CLOSE THE GAPS IN YOURCUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Merge Customer Communications Managementand Digital Experience Delivery Technologies

for More Complete Customer Journeys

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INTRODUCTION

In early 2015, Topdown commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a research study on the way the market thinks about customer communications management (CCM) and customer experience management (CXM). We wanted to explore whether and how CCM might merge with digital experience delivery (DXD) platforms used for CXM. The study revealed three major pain points related to the current state of CXM and CCM:

• Organizations are not very satisfied with their ability to manage customer-facing communications across the entire customer journey.

• Organizations need CCM to merge into CXM.• Organizations want a web content management (WCM) system to serve as the core

of a CCM solution. Why do these challenges exist, and why aren’t they easy to solve? Though more and more companies are acknowledging the critical importance of CX to their bottom lines, there are significant gaps in most organizations’ alignment of people, processes and technology with customer experience priorities. Most significantly, there’s an imbalance in many organizations’ allocation of resources to address interactions between customer and touchpoint (e.g., web site, email, SMS) at every stage of the customer life cycle. We see – and research confirms – that there is a disproportionate emphasis on the acquisition side of the customer life cycle (i.e., Discover, Explore and Buy). In other words, organizations are investing a great deal on CX for marketing and sales, often at the expense of customer service and retention (i.e., Engage, Ask and Use). There are several powerful WCM-based digital experience delivery platforms on the marketing side that help people discover our brands and engage with us through a multitude of channels. These DXD platforms provide the ability to integrate content management and marketing automation efforts while collecting data to build customer insights. We can use DXD platforms to generate content and track leads, shepherding visitors toward making a purchase. But once we have them – once prospects become customers – there’s nothing currently available on the customer service and retention side of the technology market to continue the customer experience established by the CXM. That’s a problem because customer retention relies on good CX, which in turn directly correlates to future business and positive word of mouth. The only way to retain customers is by

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providing experiences that consistently generate positive emotions – at every touchpoint, through every channel, across every customer journey and through every stage of the customer lifecycle. You have to look at it as two sides of the same coin. Shareholders want you to profitably grow revenue, quarter over quarter, year over year. That means you need customers – you need to get new ones, but you also need to hold onto the ones you have. To grow revenue, you need incrementally more business from existing customers. Satisfied customers are more likely to be loyal customers, and loyal customers are more likely to make more purchases and/or refer your brand to others. Good CX is what makes satisfied and loyal customers. To that end, it’s time to start closing the gaps and offering a consistently strong customer experience at every touchpoint. So if you’ve sunk money, time and energy into providing exceptional digital experiences on the marketing side, you’re halfway there. Now, turn your attention to the rest of the organization – the side dedicated to serving and retaining existing customers. If you look closely at that part of your organization, you’re likely to see people focused on operational metrics rather than CX goals; content creation and communication management processes operating in a vaccuum; and legacy CCM technologies that are very loosely connected to your CX architecture. These combine to produce a very different – and often very poor – customer experience for current customers. These legacy CCM systems are capable of generating a very high volume of highly-personalized customer-facing communications. But vendors have been struggling for some time to push the relevancy of their CCM solutions in a web and mobile world. If you’re looking to make investments there or are considering consolidating your CCM systems, returns will be limited unless you rethink the mission of those technologies, as we are doing at Topdown in response to our research study. We are now looking at the strengths of CCM – data handling, automation, personalization and multi-channel output in particular – and how we can use them to build better communications and improve CX at all touchpoints, not just the ones we’ve traditionally “owned,” like print. The answer is to use a WCM-based CCM system integrated with an organization’s existing DXD platform to “marry” the strengths of CCM with the strengths of marketing-side DXD. We’re not there yet; the technology doesn’t exist yet to do it – but we’re working on it at this very moment, and the solution is on its way.

In the meantime, you can begin by thinking how you might realign your organization’s people, processes and technology to optimize a WCM-based CCM solution when it debuts. Start with this eBook, which will guide you through our study findings, current market analysis, and the direction of CCM as a key component of organizations’ overall CXM strategy and architecture.

