketing or CVM team will take over all communication, you know, and, uh, now the, uh, marketing director or CMO comes to, uh, CTO and says or CIO and says, you know, from tomorrow, uh, we are taking over all transactional communication as a CIO or CTO. What would you think about that?

[00:07:30] Matthew: So, yeah, so obviously the initial because it’s normally it teams, uh, the initial reaction would be I need to know way more about the technical, uh, setup, you know, the technical configuration, the The architecture and so on. Because, you know, we’re dealing with transactional comms. These are really important communications, you know, and therefore the system that runs them needs to be robust. It needs to have low latency. There are various non-functional requirements of that system. So as a CTO or a CIO my initial response would be okay, so tell me more about the system you want to to to run these communications. Because I think what typically happens is these communications obviously have been around for a long time. So therefore they sit in systems that have been around for a long time. And those systems may be legacy. They may be inflexible or hard to use, or kind of a UI that looks like it’s from like 20 years ago. But they’re super reliable. They get the job done, they go from A to B. So that would be my initial concern is, is changing that if it’s been in that way for so long, it’s hard.

[00:08:39] Egidijus: So, uh, can we stay a little bit here with this topic and we say that there are some technical challenges that needs to be taken into account. So for people who are not aware of what does the latency mean? And could uh, and other, you know, non-functional type of requirements, could you give some examples, you know, what are the practicalities of transactional communication.

[00:09:03] Matthew: Yeah. So I mean really here we’re talking about, uh, architecture. So we’re talking about uh, the first area to focus on I would say is kind of robustness. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but it needs to be a robust architecture. What does that mean is that it needs to be able to run even if things go wrong. And so there are various things underneath that. Like you need to have failover policies. So when a job or process is not running correctly, you need to be able to run it some other way and you need to be able to retry. So there are retry policies. You know, maybe there are API calls involved or even with their kind of back end jobs and processes. You need to be able to retry these and there needs to be a set policy around this. You know there are best practices around this. It needs to have disaster recovery built in, you know. So we’re really getting into the guts of like architecture and infrastructure. There’s the robustness. And then when we talk about low latency, which is the other kind of key non-functional requirement, I think um, low latency basically just means it processes things correctly. So if you want to send, for example, an email to a customer who’s just purchased something on your eShop saying, we’ve received your order, here is your receipt and invoice, etc., that needs to happen very quickly. Uh, if a customer wants to reset their password, I mean, this for me is the I hate this when I want to reset my password and I have to wait for like five minutes for the email to come in. This is the worst. So you want this to be low latency that that request, that customer event and the request to trigger that message needs to be done very, very quickly.

[00:10:34] Egidijus: Uh, these kind of, uh, the only things that you need to take into account or, uh, is there a kind of, uh, uh, something else because, uh, well.

[00:10:43] Matthew: From a technical.

[00:10:44] Egidijus: It’s like, how how hard can it be to send a message quickly, you know?

[00:10:50] Matthew: Well, I think that I think this is the the non-functional this is the core parts of the non-functional requirements. I would say, like there’s obviously it’s a broad topic. Um, you know, you have things like security and, uh, regulatory compliance that also need to be baked in. But then there’s also a load of kind of, uh, technical kind of features, like functional features that need to be, uh, included as well. And these are not just things that exist in every like, marketing tool. You know, like if we think about some of the bigger kind of campaign management tools, for example, in the market, they don’t necessarily have things like a kill switch, they don’t necessarily have QA and workflow automation designed to allow users to kind of sign off on very important pieces of communication, you know, so there’s also kind of a functional requirement there as well.

[00:11:38] Egidijus: Yeah. Okay. So now if we step a little bit back. Yeah. Um, uh, if we kind of go through the landscape of different tools and technologies that we use in organization. So there might be CRM systems, marketing automation systems, billing systems, and you can list many, many systems who basically sends emails and sends text messages and might send push notifications and whatever. And it looks like, okay, every system knows how to do it. Yeah. So, but if you take, let’s say marketing automation systems, which carries the heaviest load, for the messaging. So how are they different from the transactional communication? Uh, and why it’s not so straightforward.

