Customer Support

The Top 7 Customer Communications Management (CCM) Software

Discover the Top Customer Communications Management (CCM) Software designed to enhance customer interactions through multi-channel communication, personalized messaging, and document automation capabilities.

The Top 7 Customer Communications Management Software includes:
  • 1. Adobe Experience Manager Forms
  • 2. Front
  • 3. Help Scout
  • 4. Messagepoint
  • 5. OpenText Exstream
  • 6. Quadient Inspire
  • 7. Zoho Desk

Customer Communication Management (CCM) software enables businesses to manage, automate, and improve outbound communications with their customers through various channels, including print, email, phone calls, SMS, and social media. To achieve this, CCM software centralizes all tasks related to customer communication, such as creating and distributing high volume, personalized, and interactively rich content, and securely storing all data regarding customer interactions for easy future retrieval. 

Adjusting your communication strategy based on customer preferences is crucial for modern businesses. An effective CCM tool ensures personalized communication with customers based on their preferences. This can lead to an enhanced customer experience and, in turn, improved brand loyalty. The right CCM software can also generate detailed reports about customer interactions, thereby helping organizations optimize their overall customer experience strategy.

In this article, we’ll explore the top CCM software solutions designed to help you improve outbound communications with your customers. We’ll highlight the key use cases and features of each solution, including automation and personalization capabilities, analytics, multi-channel support, and data security.  

Adobe logo

Adobe Experience Manager Forms is a digital document solution designed to facilitate seamless customer journeys. It allows the easy creation of responsive forms that customers can fill out and securely sign across various browsers and devices. Adobe Experience Manager Forms also enables businesses to deliver personalized, timely customer communication directly through a customer’s channel of choice, be it email, web, mobile, or print. It facilitates scheduled, on-demand, or batch communications to millions of customers, helping foster new and ongoing customer relationships.

Adobe Experience Manager Forms employs “scalable authoring,” which allows anyone to design complex forms with ease, without any coding knowledge. The platform’s automated Forms Conversion feature can quickly convert batches of legacy PDF forms into mobile-responsive forms, using a simple, guided drag-and-drop authoring tool. It also facilitates content translation into multiple languages, thanks to its AI-powered workflows. Once forms have been created and distributed, customers can then easily and securely sign them using Adobe Sign.

Adobe Experience Manager Forms streamlines customer onboarding by automatically integrating form data with back-end systems and tracking the signing and approval process. It supports secure data transfers, document backup, recovery, automatic updates, and direct integration with Adobe Sign’s e-sign tools. The cloud-based infrastructure of Adobe Experience Manager Forms ensures faster processing and scalability, even for offline data collected in the field.

Adobe logo
Front Logo

Front is a comprehensive communication platform that centralizes customer correspondence across all channels. It consolidates incoming messages from various outlets including emails, social media, SMS, and voice platforms. This communication is then funneled into a centralized hub, eliminating the need for switching between tabs or platforms.

Front’s intelligent mechanisms allow for auto-routing of messages based on specific rules such as content keywords or data integration from other platforms, like Salesforce. This ensures that each message reaches the correct individual without the need for forwarding or distribution lists. Not only does this system assign message ownership based on factors like expertise, workload, and availability, but it also leverages tagging to streamline processes like report generation, fast visual cues, and rule powering. Front also helps optimize collaboration and internal communication by offering shared drafts for collective responses and internal comments on public messages. This minimizes the need for extensive email threads and external collaboration tools. Additionally, every conversation is stored with relevant customer history and data, facilitating speedy and personalized customer service.

Finally, Front enables organizations to measure customer satisfaction and team performance by tracking response times, SLA breaches, and gratification scores. It also provides insights into individual or team performance, thus facilitating improvements where necessary. Overall, Front offers a unified solution for managing customer communications in a more personalized, efficient, and measurable manner.

Front Logo
HelpScout Logo

Help Scout is a comprehensive customer service platform that delivers three key components: an inbox, a messaging tool, and a help center. Its user-friendly layout is designed to nurture better customer interactions by integrating organization, automation, and collaboration tools.

Through Help Scout’s inbox feature, users can manage their customer communications with automated workflows, tags, and saved responses. An AI-powered assist tool gives recommendations on improving responses based on tone and length, while automatically created customer profiles provide a detailed overview of the communication audience. Help Scout’s second component, the help center, is a self-service hub where users can publish, manage, and modify content. Accessible on all devices, it allows the integration of contact forms for either emailing or chat.

The platform is highly customizable, including color formatting and CSS, which enables users to tailor the help center to their preferred design. Admins can also implement restrictive access controls over the platform’s accessibility. Help Scout’s messaging tool, Beacon, facilitates speedy customer service by offering tailored guidance across your application or website. Beacon engages customers with real-time chat or email options and provides easily accessible help articles. It also integrates live chat into the shared inbox.

Help Scout is designed for quick assimilation; it can be deployed within minutes and its user-friendly interface makes it easy for teams to adopt. With features such as AI, customizable automations, collaboration tools, customer data access, performance reporting, and over 50 integrations, Help Scout is a comprehensive and highly flexible CCM tool that can be tailored to suit any organization.