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Digital experience delivery (DXD) and customer communications management (CCM) live on opposite sides of the customer life cycle, and they are therefore typically siloed and often opaque to each other.They’re handled by different teams of people; they function under different processes; and they use separate technologies to accomplish their goals. They are led by different senior managers with their own perspectives, agendas and ways of measuring what success means for their particular departments. But most importantly, the software tools that have been built so far to serve the needs of acquisition versus customer service and retention do not even share the same technological foundation – specifically, the languages of the web.

WCM: THE BEATING HEART OF DIGITAL CONTENT DELIVERYMarketing- and sales-focused DXD platforms are typically built on web content management (WCM) systems. They evolved and matured from a web-based world and

now power web sites, portals, social media, and mobile. WCMs are great for all of that. Everything is HTML-ready, CSS-enabled, Javascript-friendly, and so on. To greater and lesser degrees, these tool sets can be made to work together relatively easily with some coding and IT support. There is sometimes difficulty with proprietary, locked-down systems and making older WCMs compatible with newer tools, but by and large, these technologies play well together in the same digital sandbox.

EMAIL: STILL DIGITAL BUT LESS WCM-ISHAlso digital but not as web-friendly is email. It’s a “kissing cousin,” but it grew out of a different delivery platform. Many emails are HTML, but the supporting technology

is different enough from that of WCMs that HTML emails have to be templated, put through conversion and inlining to be rendered viewable, and tested on multiple email clients and devices to ensure that they look and function as intended.

SMS AND MMS: GETTING EVEN FURTHER AWAY FROM THE WCM WORLDShort message service, better known as SMS, is text messaging. Multimedia messaging service, or MMS, is text messaging with the ability to include images, audio or video. Most

cellular and wifi-enabled devices can send and receive SMS and MMS messages. Very short text messages are a great way to send push notifications, links to customer portals, and important alerts. They are also the preferred communication method for some groups, including Millennials,

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as well as consumers in Latin America and Africa, where mobile is the dominant digital experience and text is the near-universal communication technology available to all. But SMS moves even further away from WCM-friendly support technology. Despite a strong customer preference for it, there are few, if any, WCMs attempting to incorporate SMS capabilities into their DXD platforms.

PRINT: THE BLACK SHEEP OF THE DXD FAMILYAnd then there’s print, formerly the king of content, now pretty much the black sheep of the new world of digital communications. Despite the surge to digital across the

board, somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 percent of business communications are still printed and mailed, printed at home from PDFs, etc. Many industries, including the giants of health care, finance and manufacturing, are required by government regulations to print and mail certain types of customer correspondence and maintain an audit trail of such communications. Plus, many customers still prefer to receive printed versions of certain types of communications. Sometimes they want it both digitally and in print; other times they just want one or the other. In our omni-channel world, we have to figure out how to give them both, based on their expressed personal preferences for how they want to interact with our companies.

So what’s the problem with print? Maybe you’re creating your document templates in Microsoft Word® already; virtually everyone can open and print Word docs or PDFs, right? Just deliver those digitally! Well, you can display a PDF document in most web browsers, but it actually takes a third-party tool to convert documents for printing (or even viewing when it comes to mobile), and it takes more third-party tools to mail them. Moreover, these technologies were not developed from web-based roots, so it can take significant coding prowess – or at least a lot of time rebuilding “digital” templates from print-oriented originals – to pull it off.

Because of this fundamental incompatibility with DXD platforms, we don’t foresee the acquisition and service/retention sides of the house ever operating with equal effectiveness on the same, single WCM system. Instead, we see them developing on different WCMs – merging their foundational languages and supporting technologies for improved transparency, consistency and personalization across touchpoints – but evolving in tandem according to the differing business goals of serving existing customers’ needs as opposed to attracting potential customers’ attention.

WHAT CCM BRINGS TO THE DXD WORLDOne of the primary objectives in the CCM world, which we believe will mesh well with WCM-based DXD when the time comes, is to have families of communications, organized by templates or groups of templates. We like to use as few templates as we can and as many reusable objects as we can. We use sophisticated data mapping to go beyond what traditional print communications were, and most DXD platforms are still, capable of delivering. That will benefit both sides of the house and bring increased transparency and consistency among departments and functions.

