Customer Communications Blog

Is your firm curating your own customer communications capabilities? Or to put it another way, are you leaving this critical piece of your digital customer experience software stack to outside vendors and hoping for the best?

Just because a software program gets the job done, that doesn’t mean it’s right for you. With a full array of customer communications management (CCM) solutions on the market, making sure your software package is business-friendly plays a key factor in how useful the program is for your brand and how high the return on investment (ROI) on that CCM software will be.

Many marketing mavens may well be aware of the capabilities of their customer communications management (CCM) software. However, when asked if their solution is cloud-native or just cloud-based, most would probably shrug a shoulder and ask: What’s the difference? Does it really even matter? It’s just a tech jargon nuance, right? Our response would be, YES! absolutely, there’s a huge difference. As we head into 2019, cloud adoption has become more ubiquitous and mainstream, and as a result, the term “cloud” can take on a variety of interpretations. In fact, what we’ve found to be true is that very few CCM vendors have a cloud-native solution. Many are offering a managed service or a SaaS subscription to software hosted in the cloud, but not created for the cloud. Currently, innovative solutions providers have devised a technical shift in favor of systems created specifically for the cloud. The good news: it’s not prohibitively expensive to get on board. Consider these advantages of a cloud-native system when devising your CCM solution.

A recently published report from Forrester, “Now Tech: Customer Communications Management, Q1 2019” (Forrester Research, Inc., January 11, 2019) cites Topdown as a future-oriented customer communications management vendor. In the report, Forrester vice president and principal analyst Craig Le Clair examines the Customer Communications Management (CCM) market and identifies the 17 most relevant CCM vendors, categorized by size (annual revenue) and capabilities (defined below). Glenn O'Donnell, Amanda Lipson, and Diane Lynch co-authored the study.

The Winter 2018-2019 edition of DOCUMENT Magazine includes an application article featuring Topdown and our INTOUCH product. In this article we review the top trends in customer communications management (CCM), with a focus on leveraging the cloud and content services to integrate CCM into a broader digital experience technology stack.

Earlier this year, Topdown engaged the independent service organization Frazier & Deeter LLC to conduct an AICPA System and Organization Controls for Service Organizations (SOC 2) Type 2 audit on our processes, procedures and products. On December 14, 2018, they issued a report of its findings. We are very excited to announce that the analysis—which thoroughly documents the controls Topdown uses to safeguard our customers' data—uncovered zero defects. We encourage our Topdown customers and prospects to review the outcomes of this study, available upon request.