By Gina Ferrara, Senior Analyst

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” This proverb, credited to the writings of Thomas H. Palmer and later popularized by William Edward Hickson in his “Moral Song,” applies to many circumstances in life and in business. But not all circumstances. The five companies featured in our 2nd edition of the “Customer Communications Management Hosted Managed Services Market Update” understand this completely.

At Madison Advisors, we engage with clients that struggle with customer communications management due to a complex technology infrastructure that consists of legacy systems, multiple document composition tools and content repositories, thousands of document templates, and limited multi-channel delivery. Many have sought point solutions to meet an internal line of business requirement to deliver communications electronically. These point solutions add to the complexity of technology infrastructure that is already poorly integrated. This places heavy reliance on internal IT not only to manage all the technology, but also to balance and prioritize new development projects against change requests to existing documents.

Often, organizations believe that a major technology refresh will solve these challenges and so they try again. On the surface, eliminating old technology sounds like a good idea; however, some organizations may lack the necessary resources and skills to reap the benefits of this undertaking and obtain the anticipated ROI from making the capital expenditure. Others may not know where to begin, or worse yet, have begun and ran out of funding or hit a major roadblock along the way and abandoned the project altogether.

Let’s face it—CCM is not easy, and we give kudos to those who have tried to make it work. Standing out from the competition is no longer about selling a product or service at the best price—it is about the experience. Technology continues to change and, with it, consumer expectations. Google, Apple and Amazon have helped to fuel those expectations, leaving many enterprises to struggle to keep up.  Organizations that provide an exceptional customer experience will reap the benefits of customer loyalty, deeper relationships and increased sales. But if your organization has fallen behind and is unable to provide the digital experience that consumers are looking for, it might be time to consider outsourcing to a CCM hosted managed services provider as an alternative solution.

What exactly is CCM hosted managed services? It is a technology model that incorporates the critical components of CCM in a single integrated platform. This results-driven model offers a complete end-to-end solution that addresses enterprise communication requirements, relieves the burden on IT resources, and delivers an optimized return on investment (ROI) by shifting from a capital expenditure model (CapEx) to an operational expense model (OpEx).

Our initial report “Hosted Managed Services: Changing the Paradigm in Customer Communications Management” (released October 2015) provided an introduction to CCM HMS. This latest research report further explains the seven critical components of CCM, provides an update on the latest trends in hosted managed services, and shares how the five companies featured have developed their solutions to help enterprises solve customer communications challenges. While purchasing and integrating the critical technology components necessary for a unified CCM platform is not insurmountable, if your organization is unable to achieve the desired results due to lack of time, resources and budget, it might be time to consider this alternative.

Click here to access our full report “Customer Communications Management Hosted Managed Services Market Update 2nd Edition.”