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Companies overwhelmingly say they want a WCM-based CCM solution. They need to address pain points such as customers’ lack of consistent access to channels they want to use to communicate with companies – all the way around the customer life cycle . The beauty of a WCM-based CCM solution would be having templates that are accessible to everyone responsible for customer communications at various touchpoints, from discovery to purchase to service to engagement.

FAMILY REUNION: BRING CCM AND DXD TOGETHERRight now, too many people, processes and technologies divide CCM and DXD. Even vendors that offer solutions for both functions sell (at least) two different applications. Our research shows organizations want to bring CCM and DXD together, with the WCM serving as the point of convergence. Our and others’ research shows there are business benefits to doing just that.

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Respondents to a study Topdown commissioned with Forrester Consulting identified the top three digital customer experience management (CXM) technologies they would like to be able to integrate: data management, campaign management, and digital asset management tools. Of these, data management tools—including master data management, ETL and virtualization tools—constituted by far the largest response.

We need to look carefully at DATA IN, or how we’re gathering, storing, managing, parsing and using data throughout the organization.

THE CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS: DATA MANAGEMENT IN DXD VS. CCMIn the CXM world, there is a lot of talk about Big Data and CX – looking at the results of communications that we send out and analyzing that information to see how to improve CX. That’s important, but it’s NOT what we’re talking about here. We’ll publish a separate post on using data for customer insights and CX improvement efforts.

What we’re looking at today is how data is managed in CCM, and how we should be managing data in DXD for the benefit of both customer acquisition as well as the service and retention of existing customers. That’s the most important distinction regarding incoming data: on the marketing and sales side of the house, we are interacting with and collecting data from visitors – not customers. Once they become customers, we are expected to know them well and treat them as unique and valued individuals.

Before visitors buy, they are merely prospects. Therefore, we use the data we collect about them – typically external data such as where they came from, where else they have been, etc. – to create personas that segment visitor populations. We can get pretty granular with personas, at least conceptually, but the challenge is to create content to match. Most often, we have to do it blindly based on a mythical person the marketing department has created out of generalizations drawn from visitor data. That said, many DXD platforms have gotten quite adept at delivering content unique to a very specific persona (visitor A may see web content that’s completely different from what visitor B sees, based on each visitor’s browsing history and on-site behavior).

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HOW CCM HANDLES INCOMING DATAOn the service and retention side, where CCM reigns, we know who our customers are. Once they’re customers, we have the ability to take personification up to the next level. Now we don’t have to guess or make generalizations about groups of people. When they’re customers, we collect data from them. We know their names, where they live, exactly what goods and services they purchased from us, and much more. Still, we can’t create each individual communication manually. That’s not practical in any way – not when a single business unit’s customer-facing communications can run in the tens of millions per month.

With CCM, we still create content starting from a template meant to be used for more than one person, but the content is assembled in ways that are more relevant to individual customers. We are well past the days when everyone got the same mass-produced, printed-and-mailed letter where only the envelopes were personalized (i.e., the address label). Now we can choose the output channel, add or omit content and replace variables with customer-specific data using business logic and reusable objects to create much more personalized, contextual and relevant communications, rapidly and cost-effectively.

As for DXD, we’ve reached our limit for the moment. We have more data than capabilities to use that data; current WCMs are not built to make every layout, word, paragraph or image that variable…yet.

CCM’S MORE ROBUST DATA SHOULD BE THE DRIVERIn our evaluation of major DXD platforms currently on the market, we have found that most do not have the facility to variablize content to the degree that is possible in CCM. DXD platforms’ ability to connect to data sources is not as versatile or powerful as it is on the CCM side. It’s a rare WCM that can take data from multiple sources and bring them into the same page at the same time. In CCM, that’s what we do (with greater and lesser degrees of success, depending on the vendor) – we use both pushed data and pulled data, and we present that data (or a subset of it) to create personalized communications, on the fly and in real time.