[00:12:31] Matthew: How are the communications different or the systems.

[00:12:33] Egidijus: Uh, how are the systems different and why it’s not so straightforward saying like, okay, now we will push all the communication through marketing automation tools.

[00:12:42] Matthew: So I think on the if we think about like, yeah, let’s call them campaign management systems, comparing with some of these legacy systems, they campaign management systems are designed for very specific things like personalization. You know, they’re designed to give the user lots of flexibility in terms of how you communicate with the customer and give them the ability to dynamically change this, you know, or create a B, testing groups or push things to lots of different channels. So they have this kind of inbuilt flexibility. They’re typically on the cloud. They’re kind of highly scalable. They’re highly flexible systems. Um, the difference between that and some kind of legacy system is that these systems are literally designed to do one thing, and so they do that one thing really, really well. They take something that comes in, they say, right, okay, we need to send a billing email to this customer. We know the customer ID they’re working with much smaller amounts of data in terms of columns. The complexity isn’t there. It’s the rows are there but the columns aren’t there. So it’s kind of very simple. We take this, we do this, we send it off. Um, and so the difference there is, I wouldn’t say with the system itself because, you know, a campaign management system can, can do this. The challenge is actually in how you, uh, like, govern the usage, because when you have all these tools to play with, then you need to be very careful about what’s being sent to whom and who is sending it from internally.

[00:14:08] Egidijus: You just mentioned the governance topic, and I think this is kind of, uh, one of very common topics that I hear when I talk with, uh, teams who are thinking how to align all this communication. So from, uh, governance perspective, what does a good governance look like in this situation?

[00:14:30] Matthew: Yeah, governance is a really interesting topic with this, because one thing in this example we spoke about earlier is when the CMO or whoever it is, uh, takes on this responsibility. They’re also probably thinking, oh, wow, you know, and when they start speaking to the CTO, they’re probably thinking, oh, there’s actually quite a lot of, uh, riding on this, you know, like the accountability is quite high. Um, so I think in terms of governance, like I said earlier, in terms of the, the model, you need to have, um, some kind of kind of, uh, like federated approach, like you want to give some capability to some teams in the business so that they can make the changes they want to do whilst retaining some form of, uh, central control. Uh, and by central control, I mean, you see all of the communications that are going out across all of these different teams, maybe there’s some kind of like campaign calendar or something like this, and then you can make decisions essentially. Then the question is who makes those decisions? And this will vary from business to business because typically, uh, the, the personal role who owns the customer will vary from business to business. It’s not feasible to, you know, ask your CEO every time you have this prioritization conflict. You know, what should we, uh what should we send? And so that has to be delegated to someone who is like head of customer, could be head of CVM, could be, you know, that kind of level of person. And it’s their job to basically say, okay, we want to send out this billing email to 1 million customers. But we also had this outage and we also have this huge campaign that’s going out. What do we what do we do? And really that has to reside with one person. Uh, in my experience, the moment you try and democratize that and put it into some kind of forum becomes very difficult to, to make decisions.

[00:16:15] Egidijus: Uh, but, uh, can we, uh, put, let’s say some, uh, super simple, uh, guidance or, or for the hierarchy of these decisions, Uh, or is it, like, totally case by case?