HelpScout Logo
MessagePoint Logo

Messagepoint is a SaaS CCM solution. Designed for organizations in highly regulated industries, Messagepoint uses artificial intelligence to enhance customer experiences with optimized communications. It provides an intelligent content hub for efficient, compliant delivery of customer conversations across all channels. This includes migration from legacy systems, content management, communications composition, interactive communications, orchestration, delivery, and archiving.

Messagepoint’s platform consists of six key areas of functionality. The Rationalizer uses the AI to migrate and optimize communication content. Messagepoint Composer puts control of composition in the hands of non-technical business users for streamlined communications development. Messagepoint Connected optimizes customer experiences by allowing the front-office teams to manage omni-channel communications. Messagepoint ECP offers control over communication processing, delivery, and tracking. The APIs, Integrations and Connectors module offers secure options for content delivery via the right channels, and Messagepoint Touchpoint Exchange enables secure sharing of model touchpoints within organizations or with clients.

With Messagepoint, content authors can translate, personalize, and optimize content to meet brand, plain language, reading level, and sentiment standards, then intelligently share content with dynamic variations. The platform offers no-code control and headless API access for content reuse, and tools for composition, orchestration, and tracking. Overall, we recommend Messagepoint as a comprehensive CCM tool that enables streamlined, optimized, and compliant communications.

MessagePoint Logo
OpenText Logo

Part of the OpenText Experience Platform, OpenText Exstream is a comprehensive customer communications tool. The platform is trusted by large enterprises globally, owing to its performance, scalability, and ease of integration with core systems, thanks to a range of accelerator packages.

Exstream is a highly flexible CCM solution; it supports deployment in off-cloud and public cloud settings, as well as being delivered as a managed service. This flexibility extends to its ability to integrate with existing customer systems and accommodate all forms of communication and digital channels. It also enables the design of responsive communications that scale and adjust according to device or screen size, making it mobile-friendly. Exstream helps boost customer engagement, drive revenue, and increase brand loyalty through personalized communications and content. Its AI/ML assisted authoring and template rationalization enable this at scale. The platform also generates reports on historical interactions to help businesses analyze trends and improve future communications. It also allows easy content authoring for non-technical users and the creation of rules without IT involvement, tracking message delivery, and responding to failures automatically.

OpenText Exstream offers integrations with multiple business applications, including ERP and CRM systems, and the wider OpenText Experience Platform. This makes it relatively straightforward to deploy at scale which, alongside its comprehensive and customizable content creation, tracking, and reporting features, makes this a strong CCM tool for larger enterprises.

OpenText Logo
Quadient Logo

Quadient Inspire is a CCM solution that enables companies to formulate and disseminate personalized, compliant customer communications across numerous digital and traditional channels from a single hub. The software offers both on-premises and cloud deployment options. It can also integrate with Red Hat OpenShift to streamline development, testing, deployment, and maintenance processes. This helps to increase agility and scalability of communication operations.

Quadient Inspire provides a unified platform that eliminates the expense and risk of managing separate CCMs and channel-specific systems. It offers a singular design interface, from which users can create communication templates for both physical and digital channels. This is made easier by the platform’s drag-and-drop design method, which users can utilize to construct communications that can share content across a variety of channels. This includes support for creating and distributing push notifications featuring text, images, and action links, with omnichannel proofing for these notifications. Users can manage communications from a central library, ensuring version control and compliance, and all customer-facing communications are connected to a comprehensive customer journey map. This ensures each communication project aligns with the company’s overall customer experience strategy. Additionally, the solution allows stakeholders to share ongoing feedback for real-time improvements. Finally, the platform also offers integration with Microsoft Power BI for enhanced, graphical reporting capabilities.

Quadient Inspire facilitates easy migration from legacy CCM systems using InspireXpress, a technology that utilizes artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing to retire old systems efficiently, reducing costs and effort. Overall, the system is straightforward to deploy and manage, with lots of customizable templates that make it easier to create and send consistent, tailored communications across all channels.

Quadient Logo
Zoho Logo

Zoho Desk is a customer service email management system that streamlines communication by transforming emails into organized tickets. It can easily consolidate and manage emails coming from different addresses in areas like refunds, sales, and billing. The system makes it simple to both assign and respond to these customer service emails from one central location.

Zoho Desk classifies tickets according to priority factors such as time, status, and CRM status. This ticket organization helps agents prioritize their tasks so they can respond more efficiently and effectively and, in turn, build lasting relationships with clients. Zoho Desk also incorporates AI assistance and automation into email responses to save agent time. It provides keyboard shortcuts, pre-written responses, and automated article suggestions, enhancing productivity. The platform also enhances the customer-agent interaction by storing customer information. This aids in response personalization and provides opportunities to explore cross- and up-sell possibilities. Zoho Desk also bolsters collaboration between both internal and external teams through private email threads and comments.

Other valuable features include automated email assignment based on agent workload and skill set, predefined templates, and automatic notification of ticket activity to relevant agents, all of which help facilitate timely responses and resolution. Finally, the system embeds happiness ratings in emails to collect essential client feedback on satisfaction levels.

Zoho Logo
The Top Customer Communications Management (CCM) Software