Table of Contents
by Shawn Phillips,
Enablement and Product Evangelist at MHC
Section I: Legacy Systems and the Manual Work They Require
- Migrating Off a Legacy System Is Hard
- Template Sprawl Makes Manual Updates Challenging
- Business Users Can’t Act Without IT
Section II: Compliance, Accessibility, and Control
Section III: Keeping Up with AI Without Losing Control
- How to Know Which AI-Augmented Features Are Ready for Production
- Demonstrating Control and Compliance When AI Is Involved
Section IV: Data, Channels and Scale
- Customer Data Is Scattered and Duplicated Across Systems
- The Customer Journey Is Inconsistent and Disjointed
- More Documents Every Year, Without More Staff
10 Customer Communication Management Challenges: What to Fix Before 2027
Shawn Phillips 
October 2nd, 2026
In Brief
Customer communication management challenges in 2026 fall into four areas: legacy systems and manual work, compliance and control, AI readiness, and managing data, channels and scale. Most organizations face several challenges at once, and they feed each other. The fastest way to make progress is to fix the challenge with the most risk first, then choose a platform that gives business users control, builds governance in, and grows with volume.
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| CCM Challenges and Solutions – Key Takeaways | ||
|---|---|---|
| Section | Challenge | Solution |
| I.Legacy Systems and Manual Work | 1. Migrating off a legacy system is hard.Legally binding documents depend on rules few people fully understand, so switching feels risky. | Move in stages.List what the old system does, run both systems side by side, and migrate one segment at a time with a rollback plan. |
| 2. Template sprawl makes updates challenging.Every variation gets its own copy, so one wording change has to be made in dozens of places. | Build one template with variable parts.Conditional content, reusable blocks and clear naming replace duplicates and make the approved version easy to find. | |
| 3. Business users can’t act without IT.Routine edits and one-off letters turn into IT tickets, which delays communications. | Self-service within IT guardrails.IT sets up data, rules and approvals once. Business users then edit and send on their own through the same review. | |
| II.Compliance, Accessibility and Control | 4. Regulations change and templates fall behind.Rules change often and in different places, while templates stay the same for years. | Build compliance into the template.Accessible, approved templates and managed content libraries make every document compliant when it’s created. |
| 5. Too many workflows are hard to keep compliant.Separate processes and workarounds put sensitive data at risk and leave no audit trail. | Workflow normalization.Combine scattered processes into one workflow framework, so a few governed workflows replace many. | |
| III.Keeping Up with AI Without Losing Control | 6. Knowing which AI features are production-ready.Vendor AI claims cover very different things, and results lag behind the hype. | Sort features into live, in pilot or planned.Test live features on your own content, then start with low-risk uses. |
| 7. Proving control when AI is involved.Regulated firms must show how an AI-assisted message was created, what it was based on and who approved it. | Set risk-based AI rules.Decide what runs automatically and what needs review. Limit AI to approved sources, log every change and restrict access by role. | |
| IV.Data, Channels and Scale | 8. Customer data is scattered across systems.Each channel uses its own version of the customer record, so messages contradict each other. | One governed data source.Connect source systems to a single document generation layer that feeds every channel. |
| 9. The customer journey feels disjointed.Each channel was built separately, so letters, emails and portals look and sound different. | Design one journey first.Map the key moments, then build every touchpoint from shared templates, brand standards and data. | |
| 10. More documents every year, without more staff.Manual processes can’t grow from thousands of documents to millions. | Build on an engine designed for scale.Templates that select themselves, standards-based output and controlled self-service let volume grow without adding engineers. | |
Table of Contents
Section I: Legacy Systems and the Manual Work They Require
- Migrating Off a Legacy System Is Hard
- Template Sprawl Makes Manual Updates Challenging
- Business Users Can’t Act Without IT
Section II: Compliance, Accessibility, and Control
Section III: Keeping Up with AI Without Losing Control
- How to Know Which AI-Augmented Features Are Ready for Production
- Demonstrating Control and Compliance When AI Is Involved
Section IV: Data, Channels and Scale
- Customer Data Is Scattered and Duplicated Across Systems
- The Customer Journey Is Inconsistent and Disjointed
- More Documents Every Year, Without More Staff
Introduction
Customer communication management (CCM) challenges used to center on producing documents at volume: too many templates, too many channels, and too many people waiting on IT to change a letter. Those CCM problems are still here. In 2026, three shifts have made the creation of regulated customer communications harder to manage, and they will shape the work you need to address in 2027.
