On behalf of CMSWiRE, Ralph Windsor of digital asset management (DAM) consultancy Daydream has written a series of articles outlining the “digital asset management consciousness” stages he believes organizations go through. It’s essentially a DAM maturity model, and we thought he captured the different phases of readiness and need fairly well. That said, we see the need to add one more stage to this model.

Forrester has dubbed the current era in business The Age of the Customer, “a 20-year business cycle in which the most successful enterprises will reinvent themselves to systematically understand and serve increasingly powerful customers.” In other words, being customer-obsessed – or deeply knowledgeable about and engaged with your customers – has become a business imperative to remain competitive. You can’t just wave a magic wand and make your organization customer-centric overnight, though. You have to have a plan and implement it piece by piece with the end goal of improving the customer experience (CX) held paramount at every stage. This requires a new, unprecedented level of technology innovation and integration. We’ve been focusing lately on digital asset management (DAM) and sharing assets across technologies and business functions, so let’s take a look at what “digital asset” means in the Age of the Customer.

My most recent article for CMSWire, “Overcoming Those DAM Customer Experience Obstacles,” came out this week. In it, I cover two significant obstacles in the way of achieving a consistent customer experience. They’re both related to sharing.

In “Digital Asset Management: Solution or Part of the CX Problem?” I discussed why an end-to-end customer experience management software solution that could serve marketing, operations, sales, customer service, human resources, accounting and more doesn’t exist – and perhaps shouldn’t: “Because tools made to serve a very specific purpose, created by people who specialize in that purpose and are passionate about really doing a limited number of things very well, are always better at solving a particular problem than a tool set meant to be everything to everyone. Invariably, tool sets that try to be everything to everyone have severe weaknesses in one or more functions that are outside the core competencies of the original core business problem(s) the software set out to solve.” So, instead of looking for a nonexistent comprehensive solution, the answer is to build your own custom digital experience delivery (DXD) system out of the best solutions available.

Gartner defines customer experience management (CEM or CXM) as “the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and, thus, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.” CXM, therefore, considers all of the touchpoints through which your company interacts with your customers and the outcomes of those interactions—how each customer feels about the brand after each interaction and how those feelings influence future behavior. In this article, we will distinguish between and show relationships among CXM and related acronyms and functions, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and customer communications management (CCM).

When you send out customer communications, do you ever need to attach a cover letter? Send a carbon copy (cc) or modified correspondence to a different recipient? Include attachments? Send follow-up communications? What about sending the same communication to different people via different delivery channels? If you’re in the insurance or other industry that requires a great deal of transaction-related correspondence to multiple concerned parties – like sending a claim notification to the insured, the provider, and the policy holder – then you answered “yes” to both. That means you need customer communications management (CCM) software that gives you versatility and complete control over electronic cover letters. Not all CCM solutions offer the same level of control, so be sure to ask about that in particular before you decide which CCM solution is best for you.