THE CONVERGENCE OF CUSTOMER COMMUNICATIONS …...The Convergence of Customer Communications Management (CCM) and Customer Experience Management (CXM) | 4 WHITE PAPER I CLASSIFICATION:

© 2017 GMC Software

White Paper

THE CONVERGENCE OF CUSTOMER

COMMUNICATIONS MANAGEMENT (CCM) AND

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT (CXM)Bringing Your Customer Communications into the 21st Century and into Alignment with Customer Expectations

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© 2017 GMC Software. All rights reserved.

This white paper was sponsored by GMC.

For more information about Dynamic Communications and other GMC solutions,

visit www.gmc.net

When it comes to the customer experience (CX) strategy,

customer communications are often one of the most

overlooked – yet critical – components of the customer

journey. In many cases, the CX strategy tends to focus

on frontline communications – training and coaching

employees regularly on how to best speak (and interact)

with customers. Yet, customer communications such as

contracts, call center inquires, customer correspondence,

email correspondence, welcome kits, invoices and

statements, are equally important to the overall customer

experience.

Organizational silos, a complex (yet very critical)

infrastructure of new and legacy systems, changing

regulations, and outdated processes and technologies

have traditionally acted as a barrier to incorporating these

types of communications into the enterprise CX strategy.

How will organizations overcome these challenges to

deliver cross-channel communications that are streamlined,

consistent, personalized and relevant across the entire

customer journey?

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Table of Contents

Communications and the Customer Experience _____________________________________ 4

The Experience Belongs to the Customer __________________________________________ 4

Centralizing Communications ____________________________________________________ 5

Legacy Systems and Approaches Yield Customer Disconnects _________________________ 8

Connecting Marketing, Customer Experience, and IT ________________________________ 8

Journey Mapping for a Better Customer Experience _________________________________ 9

What’s Better than Journey Maps? _______________________________________________ 10

From CCM to CXM: Analyst Perspectives _________________________________________ 13

The Convergence of Customer Communications Management (CCM) and Customer Experience Management (CXM) | 4W

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Communications and the Customer Experience

Communication is important in any relationship, and it’s no less important in the relationship that

you have with your customers. Traditional customer communications driven by CCM technologies

such as contracts, invoices and statements are an important component of the customer

experience, yet are often over-looked.

The right cross-functional teams need to be involved to ensure that disparate voices, systems, and

channels don’t sidetrack the brand messaging and, hence, the experience. Consistent messaging,

just like consistent experiences, builds trust. Trust keeps customers coming back. Communications

drive both the brand promise and the customer experience.

The Experience Belongs to the Customer

The following statements should not be a surprise to you.

The customer wants it now (whatever “it” is for each individual customer). The customer wants

it easy and personalized. The customer has the power. The customer has information at her

fingertips. If she doesn’t, she knows where to find it. Customers communicate with each other,

either directly or through reviews, feedback, and other ways to offer up recommendations.

Companies need to be listening.

The world is changing fast; so are your customers. Companies need to be able to respond

quickly. They need to be able to communicate via customers’ preferred channels. Tone, style,

and messaging needs to be consistent, regardless of the channel. Delighting the customer and

delivering a great customer experience is a huge competitive advantage for any company.

What is customer experience? In its simplest definition, it is (a) the sum of all the interactions that

a customer has with a company over the course of the relationship with that company and (b) the

customer’s feelings, emotions, and perceptions of the brand over the course of those interactions.

Every touch, every interaction matters. How did you make the customer feel?


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Centralizing Communications

There are many different types of communications, i.e., digital, mobile, print, verbal, etc. The

focus today is on all things digital, including customer communications, but many industries

– particularly in highly-regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, telecoms and

utilities – still use print communications on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, customer communications are often over-looked as a major and critical touchpoint

along the customer experience journey, but they cannot be. There is a real need to have a

centralized system to (a) map the customer journey – bringing into the map artifacts that

customers use or interact with along the way including marketing communications, letters,

welcome kits, statements and bills, and (b) ensure all communications, regardless of medium,

deliver a seamless brand experience for the customer.

For example, financial services is an industry that still relies heavily on print communications

and, yet, is actively transitioning to digital. Many customers still receive and complete loan

documentation and credit card applications, in paper format, as well as statements, privacy

notices, and other critical communications. But financial services websites and mobile apps are the

portals into a customer’s account, and customers want real-time access to this information.