The first shift is regulation. In several regions, the test for a compliant communication is moving from whether the customer was sent the required information to whether the customer understood it and could act on it (Aspire CCS, 2026). Accessibility rules add pressure. The European Accessibility Act, which covers services such as banking and e-commerce, has applied since June 2025 (European Commission).
The second shift is AI. Many teams already use AI to draft and translate content, so the open issue now is how much it should AI perform without a person checking its work, and how to show an auditor what it did. Aspire CCS (2026) recommends risk-based oversight, where routine tasks run automatically and higher-risk ones trigger a review.
The third shift is delivery. Documents are not going away, but more of them now sit inside journeys that span email, text messages, portals and apps. The data, templates and approvals behind them have to work together, and many CCM issues start where they don’t.
This guide explains these shifts within the framework of the top 10 customer communication management challenges. Each challenge comes with a practical solution and, where we have them, a customer story or an expert view to clarify the solution.
Section I: Legacy Systems and the Manual Work They Require
The oldest customer communication management challenges are also the ones that slow everything else down. Old platforms are hard to move off, templates multiply faster than anyone can track, and routine changes wait in an IT queue.
1. Migrating Off a Legacy System is Hard
Migrating off a legacy system is hard because the communications it produces — policy documents, billing notices and claims letters — are often legally binding, and the rules behind them live in systems and configurations that few people fully understand.
For this reason, many organizations keep a platform that costs more each year to maintain rather than risk sending an incorrect or noncompliant document on day one of a switch. And when the people who built the original setup retire or move on, no one is left who knows why the system does what it does.
“A platform that still runs is not proof that it is safe. Until you know every rule it applies, you can’t be sure the new system will apply them too.”
~ Reuben Manalo, Director, Sales Engineering, MHC
“A platform that still runs is not proof that it is safe. Until you know every rule it applies, you can’t be sure the new system will apply them too.” Two questions now shape many migration decisions. The first is whether the new platform is built for where communications are heading: cloud-native, API-based and ready for AI, not one document-generation platform swapped for another (Aspire CCS, 2026).
The second question is whether the move is a chance to change how the work is divided. Some organizations are using cloud migration mandates to separate creating communications from orchestrating them. The CCM platform stays focused on creating communications, while process logic and integrations move to a separate integration layer (Aspire CCS, 2026).
Solution: Move in Stages and Keep the Old System Running Until the New One Proves Itself
A safe migration starts with an inventory of what the old platform actually does: the integrations, the data sources and the business rules no one wrote down. From there, run the new system in parallel with the old one against real volumes, and move one business segment at a time, with a documented rollback plan for each step. Finding an undocumented rule during planning costs far less than finding it after cutover.
Dig Deeper: Follow-up Resources
GUIDE
Legacy System Modernization: Ultimate Guide for Regulated Enterprises >
Learn how regulated organizations decide whether to upgrade, rebuild or replace the platforms that produce their customer communications.
GUIDE
Legacy System Migration: A Step-by-Step Guide for Regulated Enterprises >
Follow a seven-step process for moving off a legacy platform, from mapping dependencies to running the old and new systems in parallel.
BLOG
What Are Legacy Systems in CCM and Why Are They Still Used? >
See why legacy systems stay in place and what they cost customer communications teams.
