Customer Communication Management, often referred to as CCM, is the industry behind the curtains of the world’s most successful businesses, delivering both printed and electronic transactions between a business and its customers. While marketing and sales communication uses advertising, direct mail, and social media platforms to promote and sell products, CCM focuses on the communications necessary for both the business and the customer, such as contracts, invoices, statements, notices, and letters.
In recent years, the boundaries between the transactional communications and marketing programs within a company have been eroding. Marketing messaging, for example, can often be incorporated within transactional documents, and vice versa.
However, there remain key differences between the two, in both function and format:
- While marketing enterprises often have specific start and end dates, transactional communications are run continually—daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually—to keep the customer informed and responsive.
- As such, CCM handles large amounts of sensitive personal data, classified as Personal Identifiable Information (PII) and Personal Health Information (PHI). PII and PHI can include information pertaining loan foreclosures, past due payments, health statements, account balances, and contract obligations.
- CCM rely heavily on this data to stay on top of critical transactions. Aggressive production deadlines are often 24–48 hours after input data arrives to ensure communication between business and customer is informed and efficient. Conversely, marketing communications are built several months in advance.
- While marketing campaigns usually focus on marketing output—the advertising product—businesses continually depend on CCM to manage both incoming and outgoing transactions from the customer. This includes 100% fulfillment of all input records, post-production verification of mail/content sent, and business rule programming and testing. These processes involve frequent changes to document templates and content as technology, customer needs, and business goals continue to evolve over time.