In organizations with multiple departments, it’s common for silos to build and for each team to adopt its own communications strategy. The idea that each team would know what was best for its particular effort and thus could operate how it saw fit made sense for a time. This process – known as decentralization – was the norm for decades. But as consumers grew to prefer a more unified experience, especially as digital channels became more widely accessible, the need for centralization became necessary. If the sales team uses emails, while support uses chat, while marketing uses phone calls, the consumer has a disjointed – and often frustrating – experience.

When organizations choose to centralize their communications, it’s not just the customer that benefits. Here are a few bonuses you can expect:

• Improved efficiency
• Better understanding of analytics
• Simplicity and consistency
• Reduce redundancy
• Transparency among teams

To gain the full breadth of benefits in centralization, follow the best practices below.

Support Collaboration

To make campaign centralization do the most work for you, everyone needs to be on board. That means brand designers, field technicians, web programmers, and call center agents get cross-functional training and an environment of collaboration is created. Your teams should be encouraged to communicate with each other, and the best way they can do that is through a central, digital hub that shows a 360-degree picture of outbound campaigns. Plus, your team will better understand and share skill sets that improve performance organization-wide.

Make Data-Driven Decisions

When campaigns are centralized, organizations gain a broader and more insightful view of how communications are working across all efforts. Omnichannel communications platforms like SkyCreek’s eContact provide users a central dashboard with robust analytics so that businesses can measure reach, performance, and resolutions throughout the customer journey. With decentralized campaign management, a user would need to pull analytics from multiple sources, then try to make sense of how they connect. When you centralize, take steps to follow the data, and your customers will thank you.

Implement Quality Checks

Centralized campaign management tools allow you to brand your communications so that every message and interaction looks, feels, and sounds unique to your business. But with multiple users able to use a central hub, the opportunity for inconsistencies grows. Regularly conduct quality control measures by enforcing templates, messaging guidelines, and your industry’s best practices to empower all employees to conduct on-brand communications. Take a look at how you can implement this with Content Designer.

Assign Accountability

Empowering your teams to adopt cohesive campaign management isn’t just about providing the right tools. While unified platforms like eContact help, organizations should also appoint the employees to act as brand stewards, responsible for managing access and ensuring communications stay compliant. A dedicated team – even if it’s small – of brand ambassadors also creates greater oversight for customer issues, data inaccuracies, and other issues that cost businesses needless time and money.

Measure Impact

Using the data from your centralized campaign management to refocus or support your business strategy ensures you get ROI from your investment and that the centralization can lead to future growth. Quality data – like the kinds gathered and measured by SkyCreek – provide a clear path forward in aligning your campaign management and business goals.

These are just a few of several steps you can take to make centralized campaign management an asset for your business. And with decades of experience in customer communications for healthcare, financial services, utilities, and telecommunications, we can provide suggestions based on your needs and industry. Get started with centralizing your campaign management by scheduling a demo today.