WEBINARS
IT Leaders’ Roadmap to Modernizing Regulated Comms >
Aspire CCS’s Kaspar Roos and MHC’s Olga Zakharenkava discuss how to approach a legacy migration with confidence.
2. Template Sprawl Makes Manual Updates Challenging
Template overpopulation starts when every new product, region, language or exception gets its template copy. As templates proliferate, a simple change, such as updated legal wording, then has to be updated in dozens of places, and a customer receives whichever version someone remembered to update.
Solution: Build One Template with Variable Parts, and Make Templates Easy to Find
Instead creating a template for each variation, build one template and let conditional content, reusable content blocks, and language variables handle the differences. In this way, one template can serve several languages or regions. Consistent naming and searchable tags help teams find the approved version, which addresses the old “finding the right document” problem at the same time.
Customer story: Essilor International
Essilor International had output processes spread across many entities and a platform that couldn’t keep up. It standardized 30 entities on MHC NorthStar CCM, with centralized template management and design tools.
The result was 60% fewer templates, which simplified updates and governance. Straight-through processing, where documents run without manual intervention, rose from 25% to 98% within three months.
Dig Deeper: Follow-up Resources
BLOG
Document Template Management Software Features >
See how automation streamlines creating, managing and distributing templates for enterprise organizations that handle high volumes of communications.
BLOG
Template-Based Document Generation: Streamlining Business Communications >
Learn how pre-designed templates connected to data sources keep branding consistent and cut manual work and errors.
3. Business Users Can't Act Without IT
The third challenge is that even routine changes, such as a corrected date, an updated disclosure or a one-off letter to a single customer, become IT tickets. Business teams wait, IT teams get pulled away from larger projects, and customers receive late or outdated communications. Jamie Harris names the warning sign plainly:
~ Jamie Harris, Senior Account & Partner Executive, MHC
“If every template requires engineering to be involved, if you make a change in a template, that’s a warning sign.” Solution: Give Business Users Self-Service Within Guardrails IT Controls
The fix is not to remove IT from the process but to change where IT’s work happens. IT sets up the data connections, the rules and the approval steps once. Business users then edit approved content and generate one-off documents on their own, with every change routed through the same review as any other. For one-off documents, staff pick an approved template, fill in the details, preview the result and send it. That removes the copy-and-paste workarounds that often bypass review.
Dig Deeper: Follow-up Resources
BLOG
Reduce IT Overload By Empowering Your Business Teams >
Learn how low-code and no-code tools let business teams update communications without waiting weeks for IT.
INFOGRAPHIC
Free IT from Communication Updates and Empower Business Teams >
A one-page visual on how business teams can own communication updates while IT focuses on strategic work.
WEBINAR
How Smarter Document Automation Reduces IT Workload >
Shawn Phillips shows how document automation shifts routine communication updates from IT to business teams.
BLOG
Document Creation Explained: How to Create, Send, and Store Documents In One Convenient Location >
Learn how business user configurability lets non-technical staff manage templates and workflows without waiting on IT.
Section II: Compliance, Accessibility, and Control
Compliance problems in customer communications rarely come from one large failure. They come from rules that keep changing, and from people finding their own ways around the system to get work done.
4. Regulations Keep Changing and Templates Fall Behind
Staying compliant is hard in customer communications because the regulations change on different schedules in different places, while a template is built once and reused for years.
The speed and volume of changes is significant. In a 2025 survey of more than 2,000 compliance and risk leaders at financial institutions, 82% said they track between 26 and 100 regulatory alerts each month (FinTech Global, citing CUBE). The response is slow. On average, it still takes organizations more than a year to fully implement a regulatory change (CUBE, Cost of Compliance Report 2025).