In other words, DXD might choose the right DIV, but CCM could drive all the content in that DIV. DXD platforms have solved for project-by-project, target-by-target data mapping, but what if you have to do that several times per second? Vendors are trying to solve the problem of creating content and context from acquisition-side data that is not as robust as what is available to CCM. Marketing tools draw inferences about unknown to less-known users, which is a relatively coarse use of data. In contrast, CCM deals with individuals in volume, and so CCM data is so much more granular and robust, with data management structures that have grown up to support that tremendous volume and variety.

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THE COMMON DENOMINATOR IS I.T.IT departments are stretched thin these days in most large organizations. Many times, it’s all they can do to just keep current systems running smoothly and integrating new and legacy systems as they go. Business users who need IT’s help accessing data from elsewhere in the organization may need to wait a very long time for that assistance.

The thing is, your IT team almost certainly already has a suite of data management technologies on tap, very likely being driven primarily by the wants and needs of acquisition (marketing and sales). And the same IT team is probably managing a separate set of data tools for CCM, integrating third-party tools on an as-needed basis to cobble together functional solutions.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could use the same data management tools for all stages of the customer lifecycle, and all touchpoints across a customer journey? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if your IT staff could manage one master data set that business users could then use relatively easily, without IT involvement at every step? Why yes. Yes it would. And that’s what’s coming, very soon now.

CONSOLIDATED DATA MANAGEMENT IS NOW A REQUIREMENTConsolidation of data management is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a requirement. The demands are different when you know who the customer is, as opposed to when they were mere “visitors” and faceless prospects. Once they have a relationship with you, customers justifiably expect extremely individualized interactions with you. You need the capabilities of delivering that experience. To every customer. Across all channels. On any device. And in very high volume.

We know that seems impossible. Our research shows that product doesn’t exist. Yet. But we’re working to change that.

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Now that we’re collecting data on visitors and customers at every touchpoint and through every channel throughout the customer life cycle, and we know so much about them – their preferences, their behaviors, their purchasing patterns – personalization must be robust and effective from acquisition to service to retention, right?

Wrong. Respondents to the study we commissioned through Forrester Consulting identified insufficient ability to achieve the same degree of personalization across all customer communications as one of the three largest gaps preventing companies from being satisfied with their current CCM solutions.

One reason why companies are failing to achieve the same degree of personalization across all customer communications is because people who are focused on customer acquisition – marketing and sales – think of personalization in a slightly different way than those who are focused on customer service and retention do. It comes down to how much you know about your prospects versus your customers.

Before they are customers, people exploring a brand are just visitors or prospects. We don’t know them yet; all we have is a set of generalizations based on visitor behavior metrics gathered by the digital experience delivery (DXD) platform driving web and mobile customer experience. Though some DXD platforms are getting very, very good at delivering individualized experiences to digital channel visitors based on persona-driven assumptions, we still can’t really personalize communications in the way CCM leaders think of it until prospects become actual customers. Once they’re customers, they’re known to us. We have a relationship with them, and we can start to gather much more specific and meaningful data that help us move beyond personas into the realm of true personalization.

Another reason why companies feel challenged in their efforts to personalize customer-facing communications throughout the customer journey is because they’re not sharing their data across departments and business units very well. We’ve addressed that previously; the answer is a WCM-based CCM system that is open enough to use APIs to tap into both the marketing department’s digital experience delivery (DXD) platform and the more robust data collection and business logic capabilities of CCM for a more integrated use of data across the organization.

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ACCESS TO DATA + ROBUST BUSINESS LOGIC = DEEP PERSONALIZATION CAPABILITESThe formula for deep and consistent personalization at all touchpoints is access to data from both DXD and CCM, combined with the more robust business logic capabilities of CCM. We wrote previously about the differences between DXD and CCM regarding data. Let’s take a look at how the two handle business logic.

So what is business logic? According to the Programming Glossary at WhatIs.com:“Business logic is the programming that manages communication between an end user interface and a database. The main components of business logic are business rules and workflows. A business rule describes a specific procedure; a workflow consists of the tasks, procedural steps, required input and output information, and tools needed for each step of that procedure. Business logic describes the sequence of operations associated with data in a database to carry out the business rule.”

