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What’s New in Customer Communications Management (CCM)

Published Date
Author Smart Communications

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

By: Chris Murphy, VP of Product Marketing, Smart Communications 

An ever-changing digital landscape, increasingly high customer expectations and more are forcing enterprises around the world to rethink how they interact with customers. In highly regulated industries like insurance, financial services and healthcare – where customer interactions can be stressful and/or high-stakes – the experience enterprises deliver at every touch point is more important than ever. In fact, recent benchmark data from Smart Communications revealed that communications are important to 81% of consumers’ overall experience with a company.

So, what does all of this mean for businesses?

It means that as the market has changed and evolved, so too have the requirements and capabilities that business leaders are seeking in their customer communications technology solutions. And, with an increased focus on the end-to-end customer experience, the strategic importance of communications strategy is rising. As a result, enterprises are seeking modern, cloud-based CCM solutions that provide flexibility while increasing productivity, speed, scale and efficiency.

Recent analysis from IDC and Aspire reflect these changing market conditions – outlining where the customer communications landscape is now, and more importantly, where it’s heading. In this post, we dive into our biggest takeaways from these new reports, highlighting:

  • How (and why) the CCM vendor landscape is evolving
  • What enterprises should look for in a modern CCM solution
  • Why Smart Communications is a CCM leader

RELATED READING | Enjoy complimentary access to the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cloud Customer Communications Management Applications 2022 and the Aspire Leaderboard for Customer Communications Management.

The CCM Marketplace is Evolving to a CX-centric Approach … and It’s Supported by Cloud

Marci Maddox, Research Vice President, Digital Experience Strategies at IDC, shared “In 2020, the focus was on establishing remote work, setting up systems in the cloud, and retaining customers. As companies moved into a more stable environment in 2021, the focus on the customer experience began to take hold and customer satisfaction was the most frequently cited top priority driving customer experience initiatives.”

So, with an increasing number of enterprises prioritizing customer experience as a strategic priority, taking a digital-first, cloud-based approach is the only way to meet customer demands both today and in the future. Cloud-based CCM solutions allow for:

  • Integrations
  • A complete view of the customer
  • Speed and efficiency
  • Omnichannel communications
  • Business user control
  • Optimized customer experiences

What’s more, early adopters of digital transformation are already seeing the benefits. The latest IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Customer Communications Management indicated that “organizations cited a 26% improvement in customer satisfaction as a result of embracing digital transformation.”

“Cloud is a strong differentiator for Smart Communications. The company was one of the first in the industry to move toward SaaS and it has embraced a cloud-native, DevOps way of working since the mid-2010s” – Aspire Leaderboard 2022

What Enterprises Should Look for in a CCM Solution

Just like with any technology investment, the best CCM solution depends on an enterprise’s unique challenges and goals. However, we know what is important to customers – and what frustrates them – when they are interacting with a business. For example, recent research revealed customers’ biggest sources of frustration with communications:

  • Information being provided through the inappropriate channel (61%)
  • Irrelevant messages (58%)
  • Frequency of contact being too high (54%)
  • Poor timing (48%)
  • Lack of personalization (41%)
  • Frequency of contact being too low (36%)

Channel preference, message relevancy, frequency and timing are only achievable with cloud-based technology. Simply put, legacy, on-premise tools cannot meet the demands of today’s customers.

It’s key for enterprises to keep in mind that customers are comparing every interaction they have with a brand to their last best digital experience. Whether that’s with their bank or an Uber Eats delivery, the businesses that choose to take an outdated approach to customer communications will unfortunately be left behind.

INTERACTIVE GUIDE: Looking for a checklist for must-have CCM Software Features & Capabilities? Check out The Ultimate Guide to CCM Software.

Smart Communications is a Leader in Cloud-based CCM

Unlike other providers in the space, Smart Communications has been fully committed to a cloud-first CCM approach for years. We have enabled countless enterprises to shift from delivering one-way, transactional communications, to two-way, interactive conversations. Mature cloud offerings like the Conversation CloudTM offer innovative technology solutions and facilitate personalized, omnichannel interactions.

For these reasons and more, Smart Communications has been named a leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cloud Customer Communications Management Applications 2022 and Aspire’s SaaS Cloud Customer Communications Management Leaderboard.

It’s clear that the future is cloud-based technology, and we are thrilled to once again be named a market leader best equipped to enable enterprises to meet their customer experience goals via a sophisticated CCM solution. In the Aspire leaderboard in particular, vendor-hosted SaaS is viewed as a pivotal strategy due to the benefits that it provides relative to other types of deployment (i.e., scalability, security, agility, business continuity and more).

Additional benefits of Smart Communications, according to the analysts, include:

  • Cloud leadership
  • Fast time-to-value
  • Robust partner ecosystem
  • Increasing focus on AI and Machine Learning
  • Emphasis on the customer experience

As business leaders are challenged with creating exceptional, end-to-end customer experiences having the right CCM solution in place enables businesses to meet the customer needs of today while also laying the foundation for a successful future.

SmartCOMMTM, part of the Smart Communications Conversation Cloud, is a cloud-based CCM solution that enables enterprises to deliver personalized interactions throughout the entire customer experience – enabling enterprises to create and deliver personalized, contextual and compliant communications across customers’ preferred channels and at scale. Businesses who partner with Smart Communications for CCM realize tremendous benefits, including improved business user efficiency, enhanced customer experiences, reduced costs and more.

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To view the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cloud Customer Communications Management Applications 2022, click here. 

To view the Aspire Leaderboard for Customer Communications Management, click here. 

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