Customer communication management strategy in 2023: our guide
Today, customers expect every experience they have with a brand or provider to be fast, easy, and convenient. With the ability to communicate regardless of where they are, customers don’t distinguish between online and offline. They don’t think about brands as brick-and-mortar + phone + mobile + website + social media, etc. To them, it’s one brand/one channel. In other words—omnichannel. In this reality, it’s critical that all businesses have a customer communications management (CCM) strategy in place to meet these expectations.
A customer communication management (CCM) strategy is an overarching plan for connecting with prospective and existing customers, supported by specific tactics to achieve branding, marketing, and customer service goals.
A customer communication strategy is beneficial in the following ways:
- It helps businesses retain their customers
- It improves customers’ perception of the brand
- It ensures brand consistency
- It strengthens customer engagement and loyalty
To create a CCM strategy, brands focusing on providing an exceptional customer experience must embrace omnichannel. This is especially important in more traditional industries such as financial services, insurance, telecom, and utilities whose operations are throttled by regulations, legacy technology, and organizational/data silos.
While each of these industries has many touchpoints, the key is to identify the critical ones and execute consistent, relevant, and personalized experiences—every customer, every time.
What are ‘moments of truth’?
Moments of truth are make-or-break instances along a customer’s journey that present a decision point. If executed well, the customer continues their journey doing business with the brand. If executed poorly, it’s likely the customer will stop doing business with the brand. Each moment of truth is an opportunity for the brand to differentiate.
Research done in the 1970s by Richard Normann, who developed the concept of “moments of truth,” uncovered that it takes 12 positive moments of truth to counter one failed moment. Given that, it’s imperative to remove friction from the experience and ensure each moment of truth is executed with a positive outcome.
Communication is important in your relationship with your customers. Each one is a critical moment of truth along the customer journey.
Communications support both the brand promise and the customer experience. Timely, consistent, and relevant communications build trust, and trust keeps customers coming back. As such, it’s important to inventory all of your customer communications to create a big picture view and to understand each piece’s purpose, be it to explain, inform, advise, advertise, educate, solicit payment, or other.
Communications can be reactive or proactive, but they must be timely, consistent, personalized, relevant to the individual customer, and seamless, regardless of touchpoint or channel.

Primary Obstacles
Several factors derail companies from being able to meet those communication expectations, including silos, data discrepancies, poorly designed or nonexistent omnichannel capabilities, legacy technology platforms, and more.
Silos:
To deliver the best experience, data must flow across departments and to different channels. The American Management Association survey of internal collaboration found that 83% of executives said silos exist in their companies and 97% think silos have a negative effect. Recognizing and understanding the silos in your organization will help you to break them down or connect them.
NewVoiceMedia published a whitepaper that defined three different types of silos within organizations:
- Operational: functionally-based: This may be one of the most common types you think of when you’re talking about organizations, as it refers to various departments that are not connected or talking to each other and organizations that are not acting in a uniform, one-company way nationally or globally.
- Channel: interaction-based: Customers have multiple channels on which to interact, but companies make it difficult to do so without excessive effort on the part of the customer. Companies don’t act and speak in one voice across channels and customers feel like they start anew with the company each time they shift to another channel. This speaks to omnichannel pain.
- Hierarchical: organizational-level-based: This type of silo occurs when team members are either inhibited or actively discouraged from engaging senior leaders without going through the correct protocols and channels.
These silos perpetuate disconnects in data, communication, systems, and metrics. When they inhibit or prohibit collaboration, communication, and data sharing, customers are undoubtedly impacted.
- 41% of companies stated that operational silos are a significant barrier to providing a seamless customer experience. (Source: eConsultancy)
Omnichannel:
Breaking down, or connecting, silos is crucial. When brands can’t share data between and among departments and channels, the customer feels it. Their experience is fragmented and takes effort. As an example, communications may be disjointed, irrelevant, and out of sync with where the customer is in their life or on their journey.
If you’re aiming to align your customer messaging and reduce customer frustration, one of the most impactful ways to do so is to look at your omnichannel experience. Omnichannel delivers a consistent and seamless experience across channels, which should not be confused with multichannel (using multiple channels, which are not integrated, to interact with customers).
In their interactions with businesses, customers don’t think about channels; they think about what they need to get done. The idea of separate and unique channels doesn’t exist in their world, so brands need to quickly evolve to integrate their channels in response. Disparate channels with inconsistent branding, messaging, and experiences caused by siloed data result in frustration and effort for customers. Omnichannel must be a priority in your customer experience, and especially in your communications strategy.
- Companies with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% with weak omnichannel strategies (Source: Aberdeen)
Technology:
In order to meet customer expectations, it’s vital to first understand them, and leverage customer data to design and deliver the experience your customers have come to expect—at every touchpoint. Technology is the vehicle that delivers those expectations to the right person, on the right channel, at the right time.
And yet, technology, specifically legacy technology, is what’s holding many companies back from delivering the experience customers expect.
One area where this burden of legacy technology couldn’t be more relevant is in communications. Not only are brands dealing with legacy technologies, each of which was created for a specific purpose or communication type, but also with disparate and/or redundant systems that cannot talk to each other. They also have what seems to be an unmanageable volume of messaging and communications that need to be wrangled and aligned, to not overwhelm, confuse, or worse, frustrate, the customer.
To counter that, leading enterprises are leveraging next-generation customer communications management (CCM) platforms to facilitate and support their omnichannel communication strategies. It’s no longer enough for your communications to be branded consistently; that’s a given. They need to be personalized, relevant, consistent, timely, compliant, and delivered to your customers when, where, and how they want to receive them.
To achieve communication unification, your various marketing and messaging platforms need to be integrated. That’s a problem that next-generation CCM platforms solve by facilitating collaboration and unifying not only messaging, but also siloed teams with disparate systems.
CCM platforms also allow teams from across the business to design, preview, and test communications across every channel, showing side-by-side omnichannel previews so every communication is visible in every channel context, ensuring consistency while preserving the channel experience. This also appeases compliance officers by providing a single-proof experience for every channel that is archived and reviewed in a central location.
Finding the right CCM strategy for your business requires exploration and dedication. You’ll need to iterate your approach as technology evolves and as you learn more about your customers and their preferences.
At Quadient, we understand that meeting the new standard of CX excellence requires innovative technologies built for a customer-centric world. Our award-winning Inspire Customer Experience Management Suite enables organizations to create and deliver millions of personalized omnichannel communications from one intuitive platform. Watch this video to learn more.