Beyond Integration: How to Achieve CCM Consolidation for Operational Success
By Chris Murphy, VP of Product Marketing at Smart Communications
It's a typical Monday morning, and you're gearing up for a new project at the office. The company's call center phone number is changing, and you've been tasked to track down every instance of its existence across all communication technologies, both physical and digital. As you dive into the maze of legacy systems and diverse communication channels, it becomes evident that this won’t be a quick fix; it'll end up being an initiative that will unfold over the coming weeks and months.
Now, imagine all customer communications are managed – regardless of delivery channel – by one centralized system. allowing you to make those changes in just a few mouse clicks and with the right controls in place to fully understand each instance of where the phone number is used and any dependencies from a single location. With the ease and speed with which you can make these updates, you’ll enhance the customer experience and reduce risks for the company. This might be like scenarios that you’ve experienced in the past, especially when you consider how businesses are ever mindful of increased regulations and improving operational efficiency but can’t quite figure out how to reach those goals with their current legacy customer communications management (CCM) systems.
In this article, we’ll shed light on the downsides of managing customer communications across multiple systems and the benefits of CCM consolidation. First, let’s look at what CCM consolidation means.
What is CCM Consolidation?
CCM consolidation involves unifying disparate customer communication processes and tools into one streamlined, enterprise-grade CCM solution. CCM is the linchpin of meaningful customer interactions, and operational efficiency. Many large organizations have acquired channel-specific tools and solutions for managing customer communications over many years. This approach to creating, delivering, and managing customer communications has proven to be a waste of resources and money, often requiring manual upgrades and maintenance from already stretched departments.
As organizations adopt cloud-based solutions to stay agile and responsive, integrating CCM becomes key to maintaining a unified and effective communication strategy, reducing costs, and increasing efficiency.
The Top 5 Benefits of CCM Consolidation
Here are five benefits to consolidating your customer communications management systems.
1. Enhanced Optimization & Efficiency
Organizations today need to do more with less. CCM consolidation serves as the catalyst for optimizing and streamlining communication processes and driving operational efficiency. By centralizing tools and processes, businesses can reduce redundancies, eliminate silos, and operate with peak efficiency, ultimately delivering a more responsive and agile customer experience.
2. Attract the Right Talent
Candidates in the market who possess the necessary skills to manage and maintain legacy applications is becoming more difficult. In fact, a report from Aspire asserted that 25% of employees with some level of communications responsibility overwhelmingly cite outdated technology as the primary driver behind their efforts to seek new employment. Modern, user-friendly solutions will help your business attract and retain top talent who have the skills to focus on more innovative projects that help your company grow into a future-ready brand.
3. Cost Reduction
Beyond operational efficiency, CCM consolidation brings substantial financial benefits by eliminating the ongoing maintenance costs of having multiple CCM solutions. As we touched on in the point above, doing away with aging platforms means you won’t need to sift through a diminishing group of skilled resources to find someone who knows how to make manual upgrades and/or perform maintenance on legacy systems.
Furthermore, a consolidated approach not only enhances compliance but also reduces the costs associated with managing disparate systems. It's a strategic move that aligns financial prudence with operational excellence.
4. Improved Customer Experience
In a world where customer experience reigns supreme, a unified and consistent approach is paramount. CCM consolidation plays a pivotal role in crafting a seamless and engaging digital communication experience for customers. By ensuring consistency across all touchpoints, businesses can elevate customer satisfaction, loyalty, and glean invaluable insights for continuous improvement.
5. Empowered Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is no longer a buzzword but a strategic imperative for businesses. CCM consolidation emerges as a linchpin in aligning with broader digital transformation goals. By integrating seamlessly into a single, modern CCM solution, your business can focus on what any modern business needs to do: enhance agility, adapt to shifting consumer demands, launch new products and services, add new channels, and integrate with key technologies.
What's Your Stake in CCM Consolidation?
Depending on your job role, the stake you place in CCM consolidation and its importance in achieving business priorities/goals, may vary. We’ve taken this into account and compiled job function insights below:
IT Decision Makers
In this role, the weight of strategic technology decisions rests on your shoulders. The alignment of infrastructure with consolidated CCM platforms is more than just a cornerstone—it's the bedrock of your responsibilities. Consolidation ensures not only the robustness of your technological backbone, it also gears it towards maintaining a tech-savvy and customer-centric environment. Integrating and streamlining communication systems helps you empower your team to navigate the digital landscape with agility, fostering an environment where technology is not just a tool but a strategic asset.
Customer Experience Executives
As a Customer Experience Executive, orchestrating an exceptional care plan and customer journey is your mission. With consolidated communication platforms, you can ensure that every communication touchpoint contributes to a cohesive narrative, elevating customer satisfaction and loyalty. Your pursuit of excellence in CX finds its perfect partner in CCM consolidation.
Digital Transformation Leads
If you’re at the helm of digital transformation initiatives, you undoubtedly recognize the pivotal role of CCM consolidation in shaping the future. Making CCM consolidation a big part of your strategic digital plans is super important for accomplishing a transformation. When you blend consolidation into your existing projects, you're setting your company up to not just keep up with tech changes, but to use them for long-term success.
Operational Heads
Operational efficiency is your domain, and as a leader in this space, CCM consolidation will help you enhance processes across the business. It’s more than streamlining communication processes; it's about enhancing workflow management and contributing to overall operational efficiency. Consolidating your communication platforms will lead to cost-effectiveness and a more efficient, responsive operational landscape.
Line of Business Users
Line of Business Users need the ability to take ownership over certain aspects of customer communications. As subject matter experts, they understand the impact of being able to make changes quickly and without the reliance on IT. This is made possible by consolidating to a cloud based CCM solution that empowers users to make updates easily and efficiently.
Recognizing and addressing these challenges is not just a hurdle; it's a strategic maneuver towards ensuring a successful implementation. It's a proactive stance that prepares you for the process of CCM consolidation.
Conclusion
In short, CCM consolidation streamlines operations, amplifies customer engagement, and ensures a future-ready approach to communication.
As your business stands at the crossroads of digital evolution, the call to action is clear: embrace CCM consolidation to achieve operational efficiency and elevated customer experiences.
If you're ready to take the first step into a transformative journey, visit our CCM consolidation webpage to learn more. Or, get in touch with one of our experts today to begin the process of seamless CCM migration.
About the Author
Chris Murphy is Vice President of Product Marketing for Smart Communications, the only provider of a customer conversations management platform specializing in helping enterprises - many in the world’s most highly regulated industries - to deliver smarter conversations across the entire customer lifecycle. Chris is currently responsible for the go-to-market strategy for its flagship product SmartCOMM™, a customer communications management solution. A frequent speaker at customer and industry events, Chris has over 18 years of industry experience and has held various positions at leading organizations including SalesLoft, IBM, and Silverpop.