In “Why Your Business Needs to Know About — and Prioritise — ‘Operational Customer Experience’”, Alok Kulkarni asserts that “there is a crucial element of CX that has been overlooked within the customer engagement management landscape. It’s called Operational Customer Experience (OCX) — applied effectively, it could transform the way your company communicates.” Since OCX specifically focuses on customers’ experience of an organization’s technology systems, Kulkarni advocates for prioritizing OCX and analyzing customer interactions to identify failures.

In a McKinsey article entitled “From Touchpoints to Journeys: Seeing the World As Customers Do,” Nicholas Maechler, Kevin Neher and Robert Park discuss maximizing customer satisfaction by focusing on the end-to-end customer journey rather than on individual touchpoints as many have in the past.

In The Future of CCM: Communications-As-A-Service, Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Craig Le Clair (@CSLeClair) briefly mentions Twilio as an emerging communications solution that provides APIs to support in-app chat, notifications, SMS/text messaging, picture, voice, and video messaging and user authentication.

Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Craig LeClair (@CSLeClair) has a brand new report out, called The Future of CCM: Communications-As-A-Service. The purpose of the report is to shed light on strategic choices for enterprise architects struggling to figure out how Customer Communications Management (CCM) fits in an increasingly cloud-centric, multi-platform digital experience technology landscape.

We’ve been telling you about how INTOUCH® is the first completely new customer communications management (CCM) solution in years, with its exceptionally business-user-friendly UI and UX and its services-based architecture built using containers and microservices. In this article, we present an overview of that architecture.

Not all customer communications management (CCM) software is created equal. In fact, there’s a fairly broad spectrum of solutions, ranging from lightweight Microsoft Word and SalesForce.com (SFDC) plugins to complex and powerful (and costly) multifunctional enterprise-grade platforms. But how can you tell if a solution that lies somewhere along that continuum has the features you need to get enterprise-grade CCM outcomes for your business without unneeded complexity and expense? Here are four essential features a CCM solution would need to have to be considered enterprise-grade: