The Definitive Guide to Customer Communications Management
Understanding CCM Basics to Ensure You Deliver a Modern, Engaging, and Optimized Customer Experience
Customer communications management (CCM) is crucial and necessary in modern business. But what are CCM’s core elements, and how can you implement them to truly maximize the impact of your customer interactions?
It’s time to get back to basics to better understand customer communications management, why it’s important to your business, and what you need to ensure you deliver the best possible customer experience.
What’s Inside:
What is Customer Communications Management (CCM)?
Customer communications management (CCM) is a defined strategy that focuses on creating, delivering, storing, managing, and retrieving customer communications.
At first glance, CCM seems reasonably straightforward. The truth is, at one point, CCM was simple! Businesses had only two methods for contacting their customers: via phone and mail.
Customer communications has evolved significantly. Today, computers, mobile phones, and tablets have completely revolutionized the way we interact. Customers’ preferences for receiving information have also become increasingly specific. The modern customer demands personalized, timely, and relevant information they can engage with in their preferred channel(s).
And if you can’t deliver? Well, hopefully, it won’t come to that because today’s customers will be quick to take their business elsewhere if a competitor offers them a superior CCM experience.
Why is Customer Communications Management Important to Your Business?
So, let’s get down to brass tacks.
In general, CCM paired with a solid customer communications management strategy will benefit your business now and in the future in three major ways:
1. CCM Builds Deeper Customer Relationships
Deliver Interactive and Engaging Content: While information must be timely and relevant, providing interactive and engaging content is equally important. The more a customer engages with your brand, the deeper the relationship you will build. Modern CCM allows you to create visually appealing content that customers can engage with, like personalized video, links, and more.
Follow Regulatory Compliance to a ‘T’: It’s absolutely critical to ensure that every single piece of communication meets appropriate regulations. Delivering secure and compliant information to your customers shows your commitment to protecting their interests, which is another way to ensure peace of mind and build trust and loyalty.
Deepening customer relationships is imperative to your business’s success, especially in today’s competitive landscape. Customers are well-informed and quick to seek alternatives if their needs aren’t met, making effective CCM crucial.
2. CCM Supports One Message Across All Channels
Builds Trust and Reliability: Delivering on your promises reduces uncertainty and fosters loyalty—your customers know what they’ll get and when they’ll get it.
Increases Operational Efficiency: One message across all channels simplifies your operational efforts by streamlining creation and distribution processes, resulting in increased cost savings.
Supports Regulatory Compliance: In heavily regulated industries, communications must comply with regulations and standards to prevent significant penalties. Using one message across all channels ensures that all communications are compliant.
Provides Crisis Management: During a crisis, clear, consistent communication is critical to managing customer expectations and maintaining trust. CCM is key to empowering your organization to distribute information across all channels to keep customers well-informed.
A consistent message across all channels is imperative to your business. It helps to build and maintain a strong brand identity that presents a unified front to your customers, which leads to improved relationships and overall long-term success.
3. CCM Offers Personalized Communications
There's no doubt that customers feel valued and understood when given personalized communication.
It creates an emotional connection to your brand and ultimately benefits your business in incredibly positive ways, including:An Enhanced Customer Experience: Personalized messages tailored to your customers’ needs, behaviors, and preferences make communications more engaging and meaningful. They also improve customer satisfaction by demonstrating that your business understands and values its customers.
Increased ROI: A significant benefit to CCM for your business is it’s incredibly cost-effective. Targeting customers with relevant, personalized messages reduces marketing spend while increasing return on investment (ROI).
Increased Engagement: An enhanced customer experience helps to increase engagement by building a strong emotional connection with your customers. With personalized communications, you’re more likely to grab customers’ attention and get them to respond for improved click-through and open rates.
Data-Driven Insights: CCM offers vital insights into customer behaviors and preferences. Digging into these insights helps your business adapt and improve strategies for future customer interactions.
Customer communications management allows you to offer personalized communications to your customers. Relevant and timely communications will help you gain a competitive edge and, most importantly, increase your ROI.
5 Simple Ways to Improve Customer Communications Management
Chances are, you’ve already got a customer communications management plan. You might even have systems or CCM software in place to help automate related processes. But with the constantly changing business landscape, it’s crucial to re-evaluate your customer communications management now, to ensure you meet the modern consumer’s expectations—or risk getting left behind.
Start with these five easy-to-address ways to improve your customer communications management:
1. Develop a Modern Customer Communications Management Plan
Yes. You might already have a CCM plan in place, so you’re off to a beautiful start!
