What is customer communications management (CCM)?

The evolution of customer communications management

Customer communications have transformed significantly over the past few decades. What began as primarily paper-based communications through mail has expanded to include digital channels such as email, web portals, mobile apps, and social media. Vendors have advanced document generation to include personalization leveraging generative AI for authoring.

This evolution reflects changing customer expectations, as CX gets conversational. Traditional CCM focused primarily on generating high-volume transactional documents like statements, bills, and notices. Modern CCM solutions, however, extend beyond basic document creation to facilitate personalized, interactive, and omnichannel messaging experiences. They integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing automation platforms, customer journey and data solutions, and data analytics tools to create a unified approach to customer engagement.

The shift from document-centric to customer-centric communications represents a fundamental change in how organizations view their communication strategies. Today's CCM solutions prioritize the customer journey, aiming to deliver the right message through the right channel at the right time, whether for marketing, onboarding, servicing, or retention purposes.

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Core components of CCM systems

Effective customer communications management relies on several interconnected components working together to streamline processes and enhance customer experiences.

Content creation and management
At the heart of CCM is content creation and management. This involves designing templates, managing digital assets, and establishing content libraries that can be used across various communications. Modern customer communications management platforms enable organizations to create reusable content blocks and templates that maintain brand consistency while allowing for personalization. Content creation tools often include user-friendly interfaces that empower business users to design communications without extensive technical knowledge. This democratization of content creation reduces reliance on IT departments and accelerates the development of new communications.

Data integration and personalization
CCM systems integrate with various data sources to pull customer information, transaction details, and other relevant data into communications. This integration is crucial for personalization, allowing organizations to tailor messages based on customer preferences, behaviors, and relationship history. Advanced CCM solutions leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance personalization capabilities. These technologies analyze customer data to identify patterns and preferences, enabling predictive personalization that anticipates customer needs and delivers more relevant communications. Building comprehensive customer profiles is a cornerstone of effective CCM. Organizations should focus on capturing accurately pertinent information and updating it in real-time to gain deeper insights into customers' interests and behaviors. These profiles should be strategically designed to include all personalized content relevant to specific customers. By leveraging previous interaction history, organizations can identify changing customer needs and interests, making this profile-building activity the key to strategically personalizing content for each individual customer.

Omnichannel delivery and orchestration
Modern CCM solutions support delivery across multiple channels, including print, email, SMS, mobile apps, web portals, and social media. They provide orchestration capabilities that coordinate communications across these channels, ensuring consistency and continuity in the customer experience.

Channel orchestration involves determining the optimal channel for each communication based on customer preferences, message urgency, and cost considerations. It also includes capabilities for managing channel fallbacks when primary channels fail to deliver messages successfully. Modern CCM systems must support a diverse range of communication types, including correspondence, marketing content, publications, and transactional statements . Each type requires appropriate channel selection based customer preferences. Effective CCM also considers print, email, SMS, WhatsApp, RCS and more to deliver mission-critical messages to where customers live. This granular approach to channel management ensures that communications not only reach customers through preferred channels but also display optimally on the devices they use most frequently.

Compliance and governance
CCM systems include features for managing regulatory compliance and governance requirements. This is particularly important in highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and insurance, where communications must adhere to strict legal standards.

Compliance features typically include version control, approval workflows, audit trails, and content rules that enforce regulatory requirements. These capabilities help organizations mitigate risks associated with non-compliant communications while streamlining the review and approval process.

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The business value of effective CCM

Implementing a robust customer communications management strategy offers numerous benefits for businesses and their customers alike.

Enhanced customer experience
Effective CCM significantly improves the customer experience by delivering personalized, relevant, and consistent communications across all touchpoints. When customers receive communications that acknowledge their unique relationship with an organization and address their specific needs, they feel valued and understood.

CCM solutions enable organizations to create cohesive customer journeys where each communication builds on previous interactions. This continuity helps customers navigate complex processes, such as onboarding or problem resolution, with greater ease and satisfaction. By reducing friction in customer interactions, CCM contributes to higher customer satisfaction scores and improved net promoter scores (NPS).

