Why You Need a Leader in CCM for Digital Transformation

As a Chief Marketing Officer, ensuring we’re delivering effective customer communications is at the top of my priority list. As a technology geek and a die-hard advocate for Enterprise Content Management, customer communications interests me in two regards. First, the expectations for customer communications have dramatically changed; and, second, customer communications technologies now play a significant role in Digital Transformation. Understanding the impact of these trends is critical, which is why I’m thrilled that EMC has been named a “Leader” for the third year running in the annual Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Communications Management (CCM) Software.

Why should your organization care about the changes in customer communications? Here are a few telling metrics:

Data Lakes for Big Data MOOCAnd it’s not just millennials. Think about how customers interact with banks today. We may receive monthly statements via email, but if our balance reaches a certain level, the bank sends a text notification. We may still receive credit card offers in the postal mail, but get invitations for better mortgage rates via Twitter or Facebook. And the branding, messaging, and tone are consistent, irrespective of delivery method. In the past, everything would have been sent to the customer the way the bank wanted. Now the customer is in control.

This change of control means that organizations need the right tools to help them manage the exponentially complex world of communications “the way the customer wants.”

With our CCM solution, EMC Document Sciences xPression, organizations can communicate using the customer’s channels of choice, in an intelligent, timely, context-sensitive way. It’s designed to deliver a better customer experience, while providing additional benefits to the organizations that implement it – cost efficiencies, scalability, compliance, and more.

Which leads me to my next point: CCM is not only critical to customer communications, but is becoming a critical part of the customer experience overall. And customer experience is a primary motivator for Digital Transformation. This truly is the age of the customer.

Why? The digital economy fundamentally changed customer experience expectations and has become the key differentiator for successful organizations. The right customer experience can disrupt industries that have been in place for decades. We can all name cloud-native disrupters, like Uber, Netflix and Amazon that have revolutionized how we book transportation, view movies and make purchases. But, think also about more traditional companies, like Geico and GE, who are taking the lead in digital transformation to disrupt their industries.

With this new bar set, new technologies are required to manage all aspects of customer interactions. This is one of the main reasons we’ve embarked on our next-generation offerings supporting customer interactions and experience, building on our heritage and technologies in all areas of ECM, including Customer Communications Management.

As a CMO, I’m pleased to see customer communications elevated to a new level in the digital conversation. But I’m also aware that this is no longer only a marketing priority.  Now, more than ever, customer experience is becoming a critical business priority – one that’s driving the shape of the organization as a whole – particularly as organizations take their first steps toward Digital Transformation.

About the Author: Chris McLaughlin