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Mastering Customer Communication Management for Business Owners

Customer Communication Management (CCM) describes a strategy focused on improving every aspect of a business’s outbound communication.

Mastering Customer Communication Management for Business Owners

Whether that means documents, emails, text messages, or online forms on a website, CCM deals with it all. That covers communications with clients and customers, distributors, partners, and any regulatory bodies that have jurisdiction over a company.

There was a time when CCM meant dealing with print materials, phone calls, and not much else. Now, as communication technology has changed, CCM has changed with it. Today, what CCM means for your business will depend on what you do and what your needs are. The right tool will recognize that. There are some modern apps—like Jobber’s plumbing business software—that now integrate CCM directly within the app itself.

As you consider how you’ll incorporate CCM into your business, take a look at the following four reasons why getting it right is so important:

1. Improve Customer Experience

Customer satisfaction is important, as any business owner is aware, but it may be more important than you think. Did you know there are investors who’ve been able to successfully pick companies in which to invest based on their customer satisfaction scores? It’s safe to say that the time a business owner spends improving customer satisfaction is time well spent. (1)

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One straightforward way to boost customer satisfaction is to focus on how you can improve the customer’s experience with your business. More centralized customer communication can be more responsive and more personalized—all of which results in a better experience for the customer.

To accomplish this, you need to find CCM management tools that will let you craft and distribute relevant and personalized communications across multiple channels. Consistent messaging helps build trust, so keeping things consistent across those channels will also prove helpful. Finally, the whole thing should feel more convenient for your customers. These are just some ways good CCM can help increase customer satisfaction.

2. Increase Efficiency

What happened the last time you noticed a change that needed to be made to some content on your business’s website?

If you’ve got an in-house web developer, you likely had to track them down and get them to tackle the fix. If you contracted out the job, you probably needed to spend even more time getting it sorted out. What if you could make those changes yourself?

What if you could address all the content creation, editing, and management on your own if you wanted to? That’s the promise of a good CCM tool.

In general, CCM can help break down silos, bringing people together rather than splitting email, web, phone, and print communications off into separate teams. That can make your operation more efficient, and it can help you make changes more quickly.

3. Complete Digital Transitions

While some newer industries have moved away from paper almost completely, plenty of more storied businesses and organizations—whether it’s utilities, insurance providers, banks, or the government—were designed for a print-based world. Good CCM will help you integrate those older systems with a new cross-channel communications strategy so you can be flexible while you move into the future (or the present, depending on the state of things).

4. Reduce Risks

While issues around compliance are often seen as a roadblock to running a business, they’re important to take seriously. Integrating compliance from the ground up may be a better solution. To do that, you need a way for teams to collaborate, and CCM can help with that.

As you design a product or service, different teams in different departments can use your CCM platform to share drafts and works in progress. That means that you can limit the amount of frustration in meetings when one group sees that they’d misunderstood the direction of a project, for example.

You’re also less likely to run into any unfortunate oversights if the compliance team can see every message, in every channel, that a customer is likely to see. Plus, they should be able to see how the customer is going to see a given message, ensuring that they really have all the necessary and relevant information about privacy and other important matters.

Final Thoughts

While every business’s needs are different, as a business owner, you should be able to see some aspect of your own company that could benefit from CCM in one of the ways described in this article. Whether it’s through improving the customer experience (and customer satisfaction), increasing efficiency, making a digital transition, or reducing risk—good CCM is a big help running a business today.

 References

 1. “Customer Satisfaction Is More Important Than You Thought”, Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardkestenbaum/2018/12/04/customer-satisfaction-is-more-important-than-you-thought/?sh=37c74f9c5ed9

2. “Customer Communications Management (CCM)”, Source: https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/customer-communications-management-ccm

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