End of life, performance issues, compliance concerns, lack of cloud roadmap. Has your customer communications management (CCM) solution reached the end of the road? If you’re feeling unsure about the future, you’re not alone.
Customer experience is evolving at a breakneck pace. According to Accenture, 64% of consumers wish companies would respond faster to meet their changing needs. Most executives – 88% – think their customers are changing faster than their businesses can keep up.
Brands want to increase customer acquisition, customer loyalty and customer engagement. Companies are under pressure to drive growth. As a result, they need to think about delivering more exceptional experiences and connecting with customers in more dynamic ways. A positive customer experience is another way for brands to stand out from competitors in a crowded marketplace.
While many businesses have evolved past a product-centric approach to focus on the importance of experience, seeing it as something static can be their undoing. Instead, organizations need to focus on taking a customer journey approach.
5 signs a vendor might not be setting your business up for the future
Let’s talk about customer communications in the experience era. Expectations are higher than ever and the bar is always being raised by CX leaders. How easy is it to design and maintain communication templates? Who can edit templates and how easy is it to make changes? How interactive can communications be? How personal? Can communications be delivered on the channel of choice – including emerging ones – WhatsApp, RCS, SMS, email and more? Can dynamic content be added while ensuring it’s the latest approved version?
These are all important questions to consider while evaluating your current communications experience coupled with future strategic goals. Does your CCM vendor have capabilities that will allow you to continuously raise the bar? Here are a few things to watch out for:
1. End of life
Has your vendor communicated it will be moving your CCM solution to end of life, forcing a mandatory migration path? When a change of such magnitude happens, it’s a good idea to review existing processes to look for improvements and innovation.
2. Performance
Does your CCM vendor struggle to output large communications volumes? Are there delays or lagging issues faced by teams working on simultaneous communications jobs? If so, there may be an opportunity to dramatically improve time to market when launching new products and communications.
3. Compliance
Is adapting to new requirements and business needs a challenge? Are your communications able to keep pace with your customers’ changing needs and tastes? It’s important to ensure customers’ communications preferences are maintained and that your business can quickly adapt to new industry regulations.
4. Lack of roadmap to CXM
Customers are looking to drive digital conversations. The market is changing – transforming from CCM to customer experience management (CXM). It is bringing a new engagement model and better, more personalized customer experiences. Is your vendor also on a journey from CCM to CXM? Is there a proven ability to deliver migration from CCM to CXM?
5. Cloud
To support digital transformation, it’s imperative for vendors to have a strategy that supports modernization. Does the vendor have a microservice cloud native architecture? Does your vendor enable you to run anywhere and scale globally in your preferred location – public cloud, hybrid or off-cloud?
OpenText is helping many organizations take a journey-centric approach to modernization.
See why 9 of the top 10 Fortune 500 life insurers and 7 of the top 10 global banks use OpenText Experience Cloud for Communications.