Operational efficiency
Beyond customer-facing benefits, CCM streamlines internal operations by automating manual processes and reducing redundancies. Centralized content management reduces duplication of effort across departments and ensures that all communications leverage approved content and messaging.

Template-based approaches to communication design further enhance efficiency by enabling rapid development and modification of communications. When business requirements or regulations change, organizations can update templates centrally rather than revising numerous individual communications. This centralization reduces time-to-market for new communications and minimizes the resources required for maintenance.

Cost reduction
Implementing a comprehensive CCM solution can significantly reduce costs associated with customer communications. Digital delivery channels typically cost less than traditional print and mail methods, offering immediate savings on production and postage expenses. Additionally, self-service options enabled by interactive digital communications reduce call center volumes and associated support costs. Automation of content assembly and delivery processes eliminates manual tasks and their associated labor costs. By streamlining approval workflows and reducing error rates, CCM solutions also minimize costs related to compliance violations and communication errors that may require correction and redistribution.

Revenue growth
Well-executed CCM strategies contribute to revenue growth through improved customer retention and increased cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Personalized communications that arrive at optimal times with relevant offers generate higher response rates than generic messages, translating directly to increased revenue.

CCM analytics provide insights into communication effectiveness, allowing organizations to refine their approaches based on customer responses. By understanding which messages resonate with different customer segments, organizations can optimize their communication strategies to maximize conversion rates and revenue generation.

Organizations implementing comprehensive CCM solutions report significant revenue impacts through more effective communication strategies. Particularly valuable are targeted, dynamically inserted cross-sell promotions that leverage customer data and profiles to present relevant offers at optimal moments in the customer journey. When communications shift from generic messaging to contextual, personalized offers, conversion rates typically increase substantially. This revenue enhancement represents one of the most compelling returns on investment for CCM implementations.

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Strategic approaches to CCM implementation

Implementing CCM effectively requires a strategic approach that aligns with organizational goals and customer expectations.

Creating a communications center of excellence
Many successful organizations establish a communications center of excellence (CoE) to centralize expertise, resources, and governance for customer communications. This cross-functional team typically includes representatives from marketing, customer service, IT, legal, and other relevant departments.

The CoE develops standards, best practices, and guidelines for communications across the organization. It also oversees the selection and implementation of CCM technologies, ensuring alignment with broader digital transformation initiatives. By centralizing these functions, organizations can achieve greater consistency and efficiency in their communication efforts while fostering innovation and continuous improvement.

Adopting a customer journey perspective
Rather than viewing communications as isolated interactions, organizations should map them to customer journeys and touchpoints. This journey-centric approach ensures that communications support seamless experiences as customers move through awareness, consideration, purchase, onboarding, usage, and loyalty phases.

Journey mapping helps identify gaps, redundancies, and opportunities in current communications. It also encourages cross-functional collaboration, as different departments often own different stages of the journey. By adopting this perspective, organizations can create more cohesive experiences that strengthen customer relationships over time.

Leveraging data and analytics
Data plays a crucial role in effective CCM, providing the foundation for personalization and optimization. Organizations should develop comprehensive data strategies that identify relevant customer data, establish integration methods, and ensure data quality and accessibility.

Analytics capabilities within CCM systems help organizations measure communication effectiveness and identify improvement opportunities. Key metrics might include open rates, response rates, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction scores. By continuously analyzing these metrics, organizations can refine their communications to improve performance and ROI.

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Challenges in customer communications management

Despite its benefits, implementing effective CCM presents several challenges that organizations must address.

Legacy system integration
Many organizations struggle with integrating modern CCM solutions with legacy systems that contain critical customer data and content. These integration challenges can limit personalization capabilities and create silos that fragment the customer experience.

Successful integration often requires a phased approach, with organizations prioritizing key integration points based on business impact. API-led integration strategies can provide flexibility and scalability, allowing organizations to connect disparate systems without complete overhauls.

Organizational alignment
Effective CCM requires alignment across multiple departments, including marketing, customer service, IT, compliance, and operations. Achieving this alignment can be challenging, particularly in large organizations with established departmental boundaries and competing priorities.

