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Stop wasting developers on your communications; 3 rules to follow

Good IT developers are vital for business success today. They can be damn expensive too.

So it’s critical they’re deployed on transformative projects and not bogged down in maintenance and on-going grunt work of your business communications. One, because there’s huge opportunity cost in tying them up with mundane maintenance tasks. And two, because they’ll get bored and start job-hunting.  After all, they’re in high demand and they know it.

So how do we free up our gun developers from business communications maintenance? And when I say business communications, I mean any regular or reactive communications to staff, customers or suppliers.

Whether its customer marketing, membership renewals, or IVRs, here are 3 essential rules when evaluating any communications application, platform or provider:

 

1. Identify day-to-day changes required in communications at the start.

Make it a ‘must’ in your requirements that these don’t fall into the IT domain.

Thinking through your business communications, table all the changes you’ll likely need to make on a day-to-day basis. Some examples might include:

  • Content changes – Copy changes to SMS and emails.  Image changes in emails.
  • Send times – you’re going to want to trial sends at different hours of the day.
  • Spacing of send times – call centre resource will fluctuate so there will be a need to adjust the ‘stagger’ of the send.
  • Sequencing of communication automation. E.g. send two emails, then an SMS etc

The requirement has to be eliminating any IT involvement from these changes.

 

2. Make the businesses owner the ‘doer’.

For marketing SMS we’re talking the marketing manager, or the product manager. For customer care emails this could be the customer marketing manager. For shipment updates it’s your logistics manager.  You get the idea.

The key is to empower them to make the changes from the start, give them the tools they need to do it, and embed the behaviour so they don’t refer to any IT resource to make these changes.

 

3. Future-proof your business communications

What if the next three to five years brings an international expansion?  If so you’re going to want international SMS capability.  Are you moving from rolling monthly contracts to annual? You’ll need to make adjustments to your marketing contact strategy.

The objective is to identify any key future requirements for your communications capability, and if not cater for them now, at least maintain the flexibility to cater for them down the track.

If you take care of these 3 points you’re doing everything you can to prevent unnecessary IT involvement in your communications.  You can expect happier developers, and a step change in productivity on the IT projects that matter.

To free your developers from your automated business communications, TRIAL UPWIRE for free and start the conversation.

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