In CCM, we use business logic to create highly personalized customer-facing communications that are relevant to and specifically meant for each individual recipient. Though we’re still working from templates meant for many, many recipients, and the system can generate millions of communications in a short period of time, we are nevertheless able to get quite granular in addressing individuals’ needs. The key is context.

CONTEXTUALIZATION, MEET PERSONALIZATIONWith business logic, personalization and contextualization go hand in hand. DXD allows us to show alternate content based on fairly broad chunks of information, such as geography (e.g., as revealed by the IP address of a visitor) or the time of day a mobile app or web page is accessed. In CCM, though, we have the context to give a customer his or her own specific account information, make offers based on his or her previous purchases, follow up on claims or customer service issues, etc. We can also provide documents required by regulatory bodies—but only to those customers who specifically need them based on the states in which they live, the particular goods or services they have purchased, disclosures tied to their interactions with the company, and more.

It’s a difference of breadth (acquisition-oriented personalization) versus depth (service and retention-oriented personalization). The depth of the data you own requires a similar depth of personalization. When you only have learned data gathered from visitors, you don’t have what you need to go deep. When you integrate that with earned data– the kind of data you get as a byproduct of your relationship with existing customers – suddenly you can go much deeper than ever before and offer a more contextual and personalized customer experience (CX) throughout each customer’s journey with your brand.

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WITH GREATER DATA ACCESS COMES GREATER RESPONSIBILITYOne thing to keep in mind as you begin to share data more freely across your organization and strive for greater personalization, though, is the obligation that comes with possession of vast amounts of customers’ personal information. People within your organization who are not accustomed to working with real people’s names, addresses, health histories, financial records, and more (PII, PHI, aye yai yai) can run into trouble if you don’t put some safeguards in place to protect customers’ privacy. Again, here’s where we in CCM have already solved many of those potential data security problems and put responsible mechanisms in place to limit the availability of customer’s restricted information to only those who really need it to do business with those customers.

Great care must be taken to limit parties who are not the intended recipients of sensitive information but who are still involved in creating customer communications. For example, CLIENT LETTER® can mask parts of a Social Security number or Medicare identification number automatically, depending on a user’s permissions settings. We can also protect images so those without permission just see a placeholder, and we can prevent certain blocks of text – such as legally required disclosures – from being altered.

Again, integrating data through a WCM-based CCM system with open APIs will allow companies to combine the strengths of CCM’s deep data, business logic, and safeguarding capabilities with DXD’s broad insights and multi-channel delivery capabilities to achieve the same degree of personalization across all customer communications.

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Respondents to a study we commissioned with Forrester Consulting identified automation of customer-facing communications as one of the main customer experience management (CXM)-related business goals that they find particularly challenging. One of the reasons it’s difficult to achieve comparable levels of automation in customer-facing communications throughout the customer life cycle is, once again, a disparity between the processes and technologies used on the customer acquisition side of the organization (marketing and sales) versus the customer service and retention side of the organization.

The ability to automate communications that are still highly personalized, properly branded, relevant and timely at any and all customer touchpoints and via multiple channels will become more and more crucial to companies’ ability to compete in the modern digital marketplace. To understand how to achieve consistent, high quality automation of all your customer-facing communications, you need to think about automation the way we do in customer communications management (CCM). We look at it in layers, where each layer of automation is defined by the processes it involves and the business value(s) it represents, and the layers expand out from the core functions of CCM document automation.

THREE LAYERS OF AUTOMATION LAYER ONE: PARTIALLY AUTOMATING CCM

At the center of customer-facing communications automation is the CCM software solution. Ideally, the organization will have everything it needs to create complex, personalized communications on a massive scale, all managed seamlessly and cost-effectively by the CCM system.

Since you probably won’t have everything you need all in one place and consistently available to your CCM software, at some point you’ll need human interaction. The human input could be from a customer service representative creating a communication while on the phone with a customer, or it could be input from customers themselves, e.g., when interacting with your IVR or web portal. APIs enable automating as much as possible, with manual input by humans only as needed.

