What feelings come to mind when you hear the words ‘technology migration?’ Did you feel your blood pressure begin to rise? Are your palms getting sweaty?
Fear not.
Migration can be a difficult undertaking, but it doesn’t have to be.
When it comes to Customer Communications Management (CCM), today’s enterprises face a number of challenges including an increase in the number of communication channels and maintaining compliance with new regulations on the rise. The more customers, communication channels, products and services an organization has, the more likelihood there are many systems – both legacy and modern – in place to manage it all. The result is an infrastructure of software, hardware and business rules that requires a lot of care. In most cases, the management of customer communications lacks a holistic strategy.
Customer preference demands, and a constantly changing communications landscape, are driving enterprises to rethink how they manage customer communications. With the desire to streamline processes, eliminate organizational silos, reduce costs and improve customer experience, the global trend is that enterprises are migrating to a single end-to-end CCM solution.
Typically, there are 3 key drivers for change:
1. Compliance risk: your CCM product is either so outdated that the resources required to meet changing regulations are prohibitive, or your existing CCM solution has been abandoned by the provider, putting your enterprise at risk of not meeting regulatory compliance.
2. Looking to the future: your organization is aware that your current CCM solution will not support your future customer communications needs. You’ve got a clear CX strategy, and seek a solution that will help you gain a competitive edge, and adapt to rapidly changing market demands.
3. Cut costs: multiple CCM platforms are not only costly to maintain, but also cause operational silos leading to duplication of efforts and inconsistency.
Whatever the driver is for migrating, the question becomes: What to do? There is a simple 4-step process when embarking on a CCM migration project:
Step 1: Analysis
Migration begins by analyzing the existing system, data inputs, organization, processes and technical requirements. Your customer communications management provider should have a team in place that works with you to review all documents, templates, content, business logic, code structure, production requirements and report requirements to understand what assets can be optimized, leveraged and re-used in the migration. This helps to define the overall migration strategy and identify opportunities to improve efficiency.
Step 2: Strategy
Based on the knowledge gathered in step 1, your company’s customer communications objective must be clearly defined and aligned on a strategy that best suits your business needs and culture. Your CCM provider should recommend where to inject new technology, capabilities and functions, and a template conversion approach that will optimize time and cost and maximize return.
Step 3: Disassembly
Next, documents are broken down into small pieces that include components and reusable assets, including business logic, content, signatures, logos and images to create runbooks. A runbook is a detailed roadmap or guide that illustrates how each document is assembled, right down to font styles and formatting.
Step 4: Assembly & Testing
Finally, the runbook from Step 3 is leveraged to assemble new templates based on the defined specifications. At the end of this process, the rationalized templates are integrated into the new CCM solution and thoroughly tested.
You should then be able to deliver personalized communications across all channels from one centralized solution, ensuring consistent branding, regulatory compliance, improved time to market and an exceptional customer experience.
While no one really wants to talk migration, it’s important to do so. Your customers are demanding it.
