We’ve been delving into enterprise content management (ECM) technologies as prelude for discussing how we treat “content” in INTOUCH®, our new customer communications management (CCM) software. Software vendors and enterprise leaders need to understand that ECM is evolving rapidly (we’ve written several posts on this topic), and that technology choices made now will impact how smoothly organizations will be able to adapt their content management and digital experience delivery systems to the new way of doing things.

Writing for Forbes, customer experience expert Shep Hyken (@hyken) gives us Three Ways to Create an Engaging Customer Experience That Drives Sales. Hyken advises, “No matter what type of business you’re in, if you want to take your customer service and experience to another level, take a few lessons from retail and hospitality.” Specifically, he’s talking about how many successful retailers, restaurateurs and hoteliers increase their sales by creating an engaging customer experience through the customer’s senses. He makes some great points we thought were worthy of highlighting.

Cloud-based CCM security is achieved in layers. 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 those first four tiers.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Communications Management Software just came out, and we’re extremely pleased to have been included in the “Other Vendors to Consider” section this year. Though we do not meet all of the criteria for inclusion on the Magic Quadrant itself (for example, we currently serve the US and Canada), the Gartner analysts found us worthy of recognition as a possible best choice for some customers. We are honored to be among just ten mentioned in this section of the report.

The Temkin Group recently released its annual list of customer experience trends and labeled 2017 “The Year of Purpose.” For reference, Temkin dubbed last year the Year of Emotion and 2015 the Year of Employees. They strongly feel that 2017 will require companies to focus heavily on purpose.

With the explosion of marketing technologies (martech) in recent years and more and more of the responsibility for customer experience (CX) management falling under the marketing umbrella, marketing leaders find themselves increasingly involved in the technology purchasing process. Some CMOs are working more closely with CTOs and CIOs. Others are morphing into CMTOs (chief marketing technology officers) because tech has become such a central piece of modern enterprise marketing. For this reason, understanding how customer experience delivery software is designed and deployed is going to be a pretty big deal moving forward. It’s not just IT leaders’ responsibility anymore.