Consumers have more access to the companies they do business with because of the many touch points available in the marketplace. There is now a two-way communication channel that is generating large volumes of data from emails, chats, social media, texting and conversations. Making sense of all this information is the domain of customer communications management (CCM) and customer experience management (CEM), which Topdown, a developer of solutions for empowering companies with their customers through dynamic communication, provides.
The services the company offers was recently recognized by Forrester Research as being a trend setter. The reasons cited were Topdown’s exploration of the possibilities of bringing together CCM with digital experience delivery (DXD) platforms to manage customer experiences.
Forrester Consulting was commissioned by Topdown to study the actions Topdown was taking in this area. A cross section of 150 people representing IT, marketing and lines of business who were mostly in the financial services responded to the survey. According to Forrester, they all had a hand in creating, sending and/or managing customer-facing communications, while more than half stated they were the buyer for CCM or DXD technologies or influenced the purchasing decision.
The future of customer communications management is going to be an essential tool as more consumers interact with brands. This is pushing organizations to put more effort in the CCM solutions they have in place or want to implement in the future.
Key points that emerged from the survey include:
The hurdles that are preventing CCM solution users from a great experience are: not being able to automate all the communications; not enough capability to accomplish the same degree of personalization across all customer communications; and not having the necessary tools to deliver communications from all departments over all of the same channels, or even to a customer’s preferred channel, which was given by 35, 35 and 34 percent of the respondents respectively.
One thing most of them agreed on (97 percent), was the need for a web content management (WCM) system to serve as the core of a CCM solution. Fifty one percent of these said they were interested or very interested, with only three percent claiming they were not interested at all.
The report concluded there are challenges, but they can be addressed with the integration and alignment of people, processes, and technology across the enterprise and throughout the customer journey. Having an effective platform for communicating with customers increases customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and retention, and customer lifetime value while achieving consistent and deep personalization, all of them key elements for ensuring success in a highly competitive global market place.