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.

The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q3 2017 report came out recently, and we were extremely interested to see how things have changed since the last DX Platform Wave came out in 2015. Analysts Mark Grannan (@mwgrannan) and Ted Schadler (@TedSchadler) identified the 14 most significant DX platform providers and researched, analyzed, and scored them. They ranked Acquia, Adobe, BloomReach, Episerver, IBM, Liferay, Magento, OpenText, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP Hybris, SDL, Sitecore, and Sprinklr in a 28-criteria evaluation that showed Oracle leading “an evolving market with a balance of product and platform.”

In a recent article and video for Forbes, “The Case for a Chief Omnichannel Officer,” Blake Morgan (@BlakeMichelleM) argues for the inclusion of a Chief Omnichannel Officer in the C-suite. This would be an executive who manages all employee and customer touchpoints across the organization, getting them out of silos and creating visibility into the customer experience. But isn’t that the same thing as what many companies are calling their Chief Customer Officer? Go take a couple of minutes to watch Morgan’s short but insightful take on this topic.

In “Why Your Business Needs to Know About — and Prioritise — ‘Operational Customer Experience’”, Alok Kulkarni asserts that “there is a crucial element of CX that has been overlooked within the customer engagement management landscape. It’s called Operational Customer Experience (OCX) — applied effectively, it could transform the way your company communicates.” Since OCX specifically focuses on customers’ experience of an organization’s technology systems, Kulkarni advocates for prioritizing OCX and analyzing customer interactions to identify failures.

In a McKinsey article entitled “From Touchpoints to Journeys: Seeing the World As Customers Do,” Nicholas Maechler, Kevin Neher and Robert Park discuss maximizing customer satisfaction by focusing on the end-to-end customer journey rather than on individual touchpoints as many have in the past.

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.