Accessibility shows how this plays out. The European Accessibility Act has applied to banking and e-commerce services since June 2025 (European Commission). In September 2026 the EU published an updated accessibility standard that adopts WCAG 2.2, although the earlier version remains the legal reference for now (AccessibleEU). In the U.S., state and local governments serving 50,000 or more people must meet WCAG 2.1 AA by April 26, 2027 (Federal Register). Each change means going back to templates that were built to the last standard.
For a team with thousands of templates, each change in the rules raises the same question: which of our documents no longer comply? If the answer comes from checking documents after they are produced, someone has to find every failing file and fix it one at a time. The bar is also rising on content itself. In several regions the test now includes whether customers can understand the communication and act on it (Aspire CCS, 2026), so clear wording and layout now count as compliance work.
Solution: Build Compliance into the Template Before Any Document Is Generated
Fixing accessibility in each finished document cannot keep pace with volume. It is more reliable to make the template itself compliant, so that every document generated from it starts from an accessible base. MHC NorthStar CCM takes this approach by building accessibility into templates before content is generated, aligned with PDF/UA (the accessibility standard for PDF files) and WCAG 2.1 AA. Required legal wording follows the same idea: approved content libraries, managed by authorized business users, keep mandatory language consistent across every template that uses it.
Customer story: A Regional U.S. Healthcare Network
Compliance also depends on how sensitive documents are handled. A regional U.S. healthcare network used four separate tools to produce W-2s, 1099s and AP checks.
Payroll merged the tax PDFs on local machines and emailed them to employees, which put personal information at risk.
The network replaced the four-tool approach with MHC NorthStar AP, a single cloud-based platform.
W-2 and 1099-MISC/NEC forms are now created and distributed automatically, employees get secure self-service access through a portal, and unsecured email distribution is gone.
Full implementation took approximately six months and finished ahead of the tax season deadline.
CUSTOMER STORY
Healthcare Network Modernizes AP and Year-End Tax Processes >
See how a regional healthcare network replaced emailed tax forms with a secure self-serve portal.
Dig Deeper: Follow-up Resources
BLOG SERIES
CCM Compliance Check-Up >
A series that keeps you up to date on changing regulations affecting customer communications management.
WEBINAR
Beyond the Website—Making All Your Digital Communications Accessible >
Hear why building accessibility into templates before documents are generated helps reduce risk and scale compliance.
5. Too Many Workflows are Hard to Keep Compliant
Many regulated organizations run a separate workflow for every job: one process for each document type, customer group or team. Each one depends on manual steps and on the few people who know how it works, so a new job or a new team member takes weeks to set up, and knowledge leaves when someone does.
When the official process of applying updates is slow, people find quicker ways: merging PDFs on a laptop, sending files by email, or asking a colleague in another department to edit a letter. When several departments contribute to the same communications, each with its own goals and habits, unvetted wording can reach customers, and sensitive personal information can leave controlled systems. Afterward, nobody can show who approved what.
~ Prasun Baidya, Head of Technology, MHC,
in Legacy System Modernization: Ultimate Guide for Regulated Enterprises
“A modern, API-first platform builds the audit trail and governance controls into how communications get generated in the first place, instead of bolting them on after the fact.” Solution: Simplify Workflow Complexity With Workflow Normalization
The answer is what MHC calls workflow normalization: decluttering the back office by consolidating fragmented processes onto one intelligent workflow framework, so a few workflows replace many. Instead of a separate process for every job, static print files become dynamic, data-driven assets, and automation runs from composition to delivery (Stop Managing Chaos).
Fewer workflows mean less to maintain, so there are fewer places for an error or an unapproved change to creep in. Turnaround times shorten, output can grow without adding headcount, and IT and operators are free to focus on higher-value work. Because communications follow the same few paths, consistency and compliance improve.
Customer Story: Optum Home & Community
Optum Home & Community sends communications to 12 million members. Its homegrown setup ran on several disconnected platforms, so staff had to step in by hand, which led to frequent errors.
As the organization grew through acquisitions, the setup became harder to maintain.
