By Richard Huff

As an analyst and consulting firm, Madison Advisors takes immense pride in offering enterprise clients context-specific guidance that leads to success in customer communications management (CCM). While it’s true that the quality of our research reflects our team’s combined experience in the industries we serve, we’re also committed to staying current on market predictions and trends to offer up-to-date and insightful analyses and take advantage of every opportunity to expand our expertise by learning and networking alongside industry leaders.

Most recently, members of our team attended and spoke at Xplor International’s 2023 CCM Summit, an event held from November 14-16 that featured various panels, exhibits and discussions related to CCM. It will likely come as no surprise that the two and a half days of the Summit included plenty of buzz around the topic of AI, with a number of educational presentations taking a close look at how these technologies can be applied within CCM. In addition to exploring recent advancements in AI, such as the generative capabilities popularized by ChatGPT, these presentations explored how AI platforms offer solutions to common CCM challenges, from organizing customer data to tailoring content for a particular reading comprehension level.

The intersection of AI and CCM is one that’s especially interesting to us, given the growing market of solutions that leverage AI technologies to enhance, personalize and streamline all processes related to customer communications. With generative AI, new drafts don’t begin with a blank document and a blinking cursor; instead, they can draw from an organization’s full archive of previous communications and offer greater agility when it comes to tailoring each message to an individual customer profile. Generative AI capabilities are now being built into the vast majority of current CCM systems and processes, which means that an organization’s choice to opt into these technologies is less a matter of “if” than “when.”

Madison Advisors’ forthcoming market study explores this current landscape of AI-augmented software tools and their ability to improve processes, reduce costs and perform functions that were previously outside the scope of CCM. While still in progress, this study currently includes evaluations of 14 solutions from 8 different vendors. Each solution is assessed for its capabilities in the areas of customer data processing, content migration, onboarding and process workflows. Additional data points include the ability of the platform to adjust communications for various reading levels, offer conversational responses and reflect an appropriate sentiment—all of which are essential components of outstanding AI-augmented customer service.

Staying abreast of current trends and technologies is fundamental to our work at Madison Advisors. This current landscape of AI-augmented software tools is exciting and one that we will be following in the new year.

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