The Complexity of Corporate Communication: How to get your message across!

The complexity of corporate communications

Corporate communication is a broad field that deals with the different public and internal facing aspects of a company. It involves various methods and approaches to share information about a company’s brand, products, services, employees, and so on with a broad internal and external audience.

Communication as a whole is complex as it involves many stakeholders and audiences. Moreover, effective communication requires strong connections between people at all levels of the organization.

To be able to communicate effectively within your organization and with the outside world, you need to understand what corporate communication is, its benefits, and how you can implement it in your organization.

That is why in this article we will discuss everything you need to know about corporate communication so you can get your message across!

What Is Corporate Communication?

When we talk about communication in business, we are primarily referring to two things – one is the process, and the other is the outcome of the process. The process consists of the steps involved in communication, for example – sending the message, the channel through which it is sent, the time frame, and so on.

The outcome of the process refers to the impact that the communication has had on the person who received it.

That is why communication is often described as a process through which we create an understanding between people who are not in the same place at the same time. In this sense, corporate communication is the process and activities through which organizations create a strong connection via employees with the outside world for the purpose of brand building, increasing reputation, and the acquisition and retention of customers.

Why is Effective Communication Important?

Communication is the process of exchanging information and ideas between two or more people. For this process to be effective, certain factors need to be in place. To start with, there should be an understanding between the sender and receiver of the message.

Communication is all about sharing information, and if the information is not understood, it won’t be useful to anyone. We have a saying that ‘a message without meaning is like a bird without wings’. It is because of this that communication is an important aspect of any business venture.

The right words, carefully selected and strategically placed with the correct tone, can be a very powerful tool. They can make for an excellent culture, your brand more recognizable, and encourage customers to buy your products and services.

Benefits of Effective corporate communication

Stronger relationships – The biggest benefit of effective communication is that it strengthens relationships. Whether you communicate with the members of your team, customers, or anyone in between, a strong connection will lead to better results.

Greater productivity – When people understand each other and have a clear idea of what their role is within the organization, productivity increases. This is especially true for organizations where employees have a say in shaping the communication process – for example, when they have the opportunity to voice feedback and suggestions, and when they have the power to participate in the decision-making process.

Better decision-making – When communication is effective, decision-making becomes much easier. This is because the information you share will be well-understood.

Better brand recognition – A strong connection with your audience will not only bring them closer to your brand, but it will also make them more loyal to it. Moreover, the brand of your business will become more recognizable as you take part in various communication activities.

Types of Corporate Communication

Internal communication – This is the communication that happens between employees. It can happen in a number of ways, including one-on-one meetings, group meetings, emails, and so on. Internal communication is important because it helps people work together more effectively and efficiently.

External communication – This is the communication that happens between your organization and the outside world. This could be in the form of marketing campaigns, public relations, social media posts, and more.

Customer communication – This is communication between your customers and your organization. It can happen in a number of ways, including through a company’s customer support or customer service department, through social media posts, and more.

Summing up

Communication is an essential part of any business venture, and it can make or break an organization. The success of your business relies not only on the quality of your products or services but also on how well you communicate that quality to your customers.

When you have strong relationships with your audience, when you can make better decisions, and when you can recognize your brand better – you have stronger communication.

To achieve this, it is important to implement effective goal-driven communication in your organization. This can be achieved by focusing on the type of communication you engage in and by making sure that your communications are all aligned to Successful Customer and Business Outcomes.

BPM Tips for 2021 (and Beyond)

Which #BPM skills will be hot in 2021?
Check out answers from 20+ experts! https://lnkd.in/eN3FM2a thanks to Zbigniew Misiak (LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/zbyszekmisiak/)

No alt text provided for this image

With contributions from:

Jim Sinur
Steve Towers

Tony Benedict
Lloyd Dugan
Marlon Dumas
Scott Francis
Ian Gotts
Barbara Hodge
Paul Holmes-Higgin
Cristian Ivănuș
Mathias Kirchmer
Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland
Jan Mendling

Jim Sinur – BPM Guru

Juergen Pitschke
Brian Reale
Adrian Reed
Pedro Robledo
Michal Rosik
Tomislav Rozman
Alec Sharp
Phil Simpson
James Taylor
Miguel Valdés-Faura

There are some notable Tips in there. I especially liked this one…

Innovation Democratization by leveraging Collaboration for Process improvement methods, tools and techniques

Jim Sinur in BPM Tips 2021

There are certainly many many tools out there but none, as far as I am aware, who can do that yet. Or Are There?