With MHC NorthStar CCM, Optum Home & Community moved document creation onto one platform, with more than 100 templates for plan notices, approval and denial letters, and provider documents.
Automated review steps, with legal brought into the approval process early, check communications before they go out. New plans roll out faster, manual fixes and errors drop, and an audit trail provides transparency and accountability.
CUSTOMER STORY
Optum Home & Community Streamlines Patient Communications and Speeds Time to Market >
How a healthcare organization replaced disconnected platforms with one, cutting manual fixes and errors
Dig Deeper: Follow-up Resources
BLOG
Stop Managing Chaos: How Workflow Normalization Simplifies Communications >
See how consolidating job-specific processes into one workflow framework reduces manual steps, onboarding time and compliance risk.
GUIDE
Legacy System Migration: A Step-by-Step Guide for Regulated Enterprises >
Follow a seven-step process for moving off a legacy platform, from mapping dependencies to running the old and new systems in parallel.
VIDEO
The Hidden Cost of “Just This One Custom Workflow” >
A short clip on why one-off workflows cost more than they seem to, from our Scaling Communications webinar series.
GUIDE
Guide to Compliance Document Management >
See how automated compliance document management reduces audit risk and keeps regulated documents under control.
Section III: Keeping Up with AI Without Losing Control
AI has moved from pilot projects to daily use, which makes it the fastest-moving of the customer communication management challenges. McKinsey’s 2026 State of AI survey found that nearly nine in ten respondents report regular use of AI in at least one business function (McKinsey, 2026). The harder questions now are which AI claims to believe and how to keep AI operating with the rules.
6. How to Know Which AI-Augmented Features Are Ready for Production
Almost every CCM vendor now says it has AI, and many say they have agentic AI, meaning AI that can plan and carry out steps across systems instead of only producing text. Those claims cover very different things, from a writing assistant inside an editor to software that acts on its own inside a live workflow. Results are lagging activity. McKinsey found that 40% of respondents from large organizations are scaling AI agents, up from 27% a year earlier, while the share reporting any earnings impact from AI stayed at 37% (McKinsey, 2026).
Deployment is moving faster than returns. The pressure to keep up is still real, because customer expectations are moving in the same direction.
~ Kaspar Roos, Founder & CEO, Aspire CCS, in 26 Communication Trends for 2026
“Customer expectations are fundamentally shifting from document-centric to dialogue-driven, conversational, real-time engagement. This is not going away—and AI will accelerate it at a much more rapid pace than we’ve seen before.” Solution: Ask Vendors to Sort Every AI Feature Into Live, In Pilot or Planned
Ask each vendor to place every AI feature in one of three groups: generally available and used by customers in production, in pilot, or planned. For anything live, ask to see it working on your own content, ask what happens to your data, and ask who approves the output. Then start with lower-risk uses and expand as the controls prove themselves.
MHC NorthStar CCM includes AI Assist, which helps authors create documents, templates, emails and web forms from a plain-language prompt, refine sentiment, tone and length, and translate content with one click.
Dig Deeper: Follow-up Resources
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
AI Assist for MHC NorthStar CCM >
Discover how AI Assist supports content creation, personalization and interactive forms in MHC NorthStar CCM.
7. Demonstrating Control and Compliance When AI Is Involved
In regulated industries, a customer sees only the letter, email or portal message, never the AI-assisted process behind it, and that message is what they dispute. If AI helped write it, or was involved in the decisioning, someone has to be able to show how it was created, what source it drew upon and who approved it.
Today, oversight is lagging behind adoption. A person needs to stay in the loop for work that carries risk. Deloitte found that only one in five companies has a mature model for governing autonomous AI agents (Deloitte, State of AI in the Enterprise, 2026, based on a survey of 3,235 leaders).
