We’ve been going over Gartner’s recent report, Three Steps to Enrich the Customer Experience with Contextualized Communications, for the past couple of weeks. We have been digging into the ideas they covered a bit more deeply in a series of posts here on our blog. You can read Challenge 1: A Fragmented Approach, Challenge 2: Static Output, Unidirectional Broadcast Model, and Challenge 3: Not Knowing Your Customers first if you like. In this post, we dive into the first solution Gartner recommends.

What do you think of when you hear the term “customer communications management”? Most people think of letters, statements, privacy notices, and other documents and correspondence that traditionally have been produced in large batches and mailed to customers en masse. Many people now include digital versions of those communications in their understanding of CCM, too. And some are seeing the expansion of traditional customer communications across any and all channels, throughout the customer journey, and into the broader customer experience.

With more than 30 years of experience in customer communications management (CCM), we have helped install our software at a lot of companies. Over the years, we’ve learned a few universal truths about how to achieve a successful implementation, across varying business or industry needs, evolving configuration of hardware and software systems, and complex people and processes.

We’ve pointed out before that every major digital experience platform has weaknesses or gaps in one or more of the three main areas of the customer journey: Marketing, Commerce or Service. And, for various reasons, their biggest weaknesses tend to be in the area of Service, where customer communications management (CCM) lives. In a recent article for CMSWire, Steve Smith discusses evolving customer expectations and how aligning customer experience priorities with business processes – specifically automation – can empower customer service representatives (CSRs) to be more proactive.

The biggest obstacle to delivering consistent customer experiences at every touchpoint throughout the customer journey is silos. Within many, if not most, large businesses, there are thick metaphorical walls between departments, lines of business, campuses, etc. And the separation affects everything, including people, processes and technology – and, in turn, it affects the customers.

Business users want and need customer communications management (CCM) software that allows them to create and modify layouts and templates without help from IT, and without having to learn HTML5 or CSS3. And they want an intuitive, user-friendly visual interface.