Quadient : How to Determine Where You Are in the Transition from CCM to CXM

The need to create a better customer experience has led many organizations to modernize their communications by upgrading their composition platforms.

But doing just this is not enough.

Today's consumers want more than a seamless, omni-channel experience. They want to be able to engage and interact with brands in meaningful, personalized ways.

To make the shift from CCM to CXM, more than new technology is required. For the past 5 to 10 years, companies have been investing in pre and post processing applications that have increased the complexity of the already complex systems.

Companies must embrace new ways of working together.

Silos must be overcome.

Control must be given to business users.

Organizational and cultural change is overdue.

At many companies, some or all of these changes may already be underway. But in order to define a forward-looking vision and discuss where they want to go next, companies need to assess and determine how mature their transformation from CCM to CXM is.

Why it's important to assess CCM-to-CXM maturity

The transformation of CCM to CXM doesn't happen all at once. It's an ongoing process that reaches fruition gradually. That's why it's important for organizations to assess their CCM-to-CXM maturity. Doing so will prove to be useful for a variety of reasons:

1. It will enable the company to discuss, educate and socialize within their organization the importance of evolving their customer communications into omni-channel experiences.
2. It will map out the company's current capabilities against what is needed to drive increased business value.
3. It will create a common vision of 'future state' that will be shared by other members of the organization.
4. It will create a roadmap that will help the company execute and stay on target.

Employ a CCM-to-CXM maturity model

The CCM-to-CXM maturity model shown below illustrates the five unique phases companies experience when going through the transformation process. Within each phase you'll note there is a certain strategy in play, a champion type and specific tactics being employed to execute the strategy.

Let's take a brief look at the characteristics of each phase:

Level 1: Ad Hoc

• Typically don't have a defined owner for customer communications.
• Communications are self-developed; content and business rules are hardcoded in the application.
• Tend to be a paper-centric organization that finds it difficult to change.
• Their strategy is driven by IT- or operational-centric goals like the need to respond to changing regulatory requirements or to reduce costs.

Level 2: Centralize

• IT department is responsible for customer communications.
• Typically employ several communications composition platforms.
• Usually see CCM as structured, outbound communications.
• Not a lot of control over cost; cycle times to make changes to communications can take months, sometimes even a year.

Level 3: Manage

• Control of customer communications sits at the line-of-business (LOB) level, meaning silos and coordination challenges remain.
• The silo management style means that each LOB often selects a solution that fits their purpose.
• Different departments have different goals and no common ground which can lead to politics.
• Strides have been made in customer communications; business-as-usual approaches from the past have been retired and digital-centric ones adopted.

Level 4: Optimize

• A Chief Operating Officer, Chief Executive Officer or other top executive is in charge of the transition to a communications strategy.
• Strong focus on digitization, operational excellence and a data-driven mindset centred on the customer.
• Customer communications have been transformed into digital-first (mobile-first) experiences that improve the ease of transacting with customers, thus removing friction between channels.

Level 5: Inform

• Very similar to Level 4 businesses except for one major difference-they have matured in how they use data to drive truly customer-centric interactions.
• They collect large sets of data and turn them into useful insight by employing common data models, artificial intelligence (AI) and big data analytics.
• They have real-time insights into customer behaviour and the customer lifecycle, and use these insights to determine what message at what point in time should be sent to what recipient.

As you can see each level of the CCM-to-CXM maturity model is distinctly different from the others. By using this model, companies can stop guessing and, instead, determine exactly where they fit in the CCM-to-CXM maturity spectrum. Once that level of maturity is ascertained, the organization's leaders will be able to set their goals, decide on how to achieve them and define a plan of action that will take them to the next level of maturity.

Learn more about assessing the CCM-to-CXM maturity level of your organization. Download the whitepaper 'The Road to CXM: Managing Your Transformation from CCM to CXM'.