~ Emily Washington, Head of Product, MHC,
in 26 Communication Trends for 2026
“Every letter, email, portal message that you are communicating to your customer — that’s the accountability moment. When a customer challenges a claim, or looks at the policy document and believes there’s an inaccuracy, you need to be able to trace that back to its source.” A second question comes from new connection standards. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an emerging standard that gives AI agents a common way to interact with enterprise tools and data (Aspire CCS, 2026). Once an agent can reach into a communications platform, someone has to decide what it can see, change and send.
Solution: Decide Where AI Acts Alone, Where a Person Reviews, and What Gets Logged
Start by deciding, task by task, how much AI may do without a person. Aspire CCS (2026) recommends risk-based oversight, in which low-risk work runs automatically and higher-risk work triggers a review, because requiring approval of every AI action removes the benefit of automating anything. A spelling fix and a change to required legal wording should not follow the same path.
Three controls make that rule enforceable. AI should draw on approved content and approved data sources instead of generating freely. Every AI-assisted change should be logged, with what changed, what source it used and who approved it. And an agent’s access to the platform should be limited by role, the same way a person’s is, so it can only see and do what the person supervising it is already allowed to.
~ Andy Young, Founder & Principal Analyst, Treeline Research,
in 26 Communication Trends for 2026
“Everyone should be using AI in their CCM processes. The benefits are clear—faster workflows, improved accuracy, and more personalized communications—but organizations must adopt AI responsibly, especially when handling sensitive or regulated information.” Dig Deeper: Follow-up Resources
Explore how organizations can responsibly apply AI to modernize customer communications, balancing innovation with governance in regulated environments.
WEBINAR
AI and Customer Communications: Where to Draw the Line >
Watch our session on where AI adds real value in regulated communications, and where governance and human oversight remain essential.
BLOG
Harnessing AI in Customer Communications: A Call to Action After Andy Young’s Webinar >
Explore how organizations can responsibly apply AI to modernize customer communications, balancing innovation with governance in regulated environments.
WEBINAR
Closing the AI Explainability Gap in Insurance >
Explore how insurers can turn AI-driven decisions into clear, defensible customer communications.
BLOG
Top 10 Webinar Insights on Explainable AI in Insurance >
Ten takeaways on explaining AI-supported decisions to policyholders through clear, compliant customer messaging.
Section IV: Data, Channels and Scale
8. Customer Data is Scattered and Duplicated Across Systems
Every communication is only as good as the data behind it. In most large organizations, customer information sits in policy systems, billing platforms, CRMs and spreadsheets. Each channel ends up working from its own version of the customer record. Personalization becomes guesswork, and depending on the data source, a letter can contradict the email or portal message sent the same day.
Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer research found that 79% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments, yet 56% often have to repeat or re-explain information to different representatives (Salesforce).
Solution: Generate every communication from one governed data source
Connect the systems that hold customer data to a single document generation layer, so that every channel draws on the same information and the same rules. Enterprise document generation platforms take data from source systems through APIs and standard formats such as XML and JSON. They turn that data into finished documents without anyone re-keying it. Changes to the data flow through to every output.
Dig Deeper: Follow-up Resources
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
Enterprise Document Generation >
How MHC turns data from your source systems into finished documents at scale.
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
High-Volume XML to PDF Conversion Software >
See how MHC NorthStar CCM turns XML data into PDFs in real time through a REST API or in batches of hundreds of thousands.
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
High-Volume JSON to PDF Document Generation >
See how JSON data sent through a REST API becomes production-ready PDFs using rules-based templates.
9. The Customer Journey Is Inconsistent and Disjointed
Print, email, SMS, portals and mobile apps each arrived at a different time, often under a different team, and each team built its own version. The letter has one logo, tone and layout, the email another, and the portal a third. Wording and offers can differ too. To the customer it is one journey, but it feels like dealing with several companies, and they end up repeating themselves every time they switch channels.
IDC’s July 2025 survey of 113 organizations points to the same problem: 38% named repeated requests for the same information among their customers’ top three complaints about communications, and 43% want a seamless handoff between digital and human interactions (MHC Webinar: Turn Static Forms into Workflows).
