Customer communication management software (CCM software or CCM solutions) simplifies and improves communications between an enterprise and its customers, prospective customers, and business partners.
In today’s fast-paced and competitive business environment, clear communication is critical. Companies that prioritize transparency and proactive communication always come out on top, and customer communications management software helps them do just that.
Today, we’re going to talk about customer communication management software and CCM software: what it is, why you need it, and how to choose the best vendor for your specific needs.
What Is Customer Communications Management Software (CCM Software)?
CCM software is a digital solution specifically designed to enable and satisfy a business’ customer communications requirements. Once customer communications management software is deployed, company stakeholders can manage and automate customer communications efficiently in virtually every medium, including the web, email, SMS, and instant messaging.
Imagine what you’ll do with the time you save when you automate repetitive processes like customer correspondence, scheduling, appointment setting, reminders, and notifications! Customer communication management software helps you reduce costs on customer service, reduces help desk calls, and makes it easier for your employees to focus on more complex or higher-value tasks.
Additionally, business correspondence automation ensures your messages are sent and delivered at the right time, demonstrating your commitment to customer happiness and satisfaction. All this and more are enabled with CCM software.
Why Should You Use Customer Communication Management Software?
Today’s customers expect organizations to be ready to respond to their needs at all times. That means, day or night, weekday, or weekend, you must provide that service to ensure all needs are met. Here’s where customer communication management software really shines.
When you think about the challenges businesses face today, especially labor shortages, the more you can automate, the better. It’s a common scenario—companies are short-staffed and have their best people spending inordinate amounts of time on mundane activities when they should be focusing on building new business. CCM software is the solution.
Customer communications management software allows organizations to create and deliver personalized communications, giving customers a favorable impression of your organization and helping you build trust and foster loyalty.
Today, business leaders are under pressure to react and respond quickly. Whether you’re in a B2C or B2B environment, every second counts. It’s easier than ever for customers to jump ship for a competitor if they do not get their needs met. CCM software ensures your response is just in time, so customers feel confident about choosing you.
Without CCM software, the enterprise would need to manage customer communications manually and might not respond fast enough to prevent customer service issues or attrition. CCM solutions help you interact with customers in real-time, improving customer satisfaction from every standpoint and enabling personalized, highly relevant, and timely customer communications.
5 Tips on How to Choose the Best Customer Communication Management Software
As with any software solution, you want to ensure you choose CCM software that helps you achieve your business goals, is within your budget, and can grow with you. Here are five top tips to help you choose the best customer communication management software for your needs.
1. Multi-channel. What customer communication channels does your business use right now? Most companies use a combination of phone support, email, live chat, social, and knowledge base. The customer communication management software you choose should support all these and more. Ideally, you want CCM software that will scale with you, so look for capabilities and features beyond your current use.
2. Integrations. While most CCM solutions manage customer contact information, it’s likely you already have a CRM your employees like to use and an ERP to handle financial and other processes. Look for customer communication management software that integrates with your current systems, including your CRM, ERP, content management system (CMS), customer service platform, or any other software-driven system you rely on.
3. Personalization and contextualization. Personalized and contextual customer communications are critical strategies in building loyalty and trust—and cornerstones of the best customer communication management software solutions. Choose CCM software that makes personalization easy.
4. User-friendly. You’ll want to make sure your customer communication management software is easy to use for both technical and non-technical employees. Wide adoption throughout the enterprise accelerates time-to-value and ensures you are maximizing the benefits of your CCM software.
5. Advanced analytics. The best customer communication management software provides you with detailed data on customer communication—which means it needs to pull data from all your channels. Look for customer communication management software that delivers comprehensive business intelligence based on all your channels.
Key features of the best CCM software
CCM solutions are sometimes specialized to an industry, but most offer these basic features:
· Keep track of inbound and outbound communications
· Manage customer and vendor contact information
· Automate communications workflows and content distribution
· Personalize communication
· Integrates with CRM
· Provides communication templates for various purposes (mobile, SMS, email, etc.)
· Template design, formatting, and management. Templates help organizations streamline and optimize customer communication management, reducing costs and improving user engagement.
· Document creation and management
· Maintain document and database security
· Provide detailed analytics (on open rates, bounced messages, bad addresses, etc.)
CCM solutions also enable omnichannel communication, helping you maintain consistency and tone across all channels. Messaging is instantly optimized for the target device, meaning that it will always look familiar whether your customers receive their message on their mobile, tablet, desktop, or email.
Interactive forms and direct communication are also possible using customer communication management software, enabling you to collect information, get signatures, generate invoices, personalized quotes, or support tickets, create new accounts, and collect leads 24/7.
A single, flexible CCM system can be applied to everything from new product announcements, promotions, appointment reminders, and emergency communications. For example, notifying your customers about new COVID protocols or letting them know about upcoming website maintenance or service interruptions is easy with customer communication management software. They’ll appreciate that you took the time to let them know, and you’ll be confident that the message was received and opened.
CCM Solutions You Need
Customer communication management software is an essential support in optimizing and automating communication workflows, improving customer engagement, building strong relationships, and gaining insight into the success of your efforts.
Waypath CCM solutions are designed for you, integrated with your current systems, and tailored to your workflows to ensure the best results.
