Not that long ago, customer communications management (CCM) would be a part of most companies’ operations department since it was all about automating the printing and mailing of massive amounts of documents. Now, though, CCM has to serve both print and digital channels, so it’s moving under the digital experience (DX) delivery umbrella and becoming an integral piece of an organization's customer engagement hub. That means the CCM buyer is changing. Here's why that's a good thing.

Back in 2015, we wrote about digital experience scope creep and the omni-channel customer journey. Our goal was to draw attention to how each department and line of business tended to have its own narrow focus on touchpoints along the customer journey, and to how people, processes and technologies tend to remain siloed from each other, with little to no integration between digital experience (DX) applications and tools across an organization. And with omni-channel communications, enterprises found themselves grappling with not just scope creep but more like a scope explosion, as they struggled to integrate disparate systems of engagement into a cohesive DX architecture.

In an ever-expanding landscape of digital experience technologies, how do you choose the right technologies to deliver your organization’s best customer experience today and years into the future? It’s an investment that Forrester analyst Ted Schadler says can take five years and cost between $20 million and $200 million for enterprises, so it’s important to get it right.

Last year, it was big news when OpenText™ acquired much of HP’s customer experience (CX) and content management software and then, soon after, added its customer communications management (CCM) assets, including Exstream™. We shared our thoughts on this move back in 2016:

We first wrote about what the term “digital first” means in customer communications management (CCM) last year, but we wanted to revisit the idea because the digital customer experience landscape is changing. Read on to find out what it means to manage customer engagement across all of your customer journeys, channels and touchpoints.

The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q3 2017 report came out recently, and we were extremely interested to see how things have changed since the last DX Platform Wave came out in 2015. Analysts Mark Grannan (@mwgrannan) and Ted Schadler (@TedSchadler) identified the 14 most significant DX platform providers and researched, analyzed, and scored them. They ranked Acquia, Adobe, BloomReach, Episerver, IBM, Liferay, Magento, OpenText, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP Hybris, SDL, Sitecore, and Sprinklr in a 28-criteria evaluation that showed Oracle leading “an evolving market with a balance of product and platform.”