Think about the last time you applied for a loan or a mortgage. How was that experience? Did

it feel like the financial institution was behind the times when it comes to communications,

documentation, and channels of interaction? Was there mixed messaging across the various

communications channels?


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You clearly see the disparate messaging and branding that gets delivered between digital and

traditional media. Digital is fun and sexy. Traditional is not, and so it gets left out of a lot of

customer experience conversations. Where does the breakdown happen?

A young woman is excited to make her first home purchase. She decides to apply for a mortgage from her primary bank. She enters some preliminary information through the website, signaling to the bank that she is ready to apply for a loan.

A few days later, a loan application packet arrives at her front door. The packet is filled with 100+ black-and-white pages of paper to read and to sign. Confused as to which papers to sign, she decides to call the customer service center for advice. The customer service center does not have a record of her application. Frustrated with her call, she trudges through the pages, trying to understand the legalese and other nonsense that 99% of the population doesn’t understand (and yet still signs because they know they have to).

Unfortunately, the bank does not have the mortgage process optimized for their mobile application. Instead she must hunt down a scanner, then scan and upload documents via her account on the bank’s website.

Waiting for the loan approval process begins. She did not receive confirmation from her bank that her application was received so the young woman again calls the customer service center.

After a few weeks of waiting, she is approved! Escrow closes, and she owns her new home!

A fancy welcome kit arrives from her bank about a week after she moves in. It’s colorful and filled with warm and friendly messages about the joys of home ownership. It contains documents that give advice about home ownership and also has some information about the bank and who to contact with questions about her mortgage. Being the digital user that she is, the woman files away the folder into a dark corner of her house never to look at the paper documents again.

A month later, her first autopay mortgage payment arrives. A question arises about a fee within the payment, while the answer to her question could be found in the Welcome Kit, the young woman instead searches the web. With no digital documentation, and after two bad experiences with the call center, she decides to just give up. She also makes a personal vow that her second mortgage won’t be with this bank!

To illustrate the point, here’s a classic example of disconnect and inconsistency - from branding to

messaging or positioning to the experience - in the financial services industry:


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Traditional communications such as contracts, welcome kits, customer correspondence, bills and

account statements have historically been owned and compiled by IT and operations, while the

social and digital channels have been owned my marketing and the digital teams. The latter is cool

and hip and fun - it’s what everyone is working on now - while the former is old-fashioned and

draws on several disparate legacy systems to create. The latter is about being where the customer

is now and staying relevant as the audience evolves, while the former is about getting the right

information to the right customer; it’s informative and accurate.

When it comes to these traditional communications, rarely does the customer voice and the

customer’s experience get incorporated into their design and delivery. These documents

perpetuate inside-out thinking, where the company knows best, rather than outside-in thinking,

where the customer is a part of every design and decision.

GMC Software commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct research among financial services

firms about how they are improving the customer experience, including documents and other

types of communications. The chart below shows where the focus lies.

Invoices, statements, and other necessary customer documents and communications aren’t going

away. They are fundamental essentials of the business. But, as long as companies hang on to

organizational silos and outdated customer communications management (CCM) technologies

and processes that don’t allow them to move into the 21st century, a century that requires

companies to have centralized efforts across the entire organization to deliver a great customer

experience, customers will continue to be frustrated.

“How much of a priority is improving the customer experience across each of the following digital channels?”

Customer service

New customer onboarding

Marketing campaigns/lead generation

Claims

Billing/statements

Policy/contract production

Presales

Quote and proposaldevelopment

Policy/contract negotiation

61%

59%

55%

46%

45%

41%

40%

39%

38%

High priority

Base: 150 IT and business decision-makers at financial services organizations with more than 500 employees

Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of GMC, July 2015


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Legacy Systems and Approaches Yield Customer DisconnectsThe challenge with these necessary documents is how they are created: in a proven and stable

environment. Historically, they are IT-driven and operations-driven to ensure they are branded,

compliant, personalized, and relevant - from an operational perspective. Many - often five to

seven – disparate legacy systems flow into the creation of one piece of communication. And there

are compliance and regulatory requirements, meaning there must be approval processes, as well.

None of that aligns with - or connects to - your marketing, branding, or customer experience.

Instead, it all feels very operationally driven. Because it is. While technology has moved forward

- and customers have adopted and evolved their needs and preferences along with it - many

companies are committed to their legacy systems; they can’t evolve fast enough.