~ Olga Zakharenkava, Head of Marketing, MHC, author of Omnichannel Communication Strategy
“Few things frustrate customers more than explaining the same thing twice. Fixing that starts with designing the journey first and letting every channel draw on the same content and data.” Solution: Design One Consistent Journey, Then Build Every Touchpoint From It
Start with the moments that matter, such as onboarding, a claim, a renewal or a payment reminder. Decide what the customer should see at each touchpoint and in which channel. Then build every version from the same templates, brand standards and data, so a letter, an email and a portal message look like the same company and say the same thing.
~ Kaspar Roos, Founder & CEO, Aspire CCS,in 26 Communication Trends for 2026
Dig Deeper: Follow-up Resources
GUIDE
Omnichannel Orchestration in CCM: The Ultimate Guide >
Why customer journeys end up inconsistent and disjointed, and how to remove the seams between touchpoints.
BLOG
Omnichannel Communication Strategy >
Why channels stay disconnected and how to remove the seams between them.
BLOG
Customer Journey Automation >
How automating the customer journey replaces manual steps across the customer lifecycle.
VIDEO
Journey Management Links All the Pieces of the Communication Delivery Layer Together >
A short clip on how journey management connects every part of communication delivery, from our CCM for IT Leaders webinar series.
10. More Documents Every Year, Without More Staff
Growth in customers, products and jurisdictions brings more templates, more variations and more pages to produce, and each document must be accurate. A process that relies on manual work to create and update documents may handle a thousand a day, but it is unlikely to handle a million.
Procore Technologies shows what this looks like. It serves 17,000+ customers and generates more than 365 million document pages a year. It runs tens of thousands of customer-specific templates alongside hundreds of standard, data-driven ones.
The company embedded MHC NorthStar CCM in its construction management platform, using rules-based templates with conditional logic and automatic template selection for each request. It produces PDF/A-compliant documents. Customers can edit their own templates, which reduces the load on Procore’s engineers.
The result is that the document engine grew with the business, and Procore’s product team can keep improving its authoring tools without disrupting customers already using them.
Solution: Build on an Engine Designed for Scale and Self-Service
Look for rules-based templates that select themselves, standards-based output, and controlled self-service editing. Together these let volume grow without a matching growth in engineering effort or manual checking.
Dig Deeper: Follow-up Resources
CUSTOMER STORY
Procore Technologies Integrates MHC Into a Leading Construction Management Platform >
How Procore generates 365M+ pages a year with self-serve templates.
GUIDE
Build vs. Buy: Guide for Enterprise Document Generation Software >
Weigh building document generation in-house against buying a platform, especially at high volume and regulatory complexity.
How to Prioritize Your Customer Communication Management Challenges
These ten challenges are faced by many organizations heading into 2027, but you don’t need to fix all of them at once. In fact, most organizations face several at the same time, and they certainly feed each other, making it hard to know where to begin. Here’s a practical way to start:
- Fix the challenge that carries the most risk first. That is usually an end-of-life platform, a compliance deadline, or a manual step that exposes personal data.
- Pair it with one that saves time. Letting business users update templates without IT is a common choice, because the benefit shows up quickly.
- Set AI rules before you scale AI. Decide what can run automatically and what needs review while you have only a few use cases.
- Treat data, channels and volume as design choices. Build them into the platform decision instead of adding them later.
“Cloud-native has moved past the technology debate — it’s a strategic decision now. As customer communications become interactive and journey-driven, the platforms underneath them need to absorb change at the speed the business is moving, with governance built in. That combination is what lets organizations grow confidently while keeping full control of their customer relationships.”
Our CEO, Chris HartiganTo keep up with regulation changes as they arrive, follow the CCM Compliance Check-Up series >
If you’d like to see how MHC NorthStar CCM handles these challenges with your own documents and data, contact us to arrange a Personalized Demo >
FAQs About the Biggest Challenges in CCM
What are the biggest customer communication management challenges in insurance?