Do you want to embrace advanced Customer-Centric thinking and become Outside-In?

https://lnkd.in/djWxB8m

👉 Step #1 – Review the upskilling options to become an ACX Professional & ACX Master: https://lnkd.in/dANgYX59

👉 Step #2 – Get The Book: Outside-In The Secret *FREE*  https://bit.ly/OI2021now

👉 Step #3 – Connect With The Community: https://linktr.ee/SteveTowers

👉 Step #4 – Keep Pace with Change: Recent Keynote – The Hard Benefits of XM | https://cemnext.com/xmroi2023

👉 Step #5 – Review the Testimonials Accredited Customer Experience Professional – BPG (bpgroup.org)

The 5 Secret Steps to Process Masterdom

Do you ever have that sneaky feeling that we can get so much more out of our business processes? Are you Struggling to get support from the organization for your change? Are you curious about what are the best proven techniques (that go way beyond Lean and Six Sigma)?

If so you are in the right place!

THE USE OF THE RIGHT APPROACHES WILL REDUCE COSTS BY AT LEAST 30% (and at the same time significantly improve customer satisfaction!) – 100% Guaranteed

Steve Towers

This FOUR day 5 Hours per day program shows you how using the REAL LIFE work you are doing! Come get upskilled and take back IMMEDIATE improvements that realise tangible benefits from the get-go.

Review the Preview here: https://experienceprofessional.com/cppm_preview

Here are just some of the recent testimonials:

Let me take this opportunity to thank Mr Steve. Your teachings are timeless and they stick perfectly and forever in our minds. We shall never forget you wherever we find ourselves on this planet. Thank you so much, Steve 🙏

Benignus Otmar, Tanzania


Thank you, the experience was enlightening, empowering, educating, encouraging and engaging.

Natasha Doren, South Africa

Thank you, Steve, I have never enjoyed anything more than the CX course, The weight of knowledge I gained and the enlightenment that I got is indescribable.

Reem Elsadig, Sudan


Thanks Steve for such an excellent program, the dedicated manner you use to share with us your wonderful knowledge and wisdom in CX, and time to response all our questions! God bless you, thanks a lot!

Yanese Angeles, Dominican Republic

You started me out on this journey my friend. Thanks for letting me live out my passion!

Molly Redenbaugh, Iowa, United States


Thank you! It’s been an amazing journey and you have been a great mentor.It was an honor taking your class, I am now a confident CPP Master🙏🏾

Masele Masudi Msita, Tanzania

Thank you Steve for high-quality wonderful Master. I thought the course was brilliant.Thank you for everything.

Join our upcoming Coaching and Accreditation sessions online, LIVE & Interactive

Professional WebclassStartsDuration
Accredited CX Master
(ACXM)
16th Nov4 days @
5 hours per day
Certified Process Professional Coach
(CPP-Coach)
3rd Nov4 weeks @
3 hours per week
Certified Process Professional Champion (CPPC)9th Nov3 days @
5 hours per day
Certified Outside In Master
(COIM)
17th Nov7 weeks @
3 hours per week
Certified Process Professional
(CPP)
23rd Nov2 days @
5 hours per day
Certified Process Professional Master
(CPPM)
23rd Nov4 days @
5 hours per day
Accredited CX Champion
(ACXC)
1st Dec3 days @
5 hours per day
Certified Outside In Champion
(COIC)
8th Dec3 weeks @
3 hours per week


Congratulations to Ridwan Gattoo ACX Mentor

Congratulations to a newly qualified ACX Mentor Ridwan Gattoo in South Africa! Having qualified through the ACX Professional, ACX Masters and now the ACX Mentor Ridwan has passed all the tests to be a qualified ACX Mentor.

Congratulations Ridwan!

Find out more about the Certification and Accreditation programs at the https://www.bpgroup.org – Online and Inclass, Customer Experience, Process Management, Outside-In and customised to your needs.

Connect with Ridwan at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ridwan-gattoo-7ba8b883/

LIVE online Outside-In with Steve Towers & Partners

I can’t believe it is this simple…

4 Minute overview of the content of the 6 sessions over 6
weeks at 3 hours per week

Hi Steve here, as an aside I first ran these sessions in December last year and they were very well received, despite being on a Sunday, so ignore my comment in the first few seconds about Sunday because they are through the week as well.

You will join for 3 hours per week in a live interactive video call and put to work the techniques I review in the video. Immediately usable with colleagues (near or far) you will innovate new approaches to work as we all grapple with our new normals.

Available across the planet in time zone friendly sessions – watch the overview and click the links below to review the detail and register.

See you on the inside! (I mention Sunday training but that is up to you)

Please keep safe in our new normal and I hope to see you soon in the online sessions! (Live, interactive and hands-on with real case studies).

Transforming Customer Experience FREE Webinar

A STRUCTURED step by step GUIDE to understanding and acting on REAL Customer Needs. This webinar features the rarest alchemy of converting customer experiences into precious metal.

