While the business benefits to adopting a centralized customer communication management (CCM) solution are plentiful, discussions around CCM can be complex at times. Let's break it down and make it simple. Here we will highlight four fundamental ways in which CCM will improve your business.
1. Improve the customer experience
Centralized CCM platforms that enable real-time, cross-channel, interactive communications result in dramatically higher customer experience. They achieve this in the following ways:
Personalization and channel preference.
Leading CCM solutions enable you to create highly personalized, relevant communications across virtually any channel. Further, CCM channel preference management tools ensure that you’re always engaging with your customers via the channels of their choice.
Interactivity.
Dynamic visualization capabilities facilitate real-time mobile (and web) experiences that enable customers to engage with content using interactive charts, graphs, and sliders.
Consistency.
Centralization enables a better customer experience since designs are created in a channel-agnostic way and pushed to customers via their channel of choice. Consistent messaging, just like consistent experiences, builds trust. Trust keeps customers coming back.
Convenience.
A centralized CCM platform enables you to get the right messages to your customers, faster. Additionally, it makes creating a seamless onboarding experience easy with pre-populated digital forms, electronic signature capabilities, and more.
2. Improve efficiency
Business user enablement.
Centralized CCM solutions enable business users to create, edit, and manage content, instead of relying on IT to make changes.
Eliminate departmental and digital silos.
Many organizations still have separate teams dedicated to creating communications for print, mobile, email, and web—leading to operational inefficiency, high costs, inconsistency, and increased risk. A centralized CCM infrastructure, however, delivers a better customer experience; and there are efficiency gains thanks to the fact that changes are easily propagated across various touchpoints and channels.
3. Speed digital transformation
Many traditional industries including financial services, insurance, utilities, and government have a complex infrastructure of mission-critical legacy IT technology—old systems that were developed 15 to 20 years ago for print-centric output only. Today, it’s paramount CCM integrates with existing core systems, enabling a seamless cross-channel experience through one easy-to-use interface.
Today, leading CCM solutions enable you to leverage existing templates and data from your core systems to create highly personalized, relevant communications across virtually any channel.
4. Reduce risk
Content managers often treat compliance as a barrier, when a better approach is to find ways to make compliance part of the design and development team by involving them and asking for input throughout the creative process. This is only done through a centralized CCM solution that enables:
Collaboration.
A collaborative content development process where compliance, legal, and line-of-business teams are able to share drafts from the beginning of the process, helps reduce internal frustration and speeds time-to-market.
A holistic view.
To reduce ‘errors of omission’ compliance teams require a full view of the entire communications package in every form in which that material is going to appear—paper, web pages, mobile applications, and so on. This way, compliance is able to fully review and analyze not only what customers will see, but how they see it.
Greater control.
Compliance personnel require the ability to manage, track, audit, and approve regulatory language quickly and easily. Modern CCM solutions ensure that changes are only made in one location and applied everywhere you choose, and content blocks are locked down to safeguard regulatory language where required.
This article was featured in Chapter 2 of our new interactive eBook "The Authoritative Guide to Achieving CX Excellence: Unlocking the Power of Customer Communications Management (CCM)".
The book teaches business leaders how they can leverage CCM technology to transform their customer experience using simple language, stunning illustrations, videos, podcasts, whitepapers, analyst reports, industry resources and more. And it's free! We hope you enjoy it.
