As internet access becomes more prevalent and ubiquitous, consumers have grown to expect instant access to relevant information and to crave meaningful interaction with their providers and preferred brands. Enterprises in the U.K. have started to transform their customer communications into omni-channel experiences.

In the Aspire 2019 study “The State of CCM-to-CXM Transformation”, 64% of U.K. enterprises indicated they see improving customer experience as their top corporate priority, followed by 51% who indicated that digital transformation is most important. Improving omni-channel communications came third with 41% of respondents.

Despite the high interest in customer communication transformation, most companies struggle with implementing true omni-channel communications (that is, conversations that start in one channel and can seamlessly continue in another one). This is driven by limitations around siloed and outdated technology, decentralised management, and often having an inside-out mindset that focuses on improving “as-is” capabilities versus developing new capabilities around what the customer really needs and wants.

Today, new technology is emerging that helps enterprises more cost-effectively transform their customer communications into Customer Experience Management (CXM). In this blog, we’ll take a look at AI and Cloud, two major developments that have far reaching consequences for how enterprises want to modernise their customer communications management (CCM) solutions.

The two Most Popular Emerging Technologies in CCM

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the forefront of the CCM market’s technological revolution. Several vendors have already integrated AI engines into their solutions, greatly enhancing their clients’ ability to efficiently and more effectively manage customer communications processes.

We see three main areas in 2020 and beyond in which AI is making an impact:

•  AI-based migration
Several vendors have started to develop AI-based migration and rationalisation tools, often focused on content. This is often done by extracting content from legacy communications, reducing the number of existing templates by using clever variation and business rules, and migrating legacy output into more modern solutions. By managing content and business rules centrally without embedding them in channel-specific templates, businesses are much more capable of achieving omni-channel communications.

•  Content Intelligence
This is AI-supported technology that improves the quality of the communication. AI-technology may assist content writers in developing content that is easier to understand, may suggest catchier words or titles that improve open-rates (when developing marketing emails), or may suggest images based on text analysis (when linked to digital asset management (DAM) systems) and more.

•  AI-based channels

AI is used in new channels, such as intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs), which understand natural language and are used in home automation products such as Google Home and Amazon Alexa. With more and more consumers downloading and using fewer mobile apps, IVAs are seen as a promising new interface to overcome app fatigue. Whether it is in a Tesla car or embedded in a fridge, IVAs are the future when it comes to building deeply personalised interactions on Internet of Things (IOT) devices.

2. Cloud

With its lower cost and greater flexibility at scale, cloud platforming has allowed CCM vendors to expand their offerings through integration with solutions outside the traditional CCM toolbox. As enterprises are looking to define new solutions to better serve their customers, they want to move away from investing in large-scale implementations, but prefer smaller and more rapid proof of concepts that can be scaled up cost-effectively when successful. The cloud is ideal for this and we see vendors developing a range of solutions, from managed services models based on private cloud deployments to pure cloud SaaS solutions.

What does this mean?

CCM’s continuing evolution to CXM and changing consumer behaviour in response to emerging technology will shape the industry for years to come. Using AI technology has several benefits. For example, we see AI-based migration tools coming to the market today that will lower migration times by at least 60%-70% compared to manual migration.
In addition, our own research has shown that companies that are successful in transforming their CCM to CXM demonstrate 41% higher revenue growth.

If you are looking at how to evolve your customer communications then it is important to keep a close watch on the technological developments in this space and work with trusted advisors that can help you get the most out of the latest developments.

Interested in learning more?

As a trusted advisor to many UK household names who are producing millions of customer communications, the team at Nirva would be delighted to continue this conversation and explore in more detail with you the key solutions in this emerging and exciting space.

If you would like to learn more in discussion with one of our Customer Communications experts, we would love to hear from you here.