Steve Towers walks you through a case-study in the creation of two pivotal tools, the Outside-In Strategic Matrix (OISM) and the Successful Customer Outcome Canvas (SCOC).

Review the content: FREE Webinar:

 

Developing a consensus and subsequent action plan is key to success. Watch how one airline delivers Successful Customer Outcomes. 

Sign-up for this FREE Webinar:

The CX Secrets to be Revealed include

SECRET #1: HOW TO REFRAME
any process and CX to a customer-centric model
 

How to use a powerful template that gets full collaboration

How to create an agreed understanding of the REAL CX within 2-3 hours

 

SECRET #2: HOW TO IDENTIFY and AGREE the real customer needs (even when they don’t know them!)
 
How to quickly focus on REAL needs and create an agreed framework to share with everyone involved with the CX and linked processes

 

SECRET #3: HOW TO ACTION a clearly defined SMART set of metrics that guide your work
 
How to create a definitive set of METRICS that align everything you do to quickly deliver and sustain Successful Customer Outcomes

 

Sign-up for this FREE Webinar:

And then…       When you have the SECRETS I will then introduce you to the Accredited Customer Experience Masters (ACXM) program. The global certified qualification in 116 countries!

https://cemnext.com/cxlm-template-workthru-webinar

6 Ways to Transform Process and the Customer Experience (at the Same Time)

Steve Towers Keynotes

Where do I start?

I was keynoting a conference in Europe recently, and senior executives in the room were getting the rationale behind moving Outside-In. However, there seemed to be two perplexed groups in the place.

One was what a refer to as the ‘traditional process guys’, and the other ‘the customer is first people’, and interestingly they both asked the same question “Where do we start?”

My honest and most direct answer is “You do not have a choice. You have got to start where you are and go from there!” OK, I get what you’re thinking, how could they take that away and begin to transform their organizations?

So, I walked them through TWO distinctly different ways to navigate to Outside-In working and practice, depending on your mindset, enterprise history and maturity. For the two categories of customer in the room, the NEEDS are the same, just the way they navigate to achieving them is different.

What are the Results?

From a results perspective, both approaches focus on winning the triple crown, that is Improving Service, Growing Revenues and Reducing Complexity (and hence lowering costs).

ApproachProcess EngineeringCustomer First
FocusProcess is the starting pointStarts with Customer Needs
ScopeReengineering the ProcessesAligning everything to Customer Needs
IntentionBuild out from Process to Department to Division to EnterpriseArticulate Successful Customer Outcomes and Remove the complexity of things that do not contribute to it
BenefitsLocal wins building to business-wide transformationImmediate delivery against Triple Crown benefits
Executive Buy-inSlow burn, however when they see the benefits and ‘get it’ the support is significantStarts at the strategic level so influences everything the organization does
RecommendationIf your remit is just ‘improving processes’ this approach will get you their steadily, however, the challenges facing traditional business are seismic so is there time? So, make immediate gains but push hard for more quickly.By demonstrating the value of ‘customer first’ in terms of the triple crown the enterprise can align quickly and effectively. Importantly avoid the ‘soft and fluffy’ sentiments expressed by many in the customer experience world.

How can I Implement?

Back in 2006 the BPG launched the CEMMethod™ and built out an approach, using the 50+ techniques based on global next practice from companies like Virgin, Zara, BMW, Zappos, Apple and Emirates. Since then more than 3,000 companies in 116 countries have become accredited and certified to transform their processes and organizations.

Now in version 11, the choice you make in deployment is based on your ambition and remit within the enterprise.
If you are a leader needing to embrace the digital customer ‘Customer First’ leaps out as the main option. Alternatively, if you are in a traditional process-based business (lean, six sigma, BPM etc.) the more conservative ‘process engineering’ approach may be preferred.

You can access the following resources that will help you make an informed choice:

CEMMethod™ – review its potency and pedigree:
www.cemmethod.com

Outside-In The Secret of 21st century companies (free access): http://bit.ly/StevesOIBook

The Accredited Customer Experience Program 2018-19: https://www.bpgroup.org/acxp1819.html

The Certified Process Professional Program: https://www.bpgroup.org/certifiedprocessprofessional.html

I look forward to guiding you to transformation when you are ready!

Holiday Reading – Customer Experience & Process Transformation

Just updated the Articles page which connects to my LinkedIn profile.

It has been a busy 2018 so far – you can access all the new articles (15 in 6 months) covering all the latest themes in and around Customer Experience Process Transformation.

Click on the image to access the individual pieces, however, to whet your appetite three of the most popular articles:

The Customer Experience Management Office – The What and the Why

Three fundamental Building Blocks for CX

The Employee Experience

Everyone Loves Great CX

Additionally, the new book is in draft, “Everyone Loves CX”, and will be published early next year. If you want to join the list and get access to the preview, samples and associated materials register here.

