Customer Communications Blog

To say the modern customer is mercurial may be an obvious overstatement. While many companies may have little understanding of what their customer really wants from them today, far too many have much less awareness of what their customers expect tomorrow.

As organizations increase their focus on the employee experience in the digital workplace, many companies are pursuing integrated workspaces that combine multiple applications. Not surprising, as research shows us that there is a cost incurred every time an employee switches context.

Customer experience, or CX, has become one of the hottest topics in business today. However, like many words, when thrown around too much, they can lose their meaning.

In a previous post, Security Overview: Cloud-Based Customer Communications Management, we gave you a quick summary of each of the security layers: physical, network, operating system (OS), database and application. Let’s take a closer look at cloud-based CCM security at the application level, which includes handling of customer data.

We’ve been writing a lot about sharing content and integrating data lately. The reason we keep harping on those ideas is because they are what feeds brand consistency. And brand consistency is vital to building recognition, trust and value in the eyes of consumers. The consistency of your brand goes far beyond making sure the company’s logo and colors are right in marketing materials. It pertains to the entirety of how people perceive your company and its products and services. This consistency is built over time, a cumulative image made of all the impressions and interactions customers have with the company. In that sense, it’s a big part of the overall customer experience.

Data management software helps companies retrieve, manipulate and use data, even data stored in multiple places and in different formats. This broad software category can refer to ETL tools, data virtualization tools, or any number of enterprise data management solutions that consolidate and render data for analysis or other applications. Customer experience management (CXM) requires some form of data management since personalized customer service and other customer communications require access to large amounts of customer data. CXM requires access to not only demographic and behavioral data, but also transactional and other data pertaining to all interactions between a customer and a brand.