Not all customer communications management (CCM) software is created equal. In fact, there’s a fairly broad spectrum of solutions, ranging from lightweight Microsoft Word and SalesForce.com (SFDC) plugins to complex and powerful (and costly) multifunctional enterprise-grade platforms. But how can you tell if a solution that lies somewhere along that continuum has the features you need to get enterprise-grade CCM outcomes for your business without unneeded complexity and expense? Here are four essential features a CCM solution would need to have to be considered enterprise-grade:

If you’ve shopped for customer communications management (CCM) solutions in the past, you know it’s a real challenge to figure out exactly how much each solution is going to cost you. That’s because CCM deployments are complex, no two implementations are exactly the same, and the situation is compounded by vendors’ widely varying preferred pricing models. Comparing apples to apples — and weighing value versus price — in this market is therefore a daunting task.

When looking at where we expected the CCM market to be in 2020, we concluded that, while CLIENT LETTER® is still a great on-premise CCM solution, it was going to take designing and building the new solution from the beginning to “meet the market.” We needed flexible cloud deployment options, high interoperability and sharing of data and content across the digital experience infrastructure, and the ability of line-of-business users to do their work without ongoing involvement of technicians and developers. So, we decided to create a 100% cloud-based CCM solution that would offer all the power of CLIENT LETTER while bringing an easy-to-use, business-user-friendly toolset.

Here’s an interesting Forbes article on customer experience (CX) by Shep Hyken (@Hyken): Moving from Omni-Channel to a Channel-less Experience. I really like this forward-looking vision of channel-less CX. Right now, companies are scrambling around trying to support and link together customer communications happening in multiple channels, and they typically react to emerging new channels slowly and awkwardly, if at all. This results in a chopped-up customer experience in which frustrated customers have to explain the reason they’re contacting the company over and over again.

The level of quality, consistency, contextualization and personalization of your customer-facing communications can have a dramatic effect on customer experience – as evidenced by the brands that improved their Forrester Customer Experience Index scores the most.

In a previous post, Security Overview: Cloud-Based Customer Communications Management, we gave you a quick summary of each of the security layers: physical, network, operating system (OS), database and application. Let’s take a closer look at cloud-based CCM security at the application level, which includes handling of customer data.