With a dozen new case studies and terrific insights from global leaders, I examine some of the next practices and how you can deploy them with immediate effect in your own world.

 

Rockstar CX

If videos are your thing then do hook up with James Dodkins and the Rockstar CX initiative.

He interviews live on Facebook the leading CX Professionals from across the globe at:
https://www.facebook.com/pg/JDODKINS/videos/

OK, I am off to the beach now. Get that G&T ready, please!

How popular is Customer Experience #CX thinking and practice?

An important question if you are tasked with making Customer Experience  #CX work for your organization.

Let’s contrast and compare current trends!

Twitter – Trends emerge when you monitor hashtags, and the shorthand for Customer Experience #cx is a good starting point. When you contrast #CX with other popular management approaches such as #lean #lss and #bpm is interesting:

hashtags data by hashtagify.me

That puts #CX in the ascendency.

What about #CX with other associated interests?

hashtags data by hashtagify.me

 

Top of the Tweeters for Customer Experience is Colin Shaw @ColinShaw_CX with over 43,400 #CX tweets.
If you follow him you will never be short of material related to Customer Experience as he vacuums the web for interesting articles, in addition to his own contributions.

Jump to the latest on Twitter with https://twitter.com/hashtag/cx

What about LinkedIn?

A recent introduction of hashtags to this platform provides a good insight…
Searching LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator platform with #CX reveals 83.4K members using Customer Experience as part of their profiles (that is 10 times greater than those using #lean).

The demographics
of the 83.4K show a predominance of folks in the US.

  1. United States (25,513)
  2. United Kingdom (5,733)
  3. Australia (5,200)
  4. India (4,622)
  5. Brazil (3,527)
  6. Sydney, Australia (2,639)

If you slice the data into companies expressing their interest in #CX we can see Oracle way ahead.

  1. Oracle (3,783)
  2. Amazon (534)
  3. IBM (437)
  4. Microsoft (433)

Does this reflect a reframing of their products to emphasize Customer Experience as a top table strategic interest?

And What about Google?

Searching #CX reveals 317,000,000 results in 0.8 seconds. That is one helluva a lot of reading. Drilling down with Google Trends, and using the same comparisons with Lean, LSS, BPM and CX produces an interesting contrast with Twitters results. Here we do see a decline in interest with Lean however the interest is still significantly ahead of CX.

We will revist this analysis periodically. Now go away and start researching all those interesting sources!

The Successful Technique You Can Use to Transform Your Customer Experiences and Lower Costs, Improve Service & Grow Revenues simultaneously

Dr W. Edwards Deming’s famous quote “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing” is truer today than ever in an increasingly customer-centric Outside-In world.

Perhaps we should upgrade the quote to encompass the focus on the customer?

“If you can’t describe what you are doing as relevant to a Successful Customer Outcome, you shouldn’t ought to be doing it”

Progressive Outside-In businesses understand this truth (think Amazon, Starbucks, BMW and Emirates) who are connecting everything they do to delivering these Successful Customer Outcomes. If activities and systems do not explicitly contribute to customer success they scrap them, and in doing so costs fall away, service improves and naturally, revenues grow.

Think about that for a moment from the customers perspective. It is certainly more pleasurable if interactions are simple and smoother. And if these experiences involve buying stuff, customers come back again and again for more. Even in public service, it stands to reason that reducing complexity will release more resources to do more meaningful work that delivers greater value to citizens.

So how would you approach your existing Customer Experiences and associated processes to move in this direction? Is there a formula that can be applied that is easy to use and produces immediate results?

Indeed, there is! We refer to this formula within the CEMMethod™, an approach developed originally in association with companies like Virgin and Southwest Airlines. The method, originally released in 2006, is now in version 11 and includes 50+ techniques that significantly improve business performance and customer success.

One of these techniques within the CEMMethod™ is referred to as the ‘Disruption Factor’ and quite simply allows you to calculate the potential for improvement in any Customer Experience. Additionally, it helps you pinpoint the areas that would benefit from immediate attention, and in doing so win the triple crown (lower costs, improved service, higher revenues).

If you want to know more about applying the Disruption Factor in your organization join us at the upcoming webinar register your interest here.

I will see you on the inside!

Additional Resources:

>> Disruption Factor Webinar –https://events.genndi.com/channel/BPGDisruptionFactor

>> Certified & Accredited CX Training
www.bpgroup.org/training

> More about me and the companies doing this stuff
www.stevetowers.com

> Rockstar CX with James Dodkins
http://www.rockstar.cx/podcast.html

> CEMMethod™
www.cemmethod.com