September 27, 2020
As customer expectations around instant access to up-to-date, relevant information continue to rise, the customer communications industry is evolving to satisfy their needs. For this purpose, customer communication management (CCM) has developed rapidly in the last few years, to a new, multi-channel reality.
Where customer communications are used to connect latent, one-way messaging, today’s communication explications can support organisations to realise the promise of reliable, scalable, multichannel customer communications based on extensive analytics.
But not all businesses have completed the evolution to mature CXM (Customer Experience Management). The Three stages of Customer Experience Management
In the least developed IT organisations, which represent 30% of the companies surveyed in a recent study by Aspire, IT continues to make customer communication decisions. These corporations engage a document-centric perspective and invest in CCM only when retreated into a corner by regulatory changes or equipment failures.
CCM improvements at this lowest maturity level serve to be tactical rather than decisive. For example, Information Technology oriented companies might disburse energy and funds in a push toward digital migration, but those struggles will be nearsighted, designed to meet concrete (but limited) goals or an evolving administrative requirement.
The 60% of firms that discover themselves in the middle of their transforming phase have delivered over customer communications ownership to line-of-business (LOB) users and entered the second stage of CXM maturity. Investments in this middle stage are focused on acquiring the agility and versatility necessary to deliver the fastest time to market through a customer’s preferred communication channel.
While cost reduction persists valuable as a means to fund these new initiatives, the primary goal is tremendous customer satisfaction. Problems arise, however, when companies approach this goal with an isolated perspective that does not account for actual, real-world user demand.
In the third and final stage of development, true converts to CXM prioritise customer experience through excellent data analytics and campaign insights. Every communication is studied to ensure it is relevant, logical with the consumer’s place on their customer journey, and calibrated to produce maximum lifetime value.
Aspire’s recent CXM analysis found that only around 10% of firms worldwide have attained this level of CXM ability. Going forward, these firms will begin to raise a perspective that looks from the outside in, allowing actual customers’ needs to shape their communications and fixing control in the hands of centralised CX partners, who can direct a cohesive strategy communicating consumers at every spot along their journey.
Interested to discuss more, please feel free to contact the author at contant@dbppl.com
Bhagyalakshmi has almost 4 years of industry experience specialising in the CCM technologies having implemented OT StreamServe, OT StreamServe and Quadient Inspire for various clients successfully. Based in India, she is currently working with Digital Business People (DBP), an omni-channel customer experience management company headquartered at Singapore with it’s development and delivery centres in India.