LAYER TWO: FULLY AUTOMATING CCMWith data integration and using the CCM system’s APIs, it is possible to link your CCM solution directly to other business applications, such as a CRM system or a claims application system or

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a policy administration system. This brings two worlds of creating data and using data together, saving time and effort across business functions and customer touchpoints.If you have access to data sources throughout the organization, plus web services, digital assets, and business logic, you will have the means to save significant “clicks and ticks” (effort and time).

A perfect example of an organization accomplishing this level of automation particularly well is one of Topdown’s CLIENT LETTER® customers, a major healthcare payer. This company has been able to integrate all the different data sources they have (there are seven, in this case) and combine them with Topdown’s business logic and APIs to fully automate the creation of tens of millions of highly personalized communications. They do this with just four employees, thereby saving the organization millions of dollars annually.

LAYER THREE: PROCESS AUTOMATIONToday, it’s possible for one user to begin a communication within the CCM system, save it in progress, and hand it off internally for review or approval. Also, many types of communications require input from multiple stakeholders; marketing may need to contribute to and sign off on branding components within communications, or the compliance department may need to review and approve legal language and disclaimers. Most CCM systems have a way to include those “indirect users” in the internal CCM workflow.

Using APIs, it is also possible today to include external systems in CCM workflows to automate processes organization-wide. The CCM system is then one step in a larger business process. But this requires application-specific integrations. It would be far better if the CCM system used – or at least could communicate with – an external business process management (BPM) tool.Using open standards-based business process management (BPM) software would provide a common denominator that would allow you to expand the number and variety of users who can participate in the workflow. In such a system, you could add subroutines to the automated process as needed to generate the right communications, for the right people, at the right time, through the right channels, every time – all through fully automated and highly efficient workflow process management capabilities.

Process automation is something the respondents to the study we commissioned through Forrester Consulting specifically said they wanted. Businesses want to break down organizational silos from a process standpoint. They want CCM technology that can solve the process piece of the equation. We’re working on that for you.

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THE BUSINESS VALUE OF AUTOMATIONIt’s important to note that each layer of automation we’ve outlined above serves slightly different business values. At layer one, all we care about is automating a single communication for a single individual. The business values at this level are primarily cost savings and operational efficiency.

At layer two, it’s not just about saving money by compressing the steps of creating individual communications, now it’s about savings realized from, say, avoiding lawsuits, or value gained from maintaining brand consistency and quality, or other examples of “soft” ROI.

At layer three, in the larger context of overall business processes, we are finally addressing the broader customer experience (CX). Now we’re looking at all the elements that contribute to an individual customer receiving an individual communication at a particular touchpoint. But at this level, we can multiply that individual experience by all the customers receiving communications at all touchpoints to gain insights about CX in general and to inform decision making all the way around the customer life cycle. Here’s where you can see an increase in customer satisfaction, loyalty and lifetime value – the real payoffs for your brand and business.

CONCLUSION

Research from Forrester, Watermark Consulting and others clearly articulates the business benefits of offering the best possible customer experience. However, the research also shows most organizations have gaps in CX. To address the gaps in your company, you’ll very likely need to make changes to the architecture of your

people, processes and technology in order to achieve a truly great customer experience.

To that end, this ebook makes the case for merging customer communications management (CCM) and digital experience delivery (DXD) technologies. Many companies have loosely integrated these technologies and achieved mediocre results. That’s because CCM and DXD systems use different technologies, file formats and approaches to creating, managing and deploying content. What

we really need is a new architecture, built from common components and open standards, that tightly couples together capabilities from both worlds.

It’s up to vendors like Topdown to merge the best parts of CCM with core DXD technologies. For our part, we have already started working on such a solution. In fact, we recently unveiled a reference technology architecture as part of a webinar we did with analysts from Forrester. A link to view that webinar on demand, which includes the research supporting the points made in this ebook and an overview of

the reference architecture, is below.

We hope you take the next step on your journey to improving your customer experience by viewing the webinar.

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