The biggest challenges are slow template changes, communications that explain little, and journeys split across systems. Price changes and coverage changes often go out as generic letters that don’t say why the decision was made. Chris Raffield, Senior Account & Partner Executive at MHC, sees the cause in the tools: “A lot of times the templates are difficult to change and the business has to rely heavily on IT” (Why Insurance Communications Matter in 2026). The pressure is real, because 57% of customers shopped for coverage in 2025, up from 49% the year before (J.D. Power, 2025 U.S. Insurance Shopping Study).
What are the biggest customer communication management challenges in health insurance?
Health plans have to keep member materials current as federal rules change, while handling protected health information securely. CMS’s contract year 2027 rule took effect June 1, 2026. It rescinds the notice of availability requirement for Medicare Advantage and Part D plans and loosens limits on advertising language. Each change means plans must review templates and decide what to update. Plans also have to offer language assistance and accessible formats, including screen-reader-compatible electronic documents, under Section 1557. For more on how plans handle this, see Health Insurance Document Automation.
What are the biggest customer communication management challenges in healthcare?
Healthcare providers have to reach patients in their preferred channel while meeting accessibility and language access rules. Under Section 1557, providers must take reasonable steps to give people with limited English proficiency meaningful access and supply accessible formats for people with disabilities. Section 504 adds WCAG 2.1 Level AA requirements for websites, mobile apps and patient portals. New documents must meet them, while documents created before the deadline are exempt. Systems are also disconnected: 71% of providers report little or no integration between their patient engagement systems (TalkDesk, via 10 Patient Communication Statistics). See also our healthcare solutions.
What are the biggest customer communication management challenges in financial services?
The biggest challenges are proving what was sent and keeping up with changing disclosure rules. The bar for a compliant message is also rising. The UK’s Consumer Duty now tests communications on whether customers understood them, not only whether the required disclosure was included (Aspire CCS, State of the Industry 2026). Rules keep shifting in the US too. A March 13, 2026 executive order directs regulators to revisit mortgage disclosure timing, which signals possible template changes ahead.
What are the biggest customer communication management challenges in banking?
Banks struggle with old core systems and slow disclosure updates. Many depository institutions run core systems up to 40 years old on mainframe hardware (Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, 2024, cited in our banking modernization guide). The FDIC’s revised digital signage rule, effective March 2, 2026, has a compliance deadline of April 1, 2027. It narrows where signs are required, so banks need to update the screens, apps and templates that show them.
What are the biggest customer communication management challenges for community banks and credit unions?
Smaller institutions carry the same compliance duties as large ones, with fewer people to do the work. In the 2025 CSBS survey, 61.8% of community bankers named attracting and retaining technology staff as a major five-year challenge. The smallest banks spend 16.5% to 22% of data-processing budgets on compliance, compared with 10% to 14% at the largest community banks (CSBS, November 2025, both figures cited in our banking modernization guide). Rodney Frye, SVP and Head of New Business Growth at MHC, describes the result in the same guide: “Communication teams are very lean. Small IT staffs, sometimes almost none.”
Shawn Phillips
Shawn brings over 25 years of tech and customer experience expertise to his role as Enablement and Product Evangelist at MHC. In this role, he’s the driving voice behind MHC NorthStar across sales, professional services, partners, and customers — building the training and enablement that help everyone represent the product with confidence and clarity. He is driven by a simple philosophy: great technology should make everyone’s day better, customers and employees alike. His practical, hands-on approach turns product knowledge into real-world readiness, ensuring the people closest to customers have what they need to deliver on that promise. Before joining MHC, Shawn was employed at Heart of the Customer, where he worked with Fortune 100 companies to improve how they connect with customers — everything from reducing pain points to enhancing key moments in the customer journey.