[00:16:31] Matthew: I think that I think that you could, you know, even if we’re just speaking now, we can think of a framework for prioritization. Uh, certain things are more important than others. So we can talk about, um, you know, top priority might be, okay, we’ve had a service outage or an immediate ad hoc emergency communication. Always top priority. It doesn’t matter. Then the rest the next might be, uh, like billing or dunning revenue collection, which we know is very important. After that, it might be, uh, prolongation, retention type use cases. Because in telco land, at least, this is where a lot of the work and effort goes. It’s where you make a lot of your, your your rpu. So that might be one way to frame it. And then you might have certain life cycle specific communications after prolongation. You might have kind of like welcoming and onboarding beneath that. And then right down at the bottom you may have kind of bigger, larger scale campaigns, you know, Christmas, Black Friday, whatever it may be. Back to school. I think that’s kind of the way you might approach it. Yeah. And I don’t think it’s that hard to get to that prioritization and get everyone aligned around this so that the decision becomes easier for this person. But it will differ from business to business.

[00:17:44] Egidijus: Yeah, I think it kind of makes sense because when you start thinking, you easily get overwhelmed by all these different, uh, kind of conflicting messages that you need to manage. But if you step back and look from your business perspective and your customer perspective, it’s suddenly becomes extremely clear, uh, kind of, uh, how what is the optimal way, uh, basically to approach this?

[00:18:09] Matthew: Yeah. I think this is a really good point as well. Like, uh, it’s very clear cut what you need to do at certain times. It doesn’t actually require too much thinking. The challenge is in the alignment of this, because don’t forget, in this world, we’re still working across all these different teams and that prioritization needs to be aligned and kind of signed off. And that’s probably the tricky bit. But once you got there, in theory it becomes simpler.

[00:18:35] Egidijus: Um, do you see that companies go through this process like, uh, from zero to a hero, uh, kind of perspective or, uh, is there, I don’t know, some ladder of how you would make, uh, um, how would you mature these processes or mature this alignment? Because if you don’t have anything, uh, I think it’s hard to expect that you will nail it from the first go.

[00:19:00] Matthew: Yeah. And, uh, I’ve never seen any business attempt something like this as a kind of big bang, uh, which I think is a really bad idea in this case. And I think both CTO and CMO in this case would be not willing to do this. So the question is, how do you, uh, phase it and scale it? And you can do it in a couple of ways. Like one way may be to just take a couple of kind of medium value, low risk transactional messages. Um, so it could be, yeah, update your password or have you seen our new app or there’s a new product update, um, which is, which is fine. Um, another way of doing it is to take something a bit bigger and high value, like billing, for example, and just, uh, segment because of course, this is what these marketing tools are designed to do. You can now segment your, your base so you can take some of those, and you can run tests on that kind of subsample of your, your base. So you’re not running a new billing campaign on however many million customers. You’re maybe running it on 10 or 20,000. And within that 10 or 20,000, you can use these marketing tools to test different things. So if you want your bills paid earlier in the month, measure this. Create two groups. Test different messaging. You may want to also use billing to talk about other things you know. You may want to promote usage of the app. You may want to ask the customer to sign up to self-service. It may be their first billing month and they haven’t been through the process yet, so you want to educate them. These aren’t commercial messages. These are transactional messages and putting these kinds of comms in kind of more traditionally marketing campaign platforms allows you to do these kinds of things. So there’s different ways of approaching it.

[00:20:49] Egidijus: This is exactly what I wanted to touch on next. It’s like, uh, what happens if you suddenly bring together the communication from all the scattered places to one place? What benefits do you get from the business perspective as well? Because I know I instantly see that, uh, now I can run much better next best offer, uh, or next best action campaigns, uh, because suddenly I see more actions.

[00:21:17] Matthew: Uh, yeah.

[00:21:18] Egidijus: Uh, involved. So, wha what’s your, uh, perspective on this?

