A customer communication management ( CCM ) software centralizes and manages customer communications across a range of channels, including emails, phone calls, social media, web portals, SMS text messages, and much more. There are both cloud-based and on-premise CCM tools available for businesses of all sizes. In this customer communication management guide, we'll cover the following:

  • What is Customer communication management software?
  • Why should you use customer communication management software?
  • Who uses CCM software?
  • Key features of the best customer communication management software
  • FAQs on customer communication management software

What is a customer communication management platform? 

Customers today reach out to businesses using various communication channels. A communication management platform streamlines all these conversations to make it easy for companies to engage with customers with complete context. 

Additionally, customer communication management software helps businesses to personalize communications based on the customer's profile and behavioral patterns. They can use this information to share targeted messaging on their customers' preferred channels. 

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Why is a customer communication platform important?

In today’s digital age, customers expect to be able to communicate with brands, whenever the need arises, and on a channel of their choosing. Right from the first touchpoint until post-purchase customer service, the way brands interact with customers largely influences customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

However, there are a few challenges to delivering a consistent and frictionless customer experience:

By using a customer communication management platform, you can solve these problems and hold seamless conversations with your customers.

Who uses CCM software?

1. Customer support teams for seamless omnichannel experiences

Customers wish to communicate with brands on their preferred platforms in today's digital age. A CCM software helps businesses have a 'digital first' approach where all customer communications are streamlined, and customer service agents can access messages across multiple channels at a single source.  

The best part about introducing CCM software to your support strategy is that it can integrate with your existing architecture without much tech intervention. As customer preferences change, you can add new channels using your CCM software to accommodate them swiftly and cater to the dynamic requirements of your customer base. 

2. Regulations and compliance teams for structured communications

Every business must follow a specified format to communicate with its customers to ensure consistency. Having regulatory compliance guidelines sets this standard for communication with customers. However, meeting these communications standards requires collaboration between teams. 

Using a CCM platform allows business users to approve content using minimum steps. You can also use the CCM platform to simplify customer communication by letting your agents make changes in one location or bulk changes to similar blocks. They also have the authorization to identify and restrict unauthorized language usage.

Lastly, the customer communications management platform shows agents the history of all communications, from emails to text messages. So the chances of your customer receiving irrelevant messages from your business decreases. 3

3. Operations team for streamlined delivery

A customer communications management tool helps envision the holistic customer journey with accurate data points. Customer operational specialists and decision makers can easily review critical touchpoints and suggest ideas for operational improvement.

Secondly, a company's relationship with a customer often involves the exchange of onboarding documents back and forth. Implementing a CCM tool in your business will drastically reduce the number of files to store and use. Multiple files can be converted into digital copies, and agents can be authorized to review and take the necessary action.

4. Analytics and reporting teams for customized reports

The customer communication software generates massive customer data, making it a valuable platform for creating data reports. Every customer interaction can be converted into a report and shared with CS teams to identify customer pain points and solve them. Real time data and the ability to see what works for your customer substantially save your agent time and help you optimize your support team for better productivity.

Top #5 Customer Communications Management (CCM) Software to pick from

A robust CCM platform effectively bridges the gap between your business and customers. But with multiple CCM software to pick from, it can feel impossible to finalize the right one for your business. To simplify this process, we've shared our picks for the top 5 CCM software that could suit your business needs. Read on to know more: 

1. Freshdesk

Freshdesk's customer communication management software lets you engage with customers on all channels from a single platform. This way, your team can keep track of issues on different media with one tool. 

With Freshdesk, 

Pricing: 

2. Quadient Inspire

Quadient Inspire's CCM helps businesses create effective and unified customer communications to deliver a complete omnichannel customer experience. You can provide personalized,  consistent customer communications across all digital and traditional channels from one centralized hub using Quadient Inspire.

However, the UI is complex, and adding new agents to the software is time-consuming. 

Pricing:

Available only upon connecting with the sales reps.

3. OpenText