Helping IT Teams Solve the CCM Challenge
Without your IT department, communication can’t happen at all. With a CCM in place IT can make it all happen.
Turn Messy into Mastery with CCM
If your company has no Customer Communication Management (CCM) system in place, IT-governed customer communications pose multiple challenges for your IT specialists. Their mission is to deploy solutions that achieve your organization’s goals within a complex corporate system. Isolated groups and individuals are supposed to collaborate yet they often don’t. In short, it’s messy.
IT is expected to somehow master the challenges of customer communications, and a CCM can turn that mess into mastery. CCM solutions provide a flexible collaboration platform as well as an advanced document production infrastructure, freeing IT to focus on technical tasks while supporting company-wide teamwork.
Challenges, Meet Solutions
1. Managing Multi-Layered Data Across the Platform
IT is asked to cost-effectively empower the organization to engage customers with communication materials delivered via multiple channels (web, email, print), in multiple languages, and on multiple devices (PC, MAC, iPad, Android, etc.) according to the preferences of each customer, but always in compliance with policies.
SOLUTION
CCM systems power omnichannel communications and provide organizations with high flexibility in customer communications. They can start conversations with their customers on one channel and continue them on others with no adjustment time and the highest level of quality.
2. Supporting Modern Document Formats and Communication Trends
IT specialists are asked to pull their organization’s vision of the future into the present, as projects that leverage new capabilities such as interactive documents, data visualization, embedded multi-media, and two-way communication become the norm.
SOLUTION
CCM systems leverage customizable smart document features to provide rich media experiences that will draw the customer’s attention. With interactive documents, companies can provide extensive information to their customers in formats that are easy to read and navigate.
3. Supporting Consistent Brand Management
IT departments are asked to give those responsible for managing “the brand” oversight on document quality and layout. Brand managers have the responsibility to incorporate brand-specific details in a consistent manner and assure the organization is delivering communication materials (statements, invoices, presentations, letters, brochures, catalogs, etc.) consistent with the corporate image.
SOLUTION
CCM software features advanced document template management capabilities that assure consistent branding across the full range of documents to project the corporate persona in all outbound communications.
4. Providing Consistent Customer Engagement
IT is often asked to remove latency between message-inception and delivery while still offering personalization, customization, and quality controls. In a dialog, late responses are awkward and far from engaging. IT is tasked to make standard outbound documents dynamic, as they are seen as opportunities to engage with customers.
SOLUTION
CCM systems power customer journey mapping, which relays the specific problem areas that customers encounter in their interaction with the company’s platform. They also provide important insight on the most engaging points of their journey, which could be used to drive engagement even further.
5. Driving Production in Non-Technical Departments
IT departments must empower non-technical groups to produce content with minimal dependence on the IT staff. Content professionals expect to communicate with customers without working through the IT department. While not providing content themselves, IT specialists are asked to support collaboration within the community of content professionals and the operations managers. They are asked to protect existing transactional business processes from risk, while at the same time opening the document production portions to content professionals and absorbing frequent changes.
SOLUTION
CCM systems offer workflow integration and facilitate breaking communication development projects into separate tasks in an access-based work environment. The process is governed by high-level members of the team. This way, technical and non-technical staff can work on the specific parts of the process they specialize in without depending on each other.
6. Maintaining Security Across Personalized Communications
IT specialists are asked to compartmentalize and secure sensitive data, while at the same time breaking down data silos that hinder a unified approach towards “customer intelligence” so that all data can be brought into the personalization and customization of outbound messages.
SOLUTION
CCM systems support individualized communications at scale. Personalization is an integrated feature, and the platform supports each customer to customize their interaction with the company so that it best fits their needs. Both the customer data and the personalization data are secured in the CCM system at all times.
7. Providing Rich Capabilities at Low Cost
IT is asked to keep costs at a minimum, but still provide rich capabilities for diverse needs, such as interactive document production for the customer service center, on-demand document production for the website, and batch document generation for accounts receivable.
SOLUTION
A CCM platform can be integrated to fulfill the needs of each of the company’s departments. It supports both batch and on-demand document generation on the fly and provides the same level of quality across one-time communications and high-level document production.
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How CCM Connects IT to a Broader Community
Everybody likes teamwork, but what really qualifies as collaboration? Are you in the same building? Are your desks close together? Here are some ways that document production collaboration through CCM can put the work in working together.
COLLABORATION WITH NON-TECHNICAL PEERS
Legacy IT departments are great at multitasking, but sometimes this works against them. Cross-training has traditionally been a constant of the IT programmer because customer relationships have often depended not only on their management of important customer data, but also on how the company begins to interact with it – designing customer documents, producing them, and ensuring they are sent to the right place. Wouldn’t your technical team’s time be better spent working on technical projects?
A CCM platform promises a more user-friendly interface than legacy tools that have performed the same functions in the past. It allows for the delegation of these tasks beyond just one department. Your whole organization can now be centered on a single platform – designers design, writers write, programmers program. Because you know what IT departments are good at? Focusing on one thing and doing it well.
CLARITY THROUGH HIGH-LEVEL OVERSIGHT
Though you would expect an executive team to be greatly concerned with customer relationships, legacy solutions have required them to act with a measure of faith when it comes to the details of customer correspondence. Like the graphic designers and content creators, they have not been involved in many customer relationship functions due to inaccessibility.
That’s changing with CCM platforms as well. All-in-one solutions are equipped with oversight capabilities that give executives role-based access, allowing them to track the progress of different projects, and review and approve them. This should reduce pains for those executives, and for the IT staff because everyone has a clear idea of the progress that is being made.
GREATER INVESTMENT IN COMPANY MISSION
Many companies want employees who bleed the brand. Some have achieved this, while others might only tell themselves they have. It’s one thing to talk about the devotion of your staff, and another to see it in action.
The foundation of your proud culture will ultimately be a collaboration between all the teams within the company. For everyone to rally around each other, it’s important to first establish a unified, consistent brand, something best achieved through teamwork.
A CCM system is a breath of fresh air for your company’s IT department because it facilitates their communication with non-technical teams and supports cross-department collaboration in an integrated workflow governed by specialists. Request a demo of our CCM system today to see it in action!