[00:21:22] Matthew: I think that, um, uh, in this case, if we were talking about, like, business benefit, you can there’s two things. So the first is you can use these campaigns to, uh, deliver business benefit in the form of revenue collection, app usage, you know, whatever it may be. So there’s, there’s a there’s a bigger opportunity here because you now have almost like another channel to communicate in the customer with. With such topics, you have not another channel necessarily, but another opportunity because you now have closer control over these, uh, communications. So there’s this benefit which you can measure in numerous ways depending on your goals. But then there’s another kind of universal benefit of this, which is the operational, uh, benefit. I think if you have, um, these legacy systems running lots of different types of communications, each has a team. And actually, that team is normally kind of like a single point of failure. Like I’ve seen it before. There’s like, kind of 1 or 2 people, and they’ve been in the business for like 30 years, and only they know how to work this system and make it work. And the whole billing process hinges on this person. Um, so you kind of de-risk that by combining it into one place. And it also means that you don’t necessarily need to have all these teams running these individual systems. So longer term, I think there’s a kind of operational cost saving benefit of this kind of project.

[00:22:43] Egidijus: And what are the risks that you actually bring in if you move towards this direction?

[00:22:50] Matthew: It doesn’t work. The system doesn’t work.

[00:22:55] Egidijus: If one system fails then.

[00:22:57] Matthew: Yeah, I, I, I think the like I said, like actually, um, whilst modern marketing platforms may not talk about this kind of stuff, they actually probably can handle a lot of these types of communication. Um, the issue I think is the main risk is in the is in the governance and the operational reality of doing it. So you really need to pay close attention to what people want to send and what changes they want to make, because all of a sudden, if you give a billing team the opportunity to start making changes to a message, whether it’s an email or an SMS or whatever, um, they might do something crazy. You know, they might put some new pictures in there or something that’s not brand compliant, or it could be anything. So you need to be really careful and set. Therefore kind of review sign off is really important. Um, I think this is a this is a big risk. There is a risk, of course, that if you start doing everything at once, then your major transactional campaigns just don’t run or they don’t run consistently more likely than it run consistently. So that’s why this kind of phased approach is is key, I think because you’re not just proving to whoever in the business that this kind of activity adds value. You’re also proving that your architecture and your systems can handle this kind of communication. Transactional Communication in CVM

[00:24:18] Exacaster: If you are interested in customer value management, check out our Customer Value Management body of knowledge CV and Bok is a comprehensive guide for CVN professionals offering tips, tools and best practices to help you in your job. Visit cvs.com for more.

[00:24:35] Egidijus: I have a challenging question for you from the technical perspective, kind of, do you recommend it? Uh, like running in a single campaign management, uh, environment or uh, or is it like, uh, you would still advocate for kind of federating, uh, uh, the throughputs and, uh, everything?

[00:24:56] Matthew: I think you the main thing is that you need to have visibility on both sides. So the marketing and customer side marketing side needs to see what’s happening on this in this 80% gray Grey zone and vice versa, because then you get the orchestration, you’re able to make everything consistent and avoid the situation we discussed earlier. So from a data perspective, there needs to be visibility. But if we talk about, um, kind of like user interfaces, workspaces or whatever, like how people are interacting with the tool, then I think you do need to limit, uh, uh, access and permissions across these workspaces. You know, if you have a domain team that sits in legal and they want to send out some communications, they should have their own, um, let’s call it like sandbox, you know, where they can, um, work on new things, new messaging. Maybe they can also kind of run some tests in there to see how it would look in future. Um, but then ultimately the sending of this, the sign off needs to happen. And then the operationalization of this needs to run through that central team that we discussed. So data the data view needs to be there on both sides. But then the interfaces I think need to be limited appropriately.

[00:26:11] Egidijus: And if you were like a telecom who says, okay, let’s address this issue tomorrow, uh, what would be two things that you would definitely not do?

[00:26:25] Matthew: Uh, what, like that? What would I not do the first day?

[00:26:28] Egidijus: Yeah. So that they would not fail like on the day one.

