Choosing a customer communications platform for the digital age

How to find a solution that propels your communications strategy into the future

Digital transformation makes new technologies essential

For years, industries like healthcare, insurance, and financial services have used customer communications management (CCM) platforms to produce transactional and marketing communications. CCM platforms have been the solution for highly regulated, high-security documents that contain insensitive information.

But not all CCM platforms offer the same capabilities.

Tim Nelms and Gene Phifer of Gartner® wrote an in-depth guide to the CCM market that you can read here: “Market Guide for Customer Communication Management”

They list the necessary offerings of a CCM as: authoring and design tools, production and workflow tools, integration of delivery systems and applications, architectures that support deployment, and high security. The 2021 study predicts that, “By 2023, over 75% of all customer communication management implementations will be cloud or hybrid solutions.”

The study also talks about the importance of a CCM enabling growth, and empowering better customer and user experiences (CX and UX).

The best CCM solution today must be a dynamic, interactive system that supports personal, on-demand communications based on the customer’s preferences. At Elixir® we call this type of advanced solution ComOps because it comprehensively meets the needs of your venture’s communications operation.

Evolving requirements

 
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift from print to digital. As a result, digital-first solutions are replacing legacy CCM platforms even faster than the Gartner study predicted. Customers expect to receive personalized and meaningful communications via their choice of messaging app, social media, or e-mail. CX is becoming more and more important.

Digital-first ComOps solutions enable real time interaction with customers and integration with apps. They meet the accelerated demand for digital communications across a variety of channels. These advanced solutions are still fully capable of producing large-scale batch communications, and a few leading organizations are using ComOps to deploy their batch processes via the cloud.

Cloud solutions let your venture focus on CX, particularly on digital channels. According to Gartner®, cloud-based solutions are the future.

A cloud based ComOps platform is the bridge from your old CCM to the future. It lets your enterprise consolidate CCM tools across lines of business while integrating and modernizing legacy content and templates. ComOps solutions deliver on a range of channels, provide smart and automated personalization, enable two-way interaction, and boost UX with tools that let nontechnical business users update communications and manage content.

Contextualizing modern CCM for multiple lines of business

 
According to Gartner, competition to provide better CX is the primary driving force in the digital acceleration of the CCM market. They call it a, “wholesale redesign of CX across digital and nondigital channels.” They say it is essential to bridge these experiences to maintain “multi-experience services.”

In 2021 Gartner® reported that customer communications in regulated industries had already shifted to 50% digital. They note that the focus is still on large volume, transactional document generation capabilities but that new applications are evolving for CCM. Ventures are targeting evolving, niche applications and markets.

A modern ComOps platform can benefit more lines of business than before, with on-demand or ad-hoc use cases for in marketing, sales, and customer service

Tips for selecting customer communication tools

 

Follow these tips when choosing a customer communications platform:

  • Consider whether a traditional CCM solution still fits your needs.
  • Prioritize the delivery channels your customers use now and will use in the future.
  • Prioritize tools that expedite your adoption of industry best-practice workflows rather than prop up outdatd frameworks. Don't bake in bottlenecks with your tool selection.
  • Pick a tool where your content is shared across templates; aim to reduce content creep.
  • Target cloud deployments for interactive document generation and batch composition.
Growth icon@4x

Transform regulated communications into customer engagement 

In regulated industries, digital transformation has specific challenges because communications have security, privacy, and regulatory requirements.

Tablet use in droplet cutout

Read Gartner's 2021 CCM Market Guide.

Elixir recognized in the 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Customer Communications Management.

330% in Round Purple Circle

Feature one

Use text and images to tell your company's story. Explain what makes your product or service extraordinary.