Customer communications management (CCM) is already familiar to many people who work in customer-facing roles. This concept has been around for decades, but it’s only recently become a priority for many organizations. The increasing importance of customer communications management solutions is largely due to the increasing number of channels businesses use to communicate with their customers, requiring active management to ensure customers receive a consistent experience. The type of communication is a critical factor in determining the role CCM plays in providing value for an organization. Specific benefits of CCM include customer relations, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance.
Customer Communications Management Overview
Marketing analysis firm Gartner defines customer communications management as an organization’s strategy for improving the creation, storage, retrieval and delivery of its outbound communications. These typically include customer interactions like notifications of bills, payments, and renewals in addition to claims correspondence, new product introductions and other marketing materials. CCM also covers communications with other organization stakeholders such as partners, distributors, suppliers, and regulatory bodies. These communications include a variety of formats, such as printed documents, e-mail, text messages and web pages.
CCM software solutions help users design, develop, deliver, and manage content related to outbound communications. Organizations have historically needed these capabilities only for high-volume communications like monthly billing statements. However, the prevalence of Omni-channel marketing has resulted in a convergence between CCM and Customer Experience Management (CXM) requiring a more frequent use of CCM tools.
These changes in business communications have increased the need for personalized, two-way communication that many organizations are struggling to meet. Providers of CCM solutions must develop innovative solutions to help organizations future proof their communication processes in an intuitive way.
Forms and Documents for Customer Communications Management
Forms and documents remain the core of CCM functionality, despite the increasing use of e-mail, social media platforms and text messages for customer communications. Most organizations communicate with their customers at least once a month in the form of the billing statement, but this may only be a fraction of the number of customer touchpoints that a CCM solution must manage for some companies. These solutions generally classify forms and documents into three categories, including batch, on-demand and interactive
Batch Documents
Batch documents are the type that people tend to associate most closely with CCM and may be known by other names such as batch forms, high-volume documents, and structured communications. They are usually the most common type of communication that an organization sends to its customers. The output of batch documents is typically scheduled at a particular time and uses structured templates to produce a consistent format. The best CCM solutions also include rules that control the automatic generation of forms and documents by pulling data from multiple sources to personalize the communications. The most common examples of batch documents include customer correspondence, such as invoices and billing statements.
On-demand
On-demand forms are at the opposite end of the communication spectrum from batch documents. They include one-off communications that are not part of a predetermined sequence, so generating on-demand messages is usually a manual process. While this is the least common communication type, many organizations still use them regularly. Advanced business document software should include the capability of automating on-demand communications-based requests originating from a variety of sources, including customer portals, email, social media and websites.
Interactive
Interactive communications are a combination of batch documents with on-demand capabilities. These types of communications are becoming more common as the result of rising customer expectations across all industries. Advanced CCM solutions allow users to create interactive communications with structured templates driven by business logic. These templates use customer data to create highly personalized communications in the format, language and tone that each recipient prefers. Interactive messages typically include sales and marketing materials, but many organizations are using this communication type to making touchpoints more engaging.
Value of Customer Communications Management
Businesses generally create value in three ways, including increasing sales, reducing operating costs and managing risk more effectively. CCM solutions can help them achieve these goals, especially as an organization becomes more complex and highly regulated. Increasing sales involves several strategies such as expanding into new markets, improving products, upselling and cross-selling. Reducing operating costs requires a business to increase productivity or reduce expenses. The techniques for managing risk include reducing operational losses and improving pricing.
Customer Relations
Many organizations are using CCM to engage customers, who are more likely to try new products and become brand advocates. An advanced CCM solution provides organizations with the tools they need to improve customer relations, generally by making communications more personalized, relevant, and responsive. These improvements drive customer loyalty and retention by creating a better customer experience, which is becoming increasingly more important to customers.
Operational Efficiency of Customer Communications Management
CCM helps organizations improve operational efficiency in several ways. It can streamline communications, thus reducing production time and time to market. The reduction of IT dependency for creating and modifying documents is a key requirement for meeting these objectives, which CCM can accomplish by granting users with authoring control over the content.
Furthermore, CCM provides non-technical users with the ability to distribute communications over multiple channels with a single template, which reduces printing and postage costs. Organizations can leverage CCM to reduce the number of templates they need through the use of business tools that make the workflow more intuitive and communication generation more efficient.
Regulatory Compliance
Organizations can use this kind of document software solutions to minimize their compliance risk, especially those in highly regulated industries. The automatic generation of communications reduces errors and ensures consistency across multiple correspondences with the same party. CCM solutions also manage document versions and archive them automatically, which is often necessary for regulatory audits. In addition, CCM provides a collaborative environment for creating content, which reduces compliance risk while allowing users the flexibility needed to customize documents.
Summary
The channels that organizations use to communicate with their customers are evolving rapidly, resulting in a resurgence of customer communications management. CCM solutions include many specific tools due to the wide-ranging functionality of this type of business document software. Their capabilities focus on the management of forms and documents, but CCM also provides value in many other ways.
André Klein
Freelance Consultant for DocPath