What is CCM Technology? Customer communications management (CCM) software streamlines the design, personalization, delivery, and tracking of customer communications like letters and statements that inform and engage customers across web, mobile, and print channels. CCM allows companies to present a cohesive, consistent image for communicating with customers. The primary function of CCM software is to enable companies to create, deliver, and manage highly personalized communications with customers at scale. CCM software tames people and processes to show the customer one, uniform brand. There is a reason the focus is on customers rather than on company or product or service. Imagine a sports team. Although the main goal is for the players to perform well during games, a lot of behind-the-scenes effort goes into keeping them part of the team. Player interactions with coaches, trainers, staff psychologists, HR, fans, and teammates all affect how a player feels about the team. Every touchpoint pushes the player closer to (loyalty) or further from (indifference) the team. Indifference is dangerous because, given the right opportunity, a player will switch teams. Teams spend quite a bit of money on valuable players ensuring their loyalty. Team owners know that the return on this investment (ROI) is worth it. The same holds true for CCM. Given the right CCM software, you can keep customers happy and engaged. Here’s a look at the five key pieces of CCM that help keep all of your customer communications in sync. Like cogs in a system, the various parts of good CCM software work together as one.

Correspondence management is all about efficiency on the part of the business, especially for today’s digital customers who demand responsive interactions that keep up with the pace of their daily lives. For the everyday incoming and outgoing customer communications, centralization helps carry out those exchanges in an optimal timeframe. To facilitate such, customer communications management (CCM) platforms provide a solution to calm the chaos; but when it comes to correspondence management don’t forget to watch the horizon.

Customer communications and the digital experience (DX) have become so closely related that the gap between the two has already begun shrinking in the customer communications management (CCM) industry. As a result, DX integration has risen to the top as a key factor in making digital workplace technology purchases across businesses and industries.

Is your firm curating your own customer communications capabilities? Or to put it another way, are you leaving this critical piece of your digital customer experience software stack to outside vendors and hoping for the best?

Earlier this year, Topdown engaged the independent service organization Frazier & Deeter LLC to conduct an AICPA System and Organization Controls for Service Organizations (SOC 2) Type 1 audit on our processes, procedures and products. On December 14, 2018, they issued a report of its findings. We are very excited to announce that the analysis—which thoroughly documents the controls Topdown uses to safeguard our customers' data—uncovered zero defects. We encourage our Topdown customers and prospects to review the outcomes of this study, available upon request.

The term “document output management” hasn’t been used much in the last 15 years. This old name for information technology focused on customer communications management (CCM) is confined nowadays to high-volume, batch-oriented printing jobs. This name-change reflects the expanding role of the software required to meet the needs of the modern customer.