Customer Communication Management (CCM)
How do you introduce it without the pitfalls?
You cannot implement customer communication. You’re either doing it already or very soon you don’t need to bother about it anymore. Because your customers are paying your bills. No clients – no money; it’s as simple as that.
Customer Communication Management is not really something you can implement. However, you can improve your existing customer communication if you start to use the following two things:
- What you know about your customer;
- What you know about communication.
Get to know your customers!
Using CCM, you are going to address your clients requirements. And you’re going to do this through their preferred channels, like mail, e-mail, internet or telephone. But before you can decide which mix is right vor any given customer, you need to get to know your customers. And that’s where IT can help.
Prevent pitfalls
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You’ll need an IT infrastructure with a central database which keeps track of whatever a client has asked or shown any interest in. And of course the database should have information about every item a customer has purchased and what has been proposed in the past.
In short, the data base should have records on all communications and transactions. In addition the IT infrastructure needs to robust enough to support automated, high volume in- and output processes.
If an organization does not (yet) have such an IT infrastructure in place but still want to start using CCM, we are more than happy to give advice on how to achieve it. But remember: the most important advice in this context is: Start small! Select a customer segment or a certain product with a large potential. Start with targeted (sales) activities. Monitor the results and fine tune your activities based on the findings. This does not cost a lot of money and usually this can be achieved using the existing infrastructure. Once the business case is ready, you can scale it to larger campaigns across multiple segments. Investments should be easier to realize now.
Resposibility for Customer Communication
Before you start using CCM it is essential to decide who should be responsibility for customer communication. Traditionally this was the job of Sales or the marketing department. But IT has a growing role in this. Usually marketers have spent a lot of time to develop and improve customer contacts and the question is whether marketing is happy when IT steps in with their technological approach and takes over customer communication. Most certainly not.
And it’s not necessary either. Because modern CCM technologies are dummy proof and the business themselves can manage the related tasks.
Faster time-to-market
As an example, marketers can add marketing messages to transaction documents, like invoices and statements. Without programming knowledge. With modern software tools you can preview the output directly on the screen. With the push of a button, marketing creates digital documents ready to be distributed via e-mail. Templates enforce the corporate identity and make sure that the essential information and legally required clauses are included in the document and positioned correctly. And the interfaces to customer segmentation and customer data are managed in the background.
Shifting these tasks from IT to the ‘business’ significantly increases the flexibility of your output strategy resulting in a faster time-to-market.
But please note that we do not suggest to keep IT out – on the contrary! CCM is not possible without IT involvement. Splitting output streams into multiple channels and still maintaining synchronicity is essential and should be in the hands of IT, just as well as keeping the database(s) updated.
Because the customer is their key competency, we suggest a small organisational adjustment which places the responsibility for CCM with the business.
