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.

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.

In The Future of CCM: Communications-As-A-Service, Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Craig Le Clair (@CSLeClair) briefly mentions Twilio as an emerging communications solution that provides APIs to support in-app chat, notifications, SMS/text messaging, picture, voice, and video messaging and user authentication.

Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Craig LeClair (@CSLeClair) has a brand new report out, called The Future of CCM: Communications-As-A-Service. The purpose of the report is to shed light on strategic choices for enterprise architects struggling to figure out how Customer Communications Management (CCM) fits in an increasingly cloud-centric, multi-platform digital experience technology landscape.

We’ve been telling you about how INTOUCH® is the first completely new customer communications management (CCM) solution in years, with its exceptionally business-user-friendly UI and UX and its services-based architecture built using containers and microservices. In this article, we present an overview of that architecture.