[00:26:31] Matthew: Wow. Well, I, I mean, for starters, I wouldn’t just jump in and start running some random, uh, campaign. Try running some random campaign. You have to do some groundwork first. You really have to scope, uh, what what you’ve got, and then what you think is worth, uh, kind of trying in the new system. And this is actually a very important point. Some, some maybe most businesses, especially kind of banks, telcos, they don’t actually have a full picture of all the messages that are being sent. They’re not catalogued anywhere. They’re not recorded in one system. They don’t have this view. And maybe sometimes some communications that were sent 2 or 3 years ago are now not being sent, but no one knows about it or the people that created them are now not here, but they’re still going out. You know, this this is a real situation. I’ve seen this. So I wouldn’t just jump in, I would do the legwork. And then the second thing is, uh, I would be very careful about how I, uh, engaged with other stakeholders in the business about this. You can’t just say we’re now going to send everything through the CVM team. Um, because that won’t fly. You’ll get loads of pushback. So you need to think carefully about the change management there as well. Um.

[00:27:50] Egidijus: And, uh, now we are talking quite a lot, uh, about, uh, that the CVM team is well positioned to do this job or kind of CVM team’s tools are probably most mature. Uh, but, uh, kind of we, uh, actually didn’t, uh, discuss it deeply. Uh, why exactly they they, uh, kind of, uh, the CVM team becomes a central piece, uh, uh, to, uh, let’s say orchestrate, uh, everything. Uh, are there something, uh, behind, uh, kind of, uh, uh, more than just having the best tools, you know?

[00:28:28] Matthew: Uh, yeah. I think CVM team is responsible for, you know, acquiring as many new customers as possible, retaining as many, and growing as many customers as possible. Right. This this lifecycle, that lifecycle doesn’t just depend on, uh, the offers that you have or how well you work as a team. It depends on actually the experience that you’re giving. And like CVM team is the kind of natural inheritor of the customer experience because they basically own the customer experience. You may have, like digital teams, you may have like, you know, channels, teams. And yeah, they interface with the customer. But if you have a team that has the tooling and you have a team that owns a large portion of the customer communication anyway, they seem like a very good fit to to run this, because actually it’s in their interest to ensure this happens. It’s not simply that, you know, the CVM team can control every piece of communication that we have with the customer. Customers will go into shops, they’ll call our call centers. Um, and we can have some control over this. We can, you know, limit what offers are being suggested to a customer or whatever it may be, but really, they’re the ones who are gaining the most value from an improved customer experience because ultimately it does result in higher ARPU, longer, larger lifetime value, etc.. So I think they’re just a good natural fit for this. Transactional Communication in CVM

[00:29:50] Egidijus: Mhm. It’s like uh it’s interesting thing that that you park the um customer lifetime value, uh, as a KPI for CVM Uh, and then, uh, you cut it off from 80% of communication with the customer.

[00:30:03] Matthew: Yeah, yeah. Because and this and this is it. Yeah. Such a good way of putting it because the CLV is, is so dependent on the day to day experience of the customer. And that’s the 20%, not just the 20%.

[00:30:17] Egidijus: So it’s like wow. All telecoms have their um marketing automation platform in place or omnichannel orchestration or whatever. Uh, but before they jump in and say, okay, maybe we need to do it, uh, what would be several questions that you would ask about your current technology stack before making a decision to start leveraging leveraging it for, uh, transactional communications as well.

[00:30:51] Matthew: So it’s a good question. Um, I they would probably be, uh, two questions that I would immediately ask. So the first is not necessarily about the technology but more about the data. Like always do. How in what state is your data in? Like is the data in a state where we could, you know, and by that I mean the data that’s powering these marketing systems. What additional data do we need? Uh, do we need to bring in more? Do we have the data already? Is the data we have already of sufficient quality? Because if it’s not, then you need to do the legwork. Uh, there. So that would be the first one. And then the second question would be about, uh, probably more on the non-functional requirements side that I mentioned earlier. Like, I would want to know how what the latency is for a real time triggered communication, for example. I would want to know, uh, the, the kind of max, uh, volumes of audiences before you start seeing some lag in the, in the processing speed. I would want to answer some of these questions. And these of course, aren’t questions that, like most CVM teams, would be able to answer. So I think it’s important that you kind of, in your analogy earlier, you work closely with your CTO or CIO, whoever it may be, and make sure that he or she kind of guides you through this, this process and has that information to hand. Because if you don’t have that in place, then you’re kind of not going to get very far with such a, such an initiative.

