Communication is the key to success in most of what we do. Take digital transformation as an example. We’d say it’s not about technology but about the people involved and how you communicate with them. And this is true for how we communicate with our prospects and customers. It’s not all about our products and services - to a large extent, it’s about how we communicate the benefits of said products and services that will make the difference.

Every organization has customers they need to communicate with. And you have to communicate with them at different stages of the customer journey. First, you have to attract their attention as prospective customers, then move them through the process (or buyer journey) to become a client. Then you want to make sure you retain the customers you’ve acquired and make them loyal customers, helping you gain more customers. 

It’s safe to say that digital communication is here to stay. If we look at traditional communication from organizations most people have life-long relationships with, like banks, insurance & pension providers, government institutions, and many more, most letters are now sent to us via digital mailboxes or my pages on the sender's site. But there is a challenge with the ever-increasing number of channels organizations use for digital communication.

Organizations struggle to keep all inbound and outbound communications intact due to the lack of an appropriate framework or platform to localize conversations from multiple channels, creating a need for customer communications management software (CCM).

For many organizations, the struggle of keeping track of both inbound and outbound communication is real. The absence of a strategy, framework, and the right tools and platforms to organize and keep track of dialogs from all channels is slowing down organizations, costing them money, and harming the customer experience. This is where Customer Communication Management (CCM) platforms come in.

What is customer communications management?

It’s a great question. We look at Customer Communication Management as a framework to help your organization produce, distribute & notify, sign, and archive customer communication that is personalized, relevant, on-brand, and compliant across all channels – at all times.

Your CCM strategy should empower your organization to give your customers a fantastic experience in all their interactions with you. Most organizations use CCM in one form or another. But the challenge for companies with complex offerings across several product lines is to communicate in a consistent, compliant, relevant, and on-brand way.

What are the benefits of Customer Communications Management?

We briefly touched on the complexity of communicating with customers who have bought multiple products from different offerings. Having a well-designed CCM strategy will help you manage critical customer information to always make your customer communication relevant. Successful companies leverage the insights and analytics a CCM platform gives you to manage your customer communication. And with digital communication and the advancement of new technologies, communication is no longer one-way traffic. Customer communication is turning into a dialog between you and your customers, meaning the need to be relevant, personal, on-brand, and compliant is bigger than ever.

So, what are the benefits of using a CCM platform? We’ve listed some of them here.

Compliant, relevant, and on-brand

One of the key advantages of digital communication is personalization. Organizations collect vast amounts of data and information about their customers and users, enabling them to take communication to a level never seen before. CCM platforms are critical components in this process. CCM platforms allow users to use data and information from an unlimited number of sources from existing business systems to make communication relevant. Users will be provided with a range of pre-defined templates to ensure communication is compliant, relevant, and on-brand.

You can set up new templates, auto-responders, and other similar features to automate messaging with CCM platforms. These solutions integrate customer data with conditional logic and use popular architectural styles like RESTful APIs to automate communications.

Avoid miscommunication

We’ve all experienced our fair share of miscommunication from organizations where we are either clients or members. Each time this happens, it hurts customer engagement. And just as important, it’s an annoying disruption to our colleagues dealing with the communication as they face an uphill battle from the start. Customers want and expect consistent dialogs where the respondent has access to all relevant information. They want a timely response that solves their challenges.

CCM platforms and solutions help reduce the response time and track all communication from all departments within your organization. This helps ensure no detail goes unnoticed.

Build customer relationships and improve customer experience

Customer Communication Management is intimately related to the customer experience. You want each customer to have an outstanding experience each time they interact with you. This is a critical factor for building next-level customer relationships. 

You want the ability to predict changes in your customers’ behavior, needs, and what they expect from you. If you have a detailed CCM strategy in place, this will help you meet the changing needs of your customers. Some of the real benefits CCM gives you are:

  • A more personalized customer experience

  • Produce, distribute, and manage content in real-time

  • Automated messaging and communication

  • Interactive dialogs

  • Compliant, personalized, and on-brand communication across all channels

The critical part is keeping your customer at the center of everything you do. A well-thought-out CCM strategy helps you do this. It enables you to deliver the right communication at the right time. Through the right channel. The long-term effect is better and improved customer dialogs that improve the relationship - both from the customer’s perspective and from yours.

We’re not saying this is easy. But with the right CCM platform and strategy, every organization will be better placed to improve its customer retention rates. All due to better customer experience.

Success is a journey, not a destination

We love this quote from Arthur Ashe. To us, it means that no matter how successful you are, you always have to anticipate your next move to stay ahead of your competitors. We started this post by touching on digital transformation and how it’s more about communication and people than the actual technology being implemented. There is a lot of talk about digital transformation right now and how it will affect our lives. But think about it, the digital transformation journey has been ongoing for years in different phases. And it will continue to go on for the next few decades. None of us will wake up one day saying, ‘ah, we’ve completed our digital transformation journey. What do we do now?’. There will always be new technologies, regulations, world events, or other things to tackle. The key is to celebrate the milestones we reach during our journey. 

Look at industries like banking and financial services. You will find that many organizations use digital channels for all of their customer communications, customer service, upgrading, or downgrading customers through new offerings. Organizations in these industries rely on digital communication every day. A CCM solution is a mission-critical priority for them.

We’ve mentioned banking and financial services several times now. But other industries benefit from using a CCM platform as well. Public sector agencies use CCM platforms extensively, as do membership organizations. The common denominator is they all have a complex IT landscape.

Improve efficiency without burdening the IT department

So what are you doing to improve your business processes? A CCM platform provides tools and resources to help you analyze and improve your customers’ experience when communicating with you. What makes most CCM Platforms really great is that they help organizations automate processes, which reduces the burden on the IT department. 

If you’ve read this far, you’ll now understand that a CCM platform has many benefits for your organization. Teams from across your organization can use a framework adopted by the entire organization to communicate with your customers through different channels. The business benefits are reduced costs, compliant, relevant, and on-brand communication at all times - and a world-class experience for your customers.

Want to learn more about what benefits your organization can reap from implementing a CCM platform? Click here to schedule a free consultation with one of our CCM experts.