In most cases, the CMO and the CXO (Chief Experience Officer) are not involved at any point in

that process, and so the message that these documents sends to customers is different from what

the CMO conveys elsewhere. It’s important to communicate to customers, across the organization

and along the entire customer journey, in one voice.

What’s holding companies back from delivering a great communications experience? Clearly

legacy CCM technologies and processes are an issue, but so is the thinking that only IT and

operations should be involved in creating these documents. Perhaps there’s also a lack of skills

or know-how in terms of bringing the back office together with the front office, to implement a

seamless end-to-end customer experience.

How then do we give CMOs and CXOs visibility into all customer communications? What tools are

at our disposal to align the operations folks with those in charge of delivering seamless branding

and experiences for the customer? How do we reduce the friction between operations and

experience professionals? How do we help them do their jobs more effectively, in the name of a

better customer experience?

Customized messaging and a personalized customer experience ranked as the leading marketing priority for 46% of marketing and communications execs polled worldwide in November 2014 by Teradata. - eMarketer

Connecting Marketing, Customer Experience, and ITIt’s critical that the entire organization works together to create the customer experience that

your customers want and expect. How do you shift the focus of the entire company to put

the customer front and center? How do you help employees in all departments work together,

collaborate, and innovate in the name of a better customer experience? Particularly, how do you

give the CMO and the CXO visibility into the entire end-to-end CCM process? How do we ensure

that the CMO oversees all messaging and communications, while the CXO infuses them with the

customer voice, and the CIO focuses on implementing and integrating technologies that make data

and information access easier?


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There’s one tool that you must have in your marketing and customer experience toolbox. There’s

one tool that helps you: get organizational buy-in for customer focus and customer centricity,

understand your customer and his interactions with your organization, build empathy for the

customer and what he’s going through as he interacts with your organization, bring the customer

voice to life for the organization, and return the business to human thinking, not number (policy,

account, invoice, etc.) thinking. The tool? Journey maps.

Journey Mapping for a Better Customer ExperienceIIf you haven’t yet thought about using journey maps within your organization, it’s time to change

your thinking and get started with mapping. If you want to give the CMO, the CXO, the CIO,

and the rest of the company visibility into the end-to-end customer experience, not just with

communications but with all interactions, you need to map customer journeys.

Customer journey maps done and used properly come with a lot of benefits, including:Cross-

functional departments collaborate and work together for a common goal: a seamless customer

experience.

Breaking down organizational silos.

Cross-functional departments collaborate and work together for a common goal: a seamless

customer experience.

Building a single view of the customer.

Once those silos are broken down and departments are sharing data about customers, that single

view is achievable, leading the way to more-personalized communications and experiences.

https://www.gmc.net/resources/dont-waste-your-time-customer-journey-maps


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Ensuring everyone has skin in the game.

Allowing various departments to see how they all impact a single journey ensures they all have

skin in the game.

• For example, a customer support experience is not the sole responsibility of the customer

support department; sales, marketing, product, and others need to understand how they

impacted the experience upstream that resulted in the call to customer support.

Creating a window into CX.

Giving back-office employees a window into how they impact the customer experience.

• Many people are of the mindset that only the frontline impacts or affects the customer

experience; this is absolutely not the case.

Achieving a single view of the customer.

Bringing disparate views and systems together into one place.

Identifying moments of truth and performance measurement opportunities

Communications is an oft-overlooked touchpoint and potential key moment of truth.

Identifying inefficiencies.

Allowing you to identify and, hence, update/fix/kill inefficient touchpoints and processes, rules,

policies that don’t make sense.

Marching to the same beat.

Becoming the foundation for your customer experience strategy, ensuring that all areas of the

business understand the work to be done and march to the same beat.

Specific to customer communications management, journey maps give CMOs, CXOs, and CIOs

insights into the complexity of the entire customer communications process. This group will also

benefit by going into an even deeper level of detail by doing some process mapping, which is

where you outline all of the internal processes associated with a particular output or outcome.

What’s Better than Journey Maps?

Is there any better tool than journey mapping to help the organization understand the customer

and the customer experience? Well, no. But consider this. If you combine journey mapping

with a modern customer communications management (CCM) platform, there’s no way that

communications design will be the after-thought of the customer experience that it’s traditionally

been.

