Business Process Improvement, Customer Experience and Engagement, Technology and Mobile
Customer Communications Management (CCM) and Why You Need It
on June 11, 2021
Building and maintaining strong customer relationships is paramount for any business. The way you communicate with your audience is more crucial than ever. While digital channels have their place, the tangible, impactful nature of print and mail communications, such as statements, bills, notices, and other monthly customer documents, remains a cornerstone of effective Customer Communications Management (CCM). These essential, high-volume documents are not just transactional; they are a direct extension of your brand, setting the tone for the entire customer relationship.
By modernizing and optimizing your print and mail communications, you can transform routine customer-facing documents into an engaging brand experience, ensuring your employees have a reliable and efficient way to deliver critical information and drive customer loyalty.
What is Customer Communications Management?
Customer Communications Management (CCM) is a comprehensive strategy that helps organizations create, deliver, and manage all their customer-facing communications. At its core, it’s about using specialized software to streamline and automate the entire communication process, ensuring consistency and relevance across all channels. While the fundamental idea of managing customer interactions is not new, modern CCM has evolved significantly to meet the demands of today’s market.
CCM encompasses both real-time and asynchronous communications. This includes live interactions like phone calls, live chats, and in-person conversations, as well as automated communications such as emails, text messages, and crucial print and mail documents like statements, bills, and notices.
The goal of a strong CCM strategy is to transform every interaction, no matter how small, into a positive brand experience. For example, a well-designed, personalized, and easy-to-understand invoice that allows for one-click payment provides a far superior experience than a generic, static document. These seemingly small improvements in efficiency and convenience can have a significant impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty.
How CCM Helps Organizations Grow
Today’s digital environment makes it incredibly easy for consumers and businesses to shop, research, compare and communicate. However, everybody has preferences as to how they want to connect with your brand. Some prefer text message notifications or alerts, others would rather be engaged via email, and many like to have a mix of printed and electronic communications.
The bottom line is—you can’t just focus on one channel. Some customers won’t hesitate to take their business elsewhere if your brand experience doesn’t suit them, so it’s vital to be able to meet them on their own turf with an omnichannel approach that offers many options.
A modern CCM enables many of today’s most essential features, including:
Personalization
Personalized, contextual communications drive engagement and build strong relationships. Customers want to feel heard and understood, and personalization helps you accomplish that. According to Accenture, 91% of customers are more likely to choose brands that recognize them and provide relevant offers.
Nurture Customer Relationships at Every Point in the Sales Cycle
Strong customer relationships rely on the right messaging at the right time. So, for example, you wouldn’t use the same communication approach with someone who knows very little about the brand as you would with someone who’s ready to purchase.
Omnichannel Communication
Omnichannel is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s an expectation. Customers want to know that when they speak to someone at your company, you’re listening, and the only way to accomplish this is to break down silos and democratize communications across the organization. On the customer side, it’s about removing friction. For your teams, it’s about making it easy to delight customers and ensure the best possible experience.
Actionable Data
When you implement CCM, you open the doors to detailed insights about your customers and how satisfied they are with your service. You’ll have detailed data at your fingertips that help inform the way forward, highlighting areas that are doing well and also where you need to improve. Instead of operating on guesswork, you’ll be able to leverage insights that help you grow and evolve, even during times of rapid scale.
Notifications
A CCM makes it easy to push out vital information to the right people. Whether you need to inform your employees about health and safety policies or let your customers know what you’re doing to protect them, CCM allows you to personalize, segment, and send messages quickly, so people have the information they need when they need it. Other ways to leverage notifications include payment or renewal reminders, claims or warranty information, and account activity notifications.
CCM Tools to Help You Grow
Successful businesses prioritize customer relationships, and as everybody knows, a strong, healthy relationship hinges on clear, interactive communication. A CCM strategy helps you improve your customer experience and build brand loyalty.
To maximize the value of your CCM strategy, it’s essential to deploy the right tools. Partner with communications experts like FSSI.
FSSI Customer Communications Tools
- messageStreamOne helps you make your documents more engaging with targeted personalized marketing and graphics.
- dataStreamOne utilizes customizable data formatting to improve the design, readability and response of transactional documents.
- eStreamOne supports electronic presentment and opt-in text and email messaging to ensure notifications are delivered.
- workStreamOne empowers 24/7 tracking and reporting so you can be looped into the workflow process from end to end.
Speak with a Customer Communications Management Specialist Today
FSSI is a print and mail outsourcing service provider specializing in high-volume customer communications. We help businesses maximize engagement and brand loyalty. When you partner with FSSI, you get the benefits of being covered by multiple facility locations, state-of-the-art print and mail equipment, secure data processing, innovative backup/archival technology and an expert network security team.
Our CCM suite delivers the power and flexibility you need to enable highly personalized and engaging experiences and reduce costs and complexities typically associated with customer communications.
To learn more about how we can help, schedule a demo today. Call 714.436.3300 to speak to an outsourcing specialist about enhancing your customer communications.
