Customer Communications Blog

Customer experience (CX) has been gaining traction; it’s now much more than just a buzzword and it now requires your immediate attention. Whether you are an insurance firm, a bank, or any other type of business that interacts with people, the customer’s journey plays an extremely important role for attracting and retaining customer base.

In customer communications management (CCM), we talk a lot about customer experience (CX) and the business leaders who are tasked with improving CX. We’ve seen a growing trend in some industries to create a CXO, or chief experience officer, to facilitate customer experience improvements throughout the customer’s journey – including, of course, the need for great CCM as a major part of CX strategy.

In the just-published Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management Systems, Q1 2015 report, analyst Ted Schadler discusses the role of web content management (WCM) systems in a customer journey. He lists the many tools and channels involved in managing customers' digital experiences in this graphic:

This year was a banner year for Topdown as well as for customer experience management (CXM) and customer communications management (CCM or DOCCM). What follows is a recap of some of the major milestones in our industry, along with our take on what they collectively mean.

Like many Americans, we here at Topdown took a few days away from work last week to gather together with family and friends to celebrate and give thanks. Also like many Americans, we ate waaay too much food and had leftovers for days. An interesting thing about a Thanksgiving feast, though, is that no matter how many people gather around the same table, each person experiences the meal in his or her own unique way. One person might take a small amount of each item on the table, wanting to sample a little bit of everything. Another might choose generous helpings of just two or three favorite courses, saving room for dessert. Still another might be a vegetarian and create a feast of tofurkey, fruits and vegetables.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, most large companies communicated with their customers via a single touch point: physical mail. With communication dependent upon mail service, it could take weeks for customers to resolve any issues they had with a company. Oh how the times, and customer expectations, have changed.