Leading CCM solutions allow marketing professionals to design, edit, approve, and test

communications across every channel. They show side-by-side omnichannel previews so every

communication is visible in every channel context. This ensures communication consistency,

ensuring they use one voice and have consistent messaging, while preserving the channel

experience.


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According to an Experian Data Quality study, the top three barriers to achieving a single view of the customer, which facilitates personalized communications and experiences, are: (1) inability to link different technologies, (2) poor data quality, and (3) lack of relevant technology.

Many of these tools also incorporate customer insights that help to ensure that your

communications are engaging and deliver on your objectives and desired outcomes.

Linking your journey maps with your CCM is one way to ensure you give visibility to the CMO and

the CXO, allowing for one voice to be used along the entire customer journey.

Such a system, one where customer communications management and journey mapping are

integrated in real time side by side, brings together the benefits of both and allows you to

overcome some of the legacy system issues mentioned earlier. You will:

• Break down silos and work together across the organization to develop messaging and

documentation that meets customers’ needs

• Develop personalized and relevant messaging via any channel or medium

• Ensure consistency of messaging, since designs are created in a channel-agnostic way and

pushed to the customer via his channel of choice


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This joint, centralized platform is convenient and allows CMOs and CXOs to get the right message

to the right person at the right time, in the customer’s preferred format. It removes barriers to

change that have been inhibiting your communications management for too long.

• It introduces efficiencies that can’t be achieved elsewhere.

• It drives collaboration and cross-functional cooperation, breaking down silos and opening the

door for a seamless experience for the customer from across the organization.

• It accelerates the communications design process.

• It allows for the compliance team to a part of the design process in a way that it couldn’t

previously, again expediting the time from design to delivery to the customer.

• It gets the entire organization speaking the language of the customer - not the internal,

technical, non-customer-friendly terms normally used - by walking in his shoes and being

forced to take the customer perspective in the design process.

Bring your customer communications into the 21st century - and into alignment with customer

expectations. Adopt a platform that allows you to centralize key tools in your customer experience

toolbox: customer journey maps and customer communications management systems.


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2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Communications Management Software*

Analyst report

IT leaders can use this research to assess the tools that can improve

this communications process, reduce costs, and deliver highly relevant

communications

CCM platforms will continue to enhance customer experience (CX), evolve toward broader communication needs, and more tightly integrate with other business applications.

Enterprise architecture professionals looking to help line-of-business (LOB) owners improve the customer experience now realize the potential of CCM.

Today, the ability to link CCM to all points in the customer journey is gaining ground, with stronger mobile support and integration with marketing automation and digital experience delivery platforms.

The Forrester Wave™: Customer Communications Management, Q2 2016, Craig Le Clair

The Forrester Wave™: Customer Communications Management, Q2 2016

Analyst report

Forrester evaluated 14 Customer Communications Management (CCM)

vendors across 22 criteria. Find out who was named a Leader in this

complimentary report.

From CCM to CXM: Analyst Perspectives

The CCM market’s necessary evolution beyond document composition and output management technologies is evident.

Vendors are providing new delivery models, such as cloud/software as a service (SaaS), and incorporating social, analytics and mobile features into their product roadmaps. The next — and necessary — evolutionary step is transforming CCM software into customer experience management (CXM) platforms.

Gartner Predicts 2016: Evolving Print Market Published: 3 December 2015

https://www.gmc.net/resources/2017-gartner-magic-quadrant-customer-communications-management-software

www.gmc.net/resources/forrester-wave-tm-customer-communications-management-q2-2016

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Readers can view live examples of GMC Inspire at

www.gmc.net/demo. It’s definitely worth a look.

© 2017 GMC Software. All rights reserved.

www.gmcsoftware.com

GMC Software helps companies communicate with their customers and employees. We empower

organizations to create stronger engagements with timely and relevant communications. A

Neopost Digital Company, GMC Software provides the means for business users to develop

contextual, highly individualized communications across all channels that span the entire customer

journey. A leader in customer communications, we support over 1,600 clients and partners in

banking, insurance, healthcare and service providers around the world.

http://www.gmc.net/demo

http://www.gmcsoftware.com

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THE CONVERGENCE OF CUSTOMER COMMUNICATIONS …...The Convergence of Customer Communications Management (CCM) and Customer Experience Management (CXM) | 4 WHITE PAPER I CLASSIFICATION: