Gartner report provides insights into the changing face of customer communications

Customer communications are recognised as the critical touch-point between an organisation and their customers. In many cases, they are the only connection. But in a world where change is constant, how do businesses keep up?

Quadient who Cumulo9 represent, have made this latest Gartner report available to us and we want to share it, as it contains valuable insights, such as the fact that some Forward-thinking application leaders are bringing CCM into a broader coordinated strategy that spans all customer engagement touchpoints. That by doing so, they can begin to leverage CCM for marketing, CRM and new customer engagement services based on a two-way interactive relationship model.

We’ve summarised the overview and report recommendations for you here in our latest blog.

What are the key report findings?

• The demands of digital business are driving organizations to look beyond traditional customer communications — that is, print content delivered by mail or by email attachments. This content needs to be woven into customer conversations across multiple channels, often as part of delivering services, not just information.
• Customer communications management (CCM) vendors are rushing to change their portfolios to adapt to these same trends, creating uncertainty about when, where and how emerging platforms will fit into and serve their customers’ changing requirements.
• One of the biggest questions is how the traditional CCM platform and the emerging digital experience platform (DXP) capabilities will evolve, overlap and potentially converge, creating uncertainty for CCM vendors and users alike. Both end-user organisations and CCM vendors are assessing requirements, technologies, and partnerships.

How to keep pace with the changing face of customer communications?

The report recommends that application leaders in charge of customer relationship management and customer experience should:

• Start transitioning to next-generation customer communications by defining requirements that link these evolving communications with a services delivery approach across multiple channels.
• Plan for uncertain technology evolution and market disruption by initiating a strategic dialogue with existing or prospective CCM vendors to map their portfolio plans and partnerships to the organization’s three-year requirements.
• Collaborate with digital marketing and customer experience stakeholders to evaluate how traditional CCM and digital experience platform capabilities can complement each other to satisfy customer engagement requirements.

Download the full report here to understand how digital business demands are driving organisations to look beyond traditional CCM including the importance of ensuring your CCM information becomes an integrated part of your customer’s experience. Tactics such as linking bills and statements to discount offers, loyalty programs, monthly spend trends are becoming commonplace as part of the CCM customer engagement. The report also discusses the relative uncertainty on how CCM and Digital Experience Platforms will overlap and offers some recommendations to evaluate the impact on your business solutions.

About Cumulo9

We’ve been helping companies do better business since 2001, proudly providing world-class business email services for delivering transactional email documents, marketing campaigns and tracked email signatures. Our email engine features industry best deliverability, tracking, and reporting of important business email helping our customers to leverage existing email communications into sales opportunities.

In 2019 Cumulo9 became New Zealand Platinum Partners of Quadient – the market leader in CCM. Cumulo9 provides total support for Quadient Inspire customers in the New Zealand market, leveraging Quadient global reach and industry knowledge.

At Cumulo9, we can provide you with the very best service available. We offer detailed insight into your customer and client engagement, professional design and email generation tools and more – talk to us now to find out more.