Customer Communications Blog

Forrester Research and other firms have found that delivering a customer experience (CX) with ease, effectiveness, and emotion drives higher revenues and profitability versus industry peers. That explains why CX has gotten a lot of attention (or at least lip service) from C-suite executives and board members.

Chicago, Illinois, May 10-12 I’ll be a presenter at Document Strategy Forum ‘16 in Chicago, Illinois, at 3:00 p.m. on Tuesday, May 10, 2016. My presentation, “Overcoming Legacy System Challenges to Support Your Digital Channels,” focuses on how to move beyond being document/print-focused to a mindset of digital-first communications that adapt well to whatever channel by which your customers choose to engage with you.

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.

Now that you’ve walked in your customers’ shoes and see where your company’s CX weaknesses are, what should you do if you see a disparity in your CX delivery across various touchpoints similar to the imbalance demonstrated by our hypothetical health insurance customer trying to file a claim? For starters, there is a great deal that the people focused on service and retention can learn and borrow from those focused on marketing and sales, and vice versa.

As the customer communication journey is becoming the new paradigm for customer communications (read also InfoTrends’ blog on this topic), CCM is moving away from traditional IT departments into sales, marketing, service, and help desk departments. As a consequence, CCM technology increasingly touches upon other IT systems within the enterprise. Without the centralization of this technology, successful customer communication journeys, in terms of efficiency and bottom-line impact, will not be possible. 

In our many years of serving the customer communications needs of a wide variety of companies, we’ve seen all kinds of approaches to administering a customer communication management (CCM) software solution. Sometimes a particular department or business unit owns and runs the software. Sometimes it’s the IT department or a marketing technologist. Occasionally there’s no one in the organization who’s assigned particular responsibility for overseeing CCM implementation. There are many ways to administer a customer communications solution, and some are more effective than others. It just depends on your company’s structure and what works best for you. Our Professional Services Group (PSG) works with all kinds of customers, and we adapt to each one.