What is CCM (Customer Communication Management)?

Organizations need to have seamless and constant communication with their customers while also gaining insights into their needs. This helps in enhancing the customer experience,…

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Professional Services

October 1, 20204 minutes read

Organizations need to have seamless and constant communication with their customers while also gaining insights into their needs. This helps in enhancing the customer experience, resulting in increased engagement and revenue growth.

Our definition of CCM

Customer communication management (CCM) is a way for organizations to create, manage, and deliver customer communications across multiple channels such as printed documents over mail, emails, SMS, web pages, fax etc. which ensures a consistent, personalized customer experience. It allows organizations to manage their customers along with their data and empowers them toward problem-solving capabilities with their brand. The main objective is to have a periodic connection with their customers to deliver transactional data such as invoices, statements marketing content, product launches etc.

What are the benefits of CCM for customers and organizations?

CCM enables organizations to manage their customer communications on one platform. Communications can be viewed, tracked, and managed by multiple departments within an organization which helps to gaining real-time insights and multi-dimensional views into customer behavior. Key benefits include:

  • Enriched customer relationships and added value by providing automated services which channelize and deliver interactive communication towards business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations.
  • Improved customer experience by an automated, customer-centric, and multi-channel output providing personalized communications.
  • Takes the angst out of customer support! You can use it for anything starting from subscription renewals and correspondence for bill payments and invoices. It includes a wide variety of documentation needs with the following features:
    • Personalized communications contemplating the counterpoints towards One-to-One connected communications in large volume.
    • Simplified, automated, and streamlined document handling.
    • Enhanced and refined communication at reconciled rates.
    • Increased communication effectiveness.

Traditional customer communications approach

Traditionally, different departments within an organization would communicate with their customers with each department having no knowledge on what and when the other departments are communicating. This has several disadvantages.

  • Customers may receive irrelevant and redundant communications which would contain non-contextual data.
  • Customers may miss out on receiving significant information they would have benefited from.
  • Customer content preferences, preferred communication channels, etc. might be out of sync for various departments leading to non-delivery of communications.

A better option with unified communication management

A well-orchestrated communication management approach would help in overcoming the above challenges. A platform supporting multiple stakeholders having a unified view of the customer profile, as well as past communications will help to channelize the right content to the customers. A structured approach enduring all the context specific functionalities without any interruptions and delivering the communications on multiple channels and platforms ensures that the organizations can maintain effective communications as well as help the customers receive relevant information.

  • Customer relevant data from different sources: Various departments like CRM, Finance, Sales and Marketing, etc. can collect customer data from multiple sources like databases and other systems via web services or data access being enabled through file share.
  • Context sensitive communications: Creating customer profiles by capturing accurately pertinent information and updating it in real-time will help gain insights into customer’s interests. Customer profiles are strategized and built in such a way that they include all the personalized content for specific customer. Previous customer’s interaction history can also be leveraged to identify changing customer’s needs and interests. This is the key activity to strategically personalize the content for specific customer.
  • Multichannel delivery: Communications delivered can include correspondences, marketing content, publications, or transactional statements. Delivery can be done via different channels like printed copies sent via post or digital communications shared via web mails, fax etc. or also device specific communications shared to Mobile Phones, Tablets, or iPads etc. Each type of communication can have its own customized delivery channel(s).
Customer information sources, communication platform & analytics, delivery channels
Customer information sources, communication platform & analytics, delivery channels

Customers expect only the information with relevant context to be communicated to them instead of overwhelming them with disjointed communications. CCM helps organizations to spend the right amount of effort to get to the right information to their customers. This results in:

  • Reduced time calling customer services with timely, easier to understand, more relevant communications.
  • Improved customer satisfaction with delivery through preferred channel(s).
  • Improved brand equity with higher quality, customer focused communications.
  • Increased revenue with targeted, dynamically inserted cross-sell promotions.

OpenText™ Professional Services has a wide range of field-proven experience with the ability to guide organizations through their digital transformation.

OpenText was named a leader in the IDC MarketScape CCM 2020 Vendor Assessment – visit our website to learn more or get a copy of the report.

You can also visit our website to learn more about Customer Communication Management with OpenText Exstream or contact us for a product demonstration.

Author: Sri Vidyavati Kolachalam, Senior Consultant, Professional Services

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Professional Services

OpenText Professional Services offers the largest pool of OpenText EIM product and solution certified experts in the world. They bring market-leading field experience, knowledge, and innovative creativity from experience spanning more than 25 years and over 40,000 engagements.

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