Customer communication is undergoing a transformation. Businesses are seizing the opportunity to create more sophisticated, personalized content and engage with customers through multiple touchpoints – often simultaneously. They use Columbus Central, the digital process orchestration platform, to drive their business-critical communication workflows and streamline multi-channel delivery.
Much like the conductor in an orchestra, Columbus Central guides the flow of interactions between multiple systems and channels, directing every step in the communication process to get the right information to the right place at the right time.
Columbus Central helps you to work with the practical realities of digital transformation. For many organizations the transition to digital is happening in a devolved way, with individual business units adopting a range of different processes and systems. Columbus Central allows you to monitor, oversee and manage these diverse elements of your transformation landscape from a single point of control, so it becomes easier to implement changes and improvements – all without replacing any of the technology you have already invested in.
It is straightforward to introduce new digital channels and communication technologies as you can add them in just one place. All interactions with the rest of your technology stack are handled by Columbus Central, sparing you the effort, risk and cost of making direct changes to your business systems.
Operational resilience
Columbus Central increases operational resilience and provides the flexibility to handle any process, from day-to-day correspondence for a single product line right through to integrated, enterprise-wide communications.
Orchestration
Individual tasks, such as data capture, content creation, digital customer engagement and printing of physical documents, are all orchestrated centrally to keep you in control.
End-to-end digital orchestration
Columbus Central orchestrates your communication workflows, managing and integrating the interactions between diverse systems, people and channels to deliver more customer-centric outcomes, for example by transforming individual paper documents from separate lines of business into a single, interactive digital communication.
Automated communication workflows
A graphical flowcharting tool simplifies the creation of communication workflows, allowing you to model and implement your processes visually and update them quickly whenever you need to, adding new channels, technologies and process steps as required.
Enterprise-scale, multi-channel communications
Columbus Central is designed to process of millions of documents and digital interactions and manage engagement through multiple channels, including email, apps, chat, social media, messaging and physical documents, as well as delivery to enterprise content management systems such as Columbus DW for customer and employee self-service.
Centralized monitoring and control
An administrator interface and dashboard keep you in control, with graphical displays that monitor the progress of every task as it happens, and performance metrics for your IT infrastructure to help you avoid delivery bottlenecks and maintain consistently high service levels.
Flexible, rules-based processing
Process steps can be triggered by your business rules, based on a practically limitless range of factors, such as customer behavior and preferences (perhaps sending text or email reminders if a bill is unpaid), communication channels (creating graphical content for online self-service, and short text formats for messaging, for example), and compliance requirements (such as archiving documents with sensitive data redacted).
Seamless systems interaction
Columbus Central can accept and process information from any system, in any format, and update enterprise applications with data generated by your communication workflows. You can also drive business rules in Columbus Central using real-time information from your business applications, and exchange data with SAP® systems using certified interfaces.
Dynamic, personalized experiences
Columbus Central can tailor experiences to the needs of your customers in direct response to human interactions in real time; for example, you could alter the content or timing of a customer communication dynamically depending on how the customer replies to a question on an online form, or based on a decision made by a business user.
Embedded business intelligence
Columbus Accounting provides rich reports on your business-critical communication workflows to help you drive continuous service improvement, and supports a range of business activities, including capacity planning, service level management, usage-based billing and infrastructure optimization.