[00:32:25] Egidijus: Yeah. If we go to a little bit more practical, uh, implementation. So would you wait until your, uh, marketing automation platform is perfect to start this initiative, or, uh, would you do something else? You know.

[00:32:43] Matthew: No, I wouldn’t wait till it’s, uh, perfect. I don’t think you need to wait till it’s perfect. You need to. At the end of the day, it’s not about, uh, having this, like, uh, you know, these golden criteria for your platform, and only then you can start doing something. You can start thinking practically. You can start doing, uh, such communications when you feel like you have enough, like when you feel like you have that kind of the robustness, the kind of low latency. When you feel like you have the data, you should start experimenting. This is the thing. I think there’s nothing really stopping, uh, businesses experimenting in this area. The only like I said, the hardest bit is the is the change. It’s the it’s the convincing people that this is the right way to go.

[00:33:29] Egidijus: I hear what you say. It’s like, but how would you face that? It’s like, would you choose a single team, a single use case and, uh, work or would you, I don’t know, go and gather multiple teams and take one use case per team and start incorporating that. What would be your kind of flow?

[00:33:50] Matthew: Um, honestly, I feel like with these kinds of initiatives, if you don’t show the value early, then it’s not going to move very far. So I would actually, uh, you know, I would take it upon myself or maybe someone in my team to do the kind of groundwork to understand the landscape. What communications have we got? Uh, is our marketing platform, uh, fit for such a purpose? And these days, you can do this legwork on your own with the help of AI. I would say, um, once you know this, then you need to pick something. I would pick something that’s that’s fairly high value. That will make an impact, you know? Uh, yeah, maybe it’s not billing, but maybe it’s something else where you think you can really impact certain metrics. Pick that. And then, um, I would work, work on a kind of proof of concept basis. You don’t have to take the whole base. Like I said earlier, you don’t have to take all the communications that are part of a larger flow. Just take 1 or 2. Um, make sure that you can obviously exclude those customers from the the legacy system. Uh, so therefore it helps if it’s like an isolated system or a kind of set of communications and, uh, experiment like a really, uh, really don’t think you need to wait to have some kind of gold plated solution to start at least experimenting.

[00:35:09] Egidijus: That sounds reasonable. I want to analyze some, let’s say, scary nightmare type of scenarios and, uh, to see, uh, do, uh, if, uh, let’s say marketing automation platforms have some benefits versus, uh, running it somewhere in legacy. Yeah. So for example, uh, nightmare scenario number one, you know, there is a billing cycle, the billing finished. Uh, but 3 million, uh, billing emails haven’t been sent. Why? 3 million has been sent. It uh, does, uh, let’s say marketing automation platform have, uh, some benefits on dealing with this type of situation.

[00:35:59] Matthew: Uh, I would say I mean, obviously it depends what legacy system you’re comparing it to, but, uh, in a word, yes, because in this case, you have, uh, you have segments, you have two segments, one that’s received and one that hasn’t. And you’ll have your campaign logs available. Uh, you should be able to see specifically which, uh, customers or users or whichever kind of identity you’re communicating with hasn’t received. And therefore you can create, uh, another campaign segmented by those users and send the relevant information. And this is actually probably something that’s harder in a legacy system. So I would say in this case, the benefits of a kind of modern marketing campaign management platform are, are relevant.

[00:36:41] Egidijus: Um, another I would say even more practical example is like, you know, your legal, uh, department gets, uh, complaint that, uh, that you have communicated with the customer, uh, when these customers explicitly said that they don’t want to be communicated with and then kind of, uh, how, uh, how would you deal in this situation, you know, what is the, uh, the benefits of marketing automation platforms versus, uh, legacy systems.

