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.

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.

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.