Creating governance structures that include representatives from all stakeholders helps foster collaboration and shared ownership of communication outcomes. Executive sponsorship is also critical for overcoming organizational resistance and ensuring adequate resources for CCM initiatives.

Regulatory compliance
Organizations in regulated industries face particularly complex challenges in ensuring that all communications comply with relevant laws and regulations. These requirements vary by jurisdiction and constantly evolve, creating an ongoing compliance burden.

CCM solutions can help address these challenges through automated compliance checks, controlled approval workflows, and centralized content management. However, organizations must still maintain expertise in relevant regulations and regularly update their compliance frameworks to reflect changing requirements.

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The future of customer communications management

The CCM landscape continues to evolve, driven by technological advancements and changing customer expectations.

Integration with customer experience platforms
CCM is increasingly becoming integrated with broader customer experience (CX) platforms that manage all customer interactions across marketing, sales, and service functions. This integration creates more cohesive experiences and allows organizations to leverage unified customer data across all touchpoints.

The lines between traditional CCM and marketing automation, CRM, and customer service systems are blurring, with vendors expanding their capabilities to provide more comprehensive solutions. This convergence reflects the growing recognition that siloed communication approaches no longer meet customer expectations for seamless experiences.

To visualize effective CCM integration, consider the information flow from various sources through the CCM platform to multiple delivery channels. Customer data originates in diverse systems including CRM, finance, marketing automation, and product databases. This data flows into the CCM platform where it's analyzed, contextualized, and transformed into personalized communications. These communications then travel through appropriate channels to reach customers on their preferred devices. This seamless flow ensures that the right information reaches customers at the right time through the right channel, enhancing the digital experience and creating coherent experiences instead of disjointed interactions.

Knowledge-driven GenAI and hyper-personalization
Artificial intelligence is transforming CCM by enabling more sophisticated personalization and automation. New advancements in OpenText™ Communications (Exstream) are here, powered by the collaboration between OpenText™ Experience Aviator and OpenText™ Content Aviator. This powerful combination allows businesses to create compliant, contextually relevant content faster, leveraging trusted content workspaces and focusing AI generation on specific, curated knowledge collections.

With version control, creators will always work with the most up-to-date content, speeding up approval processes and improving productivity. Plus, by aligning communications with accurate metadata, customer data, and preferences, businesses can deliver highly personalized, targeted messages, driving better engagement and customer satisfaction.

Real-time and interactive communications
The future of CCM includes more real-time, interactive communications that engage customers in two-way conversations rather than one-way messages. These dynamic communications adapt based on customer responses and behaviors, creating more engaging and relevant experiences.

Interactive documents, personalized videos, and conversational interfaces represent evolving forms of customer communications that provide richer experiences than traditional static documents. These formats improve comprehension and engagement while gathering valuable customer feedback that informs future communications.

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How OpenText solutions enhance customer communications management

OpenText offers a comprehensive suite of customer communications management solutions designed to help organizations transform their customer interactions into personalized, engaging experiences.

OpenText Communications
OpenText Communications (formerly Exstream) is market-leading CCM software that enables organizations to deliver consistent customer experiences through ultra-personalized, compliant communications. The platform allows businesses to run anywhere and scale globally in their preferred public cloud, hybrid environment, or off-cloud deployment.

With OpenText Communications, organizations can engage customers with personalized content across the entire journey, deliver digital-first communications across all channels and devices, and optimize business decisions through data analytics. The solution features HTML5 design capabilities that empower users to craft captivating, digital-first communications without complex coding expertise.

The platform includes Experience Aviator, which uses AI-assisted authoring to create new communications and improve existing content. Built-in grammar, sentiment, and reading comprehension scores help content creators develop more effective messaging that resonates with customers and drives engagement.

OpenText Output Transformation Server
The OpenText Output Transformation Server provides digital document transformation that processes, extracts, transforms, repurposes, and stores high volumes of data, documents, and print streams. This powerful solution enables enterprise-level storage management, real-time access, online presentment , PDF accessibility, and printing and delivery of information across multiple channels.