However, you must ask yourself if your CCM plan outlines who your organization communicates with and how you deliver your message.
There are four key items you should add to your checklist when developing or reviewing your customer communications management plan:
- Clearly Define the Objectives – What outcomes do you wish to achieve with your communications (increased visibility, sales, or customer satisfaction)?
- Identify Your Audience – Who are your customers, and what segments do they fall under?
- Decide on Communication Channels – What are your communication channels, and when should you use them? Is it time to go digital? What about future-proof options?
- Create a Communication Roadmap – What does the customer journey look like from start to finish? At which touchpoints do you engage your customers?
Asking these questions ensures you develop a rock-solid CCM plan and identify areas of improvement. Addressing both will help improve your overall customer communications management.
2. Leverage Data with Personalization
Did you know your business is sitting on a pot of gold? Every customer comes with a set of data points your organization collects, which you can leverage to engage them in different ways.
The reality, however, is that technology makes gathering the right data tricky.
According to one report, around three-quarters of respondents know how important personalization is to their business, but “don’t know how to do it.” And when we dig a little deeper, we only reveal further complications because current technology holds back most companies. The report also showed that 47% of respondents cited IT roadblocks as a major barrier to adopting or improving personalization, and 46% indicated legacy technology sat at the root of the challenge.
So, what do your supporting technology and its integration technologies look like? If you want to create highly personalized, relevant, and timely cross-channel communications, your CCM solution must be able to pull data from anywhere within your existing systems.
3. Automate as Much Customer Communication as Possible
Today’s customer support teams are rapidly moving from Excel spreadsheets to automated workflows. In other words, communications are going digital. If you’re not using CCM software already, automating as much customer communications as possible will help to significantly reduce or even eliminate menial tasks.
You can also automate related communications by automating workflows like lead management, email marketing, customer onboarding, and lifecycle management. And this doesn’t just improve client services. Marketing teams benefit from communication templates that allow them to create custom material for leads and new or existing customers.
4. Empower Customers with the Right Options
Gartner recently revealed that 70% of customers use self-service channels at some point in their journey, particularly, resolution. However, only 9% of those customers can resolve their issue via these self-service channels.
Customers prefer self-serve options. But it would help if you offered suitable options to keep them satisfied, loyal, and engaged with your organization.
5. Review Your Metrics
How are your customer communication efforts paying off? One of the simplest ways to improve CCM is to look at your metrics.
Here are several areas where you can examine your data more closely:
- Customer Churn: A metric that shows how many customers leave a business over a specific period. Understanding churn is vital to financial forecasting and customer retention planning.
- Customer Satisfaction Scores: A method of measuring how satisfied customers are with their interactions, purchases, and your overall business. Typically handled via a survey.
- Average Resolution Time: How long does it take customer support to resolve a customer query? Tracking this data helps businesses identify pain points and improve customer satisfaction.
- Customer Retention Rate (CRR): Tracks an organization’s ability to keep customers over time and offers data about the strength of customer relationships.
- First Response Time: This data measures the time between when a customer submits a query to when customer support responds to that query. Quick response times helps support higher customer satisfaction scores.
Following up with customers to flesh out their level of satisfaction in real time is vital to improving customer communications management. You can automate these processes to identify and address warning signs ASAP.
The end goal of any good CCM plan is to share correct information with customers to reduce errors caused by miscommunication and to act immediately to address a crisis. Whether you provide communications via email, website, text message, or mail, the message remains the same.
Customer Communications Management Software
Customer communications management software is technology that manages and streamlines the creation, delivery, and storage of customer communications. It provides all the tools businesses need to ensure that communications are consistent, personalized, relevant, timely, and delivered through the correct channels.
Crucial functionalities of CCM software include:
Content creation and management
Multichannel delivery
Personalization
Automation
Compliance and security
Data integration
Analytics and reporting
4 Keys to Implementing the Right Customer Communications Management Solution
The modern business landscape requires a customer communications management solution, such as CCM software, CCM tools, and managed services. While many businesses adapt to the ever-evolving digital landscape, many still require print and mail services.
Not only is it imperative to invest in the right CCM strategy and software, but you must also consider the future of CCM while ensuring the solution is compliant, efficient, and secure.
Check out these four key checklist items that will help guide you in implementing the right customer communications management solution:
What does your current technology architecture look like? It’s an important question because most organizations seeking a CCM solution have a collection of modern and legacy platforms. Without a comprehensive strategy for handling each one, it becomes impossible to manage customer communications.
