April 3, 2023

Evolution of customer communication

CCM and Customer Experience

The customer communications industry is always changing to meet the needs of consumers who want accurate and up-to-date information right away. Customer communication management, also known as CCM, has changed quickly in recent years and become a multichannel reality in order to reach this goal.

In the past, customer communications were one-way and did not move forward. Today’s communication explanations can help organisations realise the promise of multichannel customer communications that are reliable, scalable, and based on a lot of analytics. This can be done with the help of modern ways to talk to each other.

The origin of CCM and Customer Experience

Nobody knows where the field of Customer Communications Management started. Getting to know one’s clients goes back to the early days of our economy, when people bartered to buy and sell goods and services. From 1760 to 1820, when the Industrial Age began, the number of customer orders and interactions went through the roof. This was a turning point in the history of customer service. This post shows how customer service has changed over time, which is what makes communication so important.

But what about CX, which is also called the idea of Customer Experience? How, if at all, has it moved on from CCM over the years? In this article, we’ll look into this question and argue that CX should be seen as a very different kind of mammal from other species.

Not all companies, though, have yet reached the mature stage of CMX implementation (Customer Experience Management). Customer experience management’s first, second, and third stages

1. IT Lead Customer Communications

In IT organizations with the least amount of development, IT still makes decisions about how to communicate with customers. These companies focus on documents and only invest in content management systems (CMS) when they have to, such as when the law changes or a piece of equipment breaks.

At this lowest level of maturity, CCM improvements are more for tactics than for making a big difference. For example, businesses that focus on information technology might spend time and money trying to move their operations online. But these kinds of efforts are likely to be short-term, with the goal of reaching certain (but limited) goals or meeting a changing administrative requirement.

2. Line-of-Business (LOB) Lead Communications

Sixty percent of companies that are in the middle of their transformational phase have moved on to the second stage of customer experience management (CMX) maturity. Line-of-business (LOB) users are now in charge of customer communications at these companies. During this stage of development, money is spent on getting the speed and flexibility needed to get to the market as quickly as possible through the communication channel that the customer prefers.

Getting costs down will continue to be a good way to pay for these new efforts, but the main goal is to make sure customers are happy to an extremely high degree. But businesses run into trouble when they try to reach this goal from a single point of view that doesn’t take into account the real, everyday needs of their customers.

Email, phone calls, in-person meetings, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems are all ways that LOB (Line of Business) lead communication is used in the real world. There are also other ways. For example, a company might use a customer relationship management system (CRM) to track and manage leads while also using communication channels like email and phone calls to set up meetings with leads and talk to them. Also, the organization might set up in-person events and networking opportunities so that leads can meet people and relationships can be built.

3. CX-Lead Customer Interactions

Customers who have reached the third and final stage of development in customer experience management put the customer experience at the top of their list of priorities. They do this by doing good data analytics and getting campaign insights. Every communication is looked at to make sure that it is relevant to where the customer is in the customer journey, that it fits with where the customer is, and that it is set up to provide the most lifetime value possible.

Aspire recently did a CMX analysis and found that only about 10% of companies around the world had reached this level of CXM capability. In the future, these companies will start to take a more “outside-in” point of view. This will let the real needs of customers shape the company’s communications and give centralised CX partners more control. These partners are able to lead a strategy that works well together and talks to customers at every step of their journey.