Organizations use this server to convert high-volume documents and communications in legacy formats into web and mobile-friendly formats such as PDF, accessible PDF, and more. This transformation capability is essential for providing an inclusive customer experience while complying with accessibility regulations.

The solution features enterprise-class capabilities including clustering, load balancing, and automatic failover to meet demanding business and service level agreement requirements. Its high performance and scalability increase as information volume grows, making it ideal for organizations managing large-scale communications.

OpenText Document Accessibility
OpenText Document Accessibility helps organizations make their content accessible for all audiences, providing equal access to digital content and ensuring compliance with accessibility legislation. This solution addresses the significant challenge of meeting accessibility standards amid inconsistent compositions, changing specifications, and diverse interpretations of legislation.

The platform enables record managers to easily transform documents as needed, using built-in auto-detection algorithms that accurately determine and apply tags with minimal manual editing required. Users can customize reading order, add alternate text for images, and ensure proper table navigation by identifying table rows, columns, and cells.

By implementing OpenText Document Accessibility, organizations can provide exceptional experiences to persons with disabilities, generating greater satisfaction and loyalty from this often-overlooked audience. When accessible documents are requested, they can be swiftly retrieved from archive and transformed quickly, minimizing or eliminating delays.

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Integrating CCM into a comprehensive customer experience strategy

To maximize the value of customer communications management, organizations should integrate it into their broader customer experience strategy. This integration ensures that communications align with other customer touchpoints and contribute to cohesive, meaningful experiences.

Aligning communications with brand values and voice
Customer communications should consistently reflect an organization's brand values, personality, and voice. This consistency builds brand recognition and trust across all interactions. CCM solutions help maintain this consistency by centralizing content assets and templates that embody the brand identity.

Organizations should develop comprehensive brand guidelines that extend beyond visual elements to include tone, language, and messaging principles for different types of communications. These guidelines should be incorporated into CCM systems through content rules, templates, and approval workflows that ensure adherence.

Connecting communications to customer journey orchestration
Communications should be orchestrated as part of the overall customer journey, with each message building on previous interactions and setting expectations for future engagements. This orchestration requires integration between CCM systems and customer journey management tools that map and optimize customer pathways.

By connecting these systems, organizations can trigger communications based on customer behaviors and journey stages rather than relying solely on scheduled batch processes. This event-driven approach creates more timely, relevant communications that respond to customer needs as they emerge.

Measuring and optimizing communication effectiveness
Organizations should establish comprehensive metrics for evaluating communication effectiveness across channels and touchpoints. These metrics should go beyond operational measures like delivery rates to include customer impact measures such as comprehension, satisfaction, and behavior change.

A/B testing capabilities within CCM systems allow organizations to experiment with different messaging approaches and optimize based on results. This continuous improvement process ensures that communications evolve with changing customer preferences and business needs.

Transform customer interactions to drive business value
Customer communications management has evolved from a tactical, document-focused function to a strategic component of customer experience management. By implementing robust CCM solutions and strategies, organizations can transform their customer interactions into personalized, engaging experiences that build relationships and drive business value.

The capabilities provided by platforms like OpenText Communications, Output Transformation Server, and Document Accessibility enable organizations to meet the diverse communication needs of their customers while improving operational efficiency and ensuring compliance. As technologies continue to advance, CCM will increasingly leverage AI, real-time capabilities, and deeper integration with other customer experience systems to deliver even more personalized and impactful communications.

Organizations that recognize the strategic importance of customer communications and invest accordingly will gain competitive advantage through stronger customer relationships, improved operational efficiency, and accelerated digital transformation. In an era where customer experience is a key differentiator, effective communication management has become essential for business success. The evolution from traditional departmental communications to unified customer experience management (CXM) approaches marks a significant advancement in how organizations engage with customers. While traditional approaches often result in irrelevant or redundant communications containing non-contextual data, customer experience management ensures customers receive only information with relevant context instead of being overwhelmed with disjointed messages. This transition not only improves customer satisfaction but also increases operational efficiency and drives revenue growth. As you implement CCM solutions like those offered by OpenText, focus on growing beyond CCM to CXM realize your brand’s full potential.