[00:37:17] Matthew: Modern marketing platforms have, uh, you know, consent management built in. So there are, there are there is functionality to manage different consents and apply different consents to different communications. But in this case, I would say it’s probably more of a data issue. Uh, you know, obviously in the marketing world, commercial communications consent is very key, especially now under GDPR. And so a lot of these these platforms have this functionality, but it still relies on the right data. If your data is not up to date, if your data is not of a high enough quality in this area, then you will struggle. But this is the case regardless of whether it’s a legacy system or something more modern, I would say.

[00:37:58] Egidijus: Well, and I guess that legacy system with a high probability will not have a consent at all. Yeah. So it’s like it, it will not be able to even prevent this.

[00:38:10] Matthew: Mhm. Yeah.

[00:38:11] Egidijus: And here’s like the last part um uh imagine like some important thing happened a data breach you know, and now suddenly you need to inform the whole base of, uh, your customers within an hour, you know, that something bad happened. Um, why? Marketing automation is better or worse compared to legacy systems.

[00:38:39] Matthew: Uh, here, I would say There’s two points. The first again is segmentation. You may not want to communicate with your whole base that there was a data breach. You may want to communicate with only a few. It may be limited to a region or country or something like that. So in the first case uh, segmentation, um, and in the second case, I would say the kind of the way you deliver that message, the personalization of that message, you know, you may want to say hello name, we are aware that you have XYZ service or we are aware that you are living in XYZ region and in XYZ region, we see that we have had some kind of breach. So here you’re making it sound less like a kind of oh, we’ve had a big incident. Now we’re just kind of communicating with everyone, and instead you’re being a bit more personal in your touch about how you deal with these. So I think the opportunities there are also, uh, good, you know, in terms of the experience.

[00:39:37] Egidijus: Yeah. So I, I, I couldn’t catch you, you know, on the.

[00:39:42] Matthew: It’s good to have it tested though. The theory like this because these are important questions and but like I said, for me, the thing that I always remember with this is I think this sounds scarier than it is because it’s just the way it’s been done for so long. Legacy systems that have been there for ages, with coms that have been there for ages. Um, but once you start experimenting, I think the opportunities are significant, you know, from a customer experience perspective, but also from a business perspective as well.

[00:40:14] Egidijus: Uh, I hear you. I can you think of any example of, uh, how could this translate not only, let’s say, in NPS type of metrics, but also in revenue or retention type of KPIs, because kind of experience, it easily translates, uh, now these other metrics. Uh. Uh. I don’t know yet.

[00:40:41] Matthew: I think it’s, um. It’s maybe slightly harder to attribute because you’re not directly selling, uh, something, but, you know, maybe we could take the example of, like, a product led communications. Maybe you have a new product or service. Maybe you want to describe that product or service slightly differently for different, uh, audiences. You know, maybe the way you describe your new, uh, mobile broadband service is slightly different for a 70 year old living in the countryside than to someone who’s younger, living in the in the city. You know, just as an example, if you can better describe the features of that product, you can better describe the benefits. Then you are. You know, in theory, you are having a much, a much more, much more cut through with each of those segments. So I think it’s yeah. You’re not like selling something. It’s just an update. But the way you’re describing it the way you’re achieving that cut through with different segments and how that’s made possible by a campaign management platform. I think this is where you have the maybe more of a tangible impact on revenue, rather than just customer experience or NPS, for example.

[00:41:52] Egidijus: So you would basically bet on all the small details that you can improve in the process. That adds up to kind of a couple of percents there, a couple of percentage there. Uh.

