Today’s enterprise priorities are strongly propelled by improving customer experience (CX). According to recent research from InfoTrends, about 80% of enterprises have a CX strategy in place, but only 67% say they have the right technology to properly execute on it. CX involves of all parts of a business, from sales and marketing to operations and customer service. Businesses are challenged with taking a cohesive approach that unites individual engagements across the entire customer journey. When enterprise executives were asked about their biggest challenge to improving CX, the top responses included developing the right strategy, dealing with legacy systems, and using benchmarks to improve operations.

Figure 1: What is the top challenge that your organization faces relative to improving customer experience?

 
The CCM technology space has seen major innovations in recent years focusing on digital experiences, mobile enablement, and consumer empowerment. These all are critical aspects of delivering a stellar CX today. As such, today’s CCM solutions are well-positioned to help businesses overcome the challenges associated with executing a CX strategy. To this point, 64% of enterprise respondents to InfoTrends’ research acknowledge that their CCM platform is critical to improving CX.

Figure 2: To what extent do you agree with the following statement?
“Our CCM platform is critical to improving our customer experience.”

 
Because communication is such a crucial component in each customer engagement, customer communications become a strategic lever for delivering the best possible CX. InfoTrends has identified three key ways that today’s CCM technologies can support an improved CX:

1. Rewiring Your Organization Around Customer Touchpoints. Businesses are typically organized in a functional way, whereas customers expect to engage with a brand in a cross-functional way. This gap can be addressed by rewiring functional areas across the customer journey. CCM technology can help organizations break down their boundaries with a centralized hub that serves all customer communications across the journey, from marketing-related communications to business-critical communications.
2. Enabling Omni-Channel Engagements. Customers engage with companies based on their communication preferences—or the channels that are offered by their provider. Each individual engagement involves one or more communication channels, and managing CX across these channels is crucial. The customer must be able to seamlessly transition from one channel to another throughout the engagement process without an interruption in the conversation. CCM technology is a critical element of this process because it sits on top of all the channels.
3. Personalizing the Customer Experience. According to InfoTrends’ research, consumers cited personalization as a top way for providers to improve their paper-based and digital communications. The good news is that most businesses have huge amounts of data about their customers and are therefore able to create highly targeted communications. Unfortunately, using all this data for personalization can be a challenge because it is often scattered across siloed databases and different departments. Additionally, most of this data is unstructured, and it needs to be structured before it can be used for personalization. By default, CCM technology comes with rich personalization capabilities as well as the ability to manage customer data in a structured and cohesive way.

Are you struggling to implement your CX strategy? Take a critical look at these three key areas for improving CX and consider CCM as a technology stack for success so you can concentrate on serving your customers!

David Stabel is Director of the Customer Communications advisory service at InfoTrends, a division of Keypoint Intelligence. He is responsible for conducting market research and analysis, consulting engagements, forecasting market growth, client care, and providing coverage of industry events in relation to the customer communications market. He also frequently speaks at tradeshows, customer events, and industry conferences.