CCM, or Customer Communication Management, has been around for a long time. It often lurks deep in the enterprise stack of IT solutions. Often times, there are many CCM software products in place. There are even companies that do not know how many CCM assets they have.
How can CCM be so important, but also so overlooked?
CCM is an unsung hero of nearly every enterprise. CCM technology creates communications for customers (or employees) by taking data and content from multiple systems and assembling this together in a format useful for the recipient.
In the past, CCM just made “documents” that were one way business to customer communications, like direct mail, bank statements, policies, EoBs, Checks, ID Cards, credit and debit card mailers, loyalty statements, and other types of correspondences.
Today, these messages are delivered to many channels by CCM systems.
Let’s take a look at your inventory of channels.
First there was paper. CCM used to be limited to making documents, back when it was called VDP (Variable Data Printing.) Back then, CCM engines were making large batch runs on high speed toner-based machines. Then highlight color emerged. Then high speed inkjet technology. Then full color toner based systems, and finally super high speed inkjet making over 5,000 fully variable pages per minute. While paper is still important, the mid 1990’s started to expand the channels.
The popularization of HTML on the web, combined with the rise of email and the creation of the PDF format opened up series of new channels. This was a moment that forked CCM technology. I bet many in the business (myself included) wish we made some different choices in the late 1990s to incorporate these new channels early on. However, the email and html (for web presentment) projects were generally assigned to the IT or Webmaster to start. This created a divide that still exists in many companies today, which separates projects by channels, multiplying design investment and approval costs by the number of channels.
Then, in the mid 2000’s, Social and mobile created a slew of new combinations of social networks, app delivery options, SMS-augmented communications, and new types of notifications. This was again generally sent off to a new silo, which again increased investments in customer communications.
So, today the CCM industry, with GMC Software at the forefront, has created design, proof, approval, and deployment technology to unify the separate channel outputs of the CCM Projects.
If you want to create and curate a consistent customer experience, you are going to have to remove the design, implementation and approval friction from your communication silos. GMC Software is passionate about helping you improve your Customer Experience (CX) strategy by helping you minimize your channel investments.