[00:42:06] Matthew: Yeah, I think so. I mean, like again, it’s hard to attribute because it’s not commercial messaging, but maybe it also impacts. Well, it would definitely have an impact on, you know, things like revenue collection as well. Right. Like this is a this is a major thing for for telcos in particular revenue collection on time every month. Uh, and how we communicate with people who are debtors, for example uh dunning communications as well. So improving revenue collection and therefore cashflow. Again, it’s not revenue per se. It’s not, uh, um, commercial like that, but it is kind of financial operational metrics that I think can also be improved. Transactional Communication in CVM

[00:42:44] Egidijus: Um, and let’s stay on this topic for, for a second, because I have heard quite a lot of stories where, uh, when, uh, billing and collections team got a little bit more creative. Uh, suddenly they started collecting, uh, more. So for example, um, when, uh, collection period would, uh, come up, they would say, okay, uh, pay on time and we will give you 5% discount, uh, for next invoice, you know, and these are kind of, uh, started bringing in, uh, just a bigger, uh, collection percent on time, you know, but, uh, these tools as the marketing tools, like a B testing and the different messages, testing and even, uh, customer journeys testing, you know, how how you follow up in the third day or one week or whatever, uh, with the people who are who need to pay. Uh, uh, this these tools are usually not available because you kind of usually you have no capability to press a button and send the an automated message somewhere in the building, you know. So these I think, are, uh, really interesting examples, how you can lift up the function, uh, in your organization, actually. Transactional Communication in CVM

[00:44:04] Matthew: Yeah. Uh, in the example you gave, it’s interesting, though, because, uh, this is where the governance comes in because, uh, the billing team, uh, may have a kind of percentage collection by date metric. They didn’t specify how much they’re going to collect. And so the next month when we’re sending, uh, when we’re billing 5% less for a portion of the base, all of a sudden the CDM team then turns around and goes, guys, what? What’s going on? Well what happened? Yeah. And they go, oh well, our metrics are great. These tools are amazing. You know, CVS going, yeah, that’s great. But so this is again where the governance comes in. And uh, these domain teams can make their changes. But ultimately one person really should be one role should be responsible for whether those changes go live.

[00:44:47] Egidijus: So I think we have tortured this topic from, uh, all all different sides. Um, how would you summarize it? Like what would be the key objective of, uh, moving towards more government, uh, messaging approach? And, uh, if you were in the stage one, what would be your recommendations for, uh, for the teams?

[00:45:13] Matthew: So my overall message, uh, for listeners would be, uh, don’t be don’t be too fazed by it, because like you said, if you take a step back and just think about it this way, the opportunity is clear, and there’s ways you can go about phasing your approach to how you do something like this. The second message would be be really clear on the potential, because there is a high potential here, and I don’t think enough people actually talk about this, probably because it appears so, so tricky to do. And then the third thing would be the importance of that kind of scoping and legwork at the start, really, really need to understand the messaging landscape. You know, what’s the other 80%, which may take some time, but it’s important. Um, and then really, really spend some time understanding, where are we going to have the biggest impact when we take all of that 100% of comms, you know, where are the areas that we should focus, um, and take those little bits off and play around? Don’t be afraid to play around because you can de-risk a lot of this. Um. Transactional Communication in CVM

[00:46:20] Egidijus: So would your sales message for the CTO would be that, uh, you will help to save costs as well. If you increase the operational efficiency actually.

[00:46:33] Matthew: Well, yes. Yes. Because but there’s probably more of a kind of CEO sales pitch. My pitch for the CTO would be, don’t worry about this anymore. We’ll take it. You know, you don’t have to worry about you don’t have any more sleepless nights about billing runs that haven’t haven’t run or anything like that. Let us take care of it. That would be my pitch to the CTO.

[00:46:53] Egidijus: Okay. So, uh, with this pitch, uh, thank you. Matt. Uh, it was a really interesting conversation. I tried to kind of catch you on, uh, every possible aspect of, of this, but I. I learned a lot. Thank you.

[00:47:09] Matthew: Thanks for having me.

[00:47:10] Exacaster: CVM Stories is produced by Exacaster. We help companies take their customer value management to the next level. To stay updated on our latest episodes, subscribe to the podcast or sign up for an email newsletter at exacaster.com/cvmstories