Selecting a CCM solution to handle all your communications streamlines CCM processes and ensures consistency.
But there’s more! One platform—the right platform—also helps you to streamline processes across the entire organization with seamless integration, including legacy systems, line-of-business systems, core systems, and more.
Communications is rapidly changing, and a major challenge with this change is that many organizations must handle more. And more customers, products, services, and channels mean these businesses likely have a combination of modern and legacy systems to try and manage it all.
The best approach is one where organizations invest in a centralized platform despite the complex nature of such an undertaking.
A centralized platform creates a holistic approach for business users to create, edit, and manage content, which reduces the workload on IT. It also reduces risks associated with regulations because you can integrate compliance directly into the design for greater control over tracking, auditing, managing, and approving regulatory language anywhere it’s required.
So, instead of relying on CCM tools or legacy solutions that depend on IT for changes, invest in a CCM solution that empowers business users to create, edit, and manage content.
4. Think About the Future
Select a CCM solution that keeps up with the latest and greatest in communications. This way, your organization can quickly go-to-market when a new channel needs implementation.
Why Partnering with the Right Provider Gets You a Best-in-Class Customer Communications Management Solution
Choosing the right customer communications management solution can be a daunting task. A project of this complexity requires a solid CCM strategy, the right CCM software, and the know-how to successfully navigate legacy solutions to correctly integrate a solution that delivers on modern customer communications management demands.
It’s why so many organizations in highly regulated industries turn to Doxim for help.
From start to finish, Doxim’s got you covered with an Onboarding process tailored to suit your specific needs. Our industry experts know how to build the CCM solution of your dreams with data integrations to core systems, templates based on output channels, best practices in statement and document design, and targeted campaigns for increased wallet share.
The Doxim team provides Client Services & Support, helping with the functionality, configuration, and daily use of your solutions. For guidance in going digital, Doxim also provides Digital Transformation Consulting to develop the right strategies and improve Customer Experience (CX).
Are you seeking to empower your customers? Doxim can help there too! Doxim’s CCM Admin Portal (DAP) provides Self-Service opportunities for business users to update key communications elements. And let’s not forget about the insights gained via DAP’s easy-to-use reporting dashboard!
We are committed to ongoing innovation that streamlines engagement in ways that constantly serve you better.
Grow Your Business with Customer Communications Management
Modern customer communications management is about choosing CCM software that suits your enterprise needs today and in the future. And that’s what Doxim does best. We identify where you’re at and grow with you over time! The best part? There’s a solution for every organization:
- Doxim CCM Communicate – Do you require print and mail services? Doxim’s world-class services fulfill your customers’ every print and mail need.
- Doxim CCM Experience – Are you seeking a way to effectively save on print and mail costs? Migrate your customers from print to digital for a self-serve, immediate, and convenient customer experience.
- Doxim CCM Engage – Looking for future-facing technology? Lead the way with a CX that leverages new revenue opportunities and optimizes customer engagement.
Customer communications management is vital for the longevity of organizations as it ensures consistent, personalized, and timely interactions that build customer trust and loyalty. By enhancing operational efficiency and providing valuable data-driven insights, CCM enables businesses to stay agile and responsive to market changes.
It’s a strategic approach that not only enhances current operations but also secures a competitive edge for future growth and success.
Do you want to learn more about customer communications management for your organization? Book a consultation with our industry leading experts today.
Customer Communications Management (CCM) FAQ
What is a CCM approach?
A customer communications management approach requires organizations to direct and optimize all customer communications, so they are consistent, efficient, and personalized.
What are CCM tools?
CCM tools are software solutions designed to manage, automate, and optimize the creation, delivery, and storage of customer communications across channels. These tools ensure businesses deliver consistent communications that are personalized, timely and enhance the customer experience.
What is the difference between CCM and CRM?
Customer communications management (CCM) and customer relationship management (CRM) serve two different business purposes but are complementary to each other.
CCM refers to the creation, delivery, and management of personalized communications across channels like statements, invoices, emails, text messages, and other marketing materials.
CRM is the broader strategy and technology aimed at improving relationships, retention, and sales. It’s used to manage and analyse customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle.
What's the connection between CCM and customer service?
CCM and customer service share a common goal: to enhance customer interactions and satisfaction. With effective CCM, you empower customer service. Communication is clear, accurate, and supports your customers’ needs because it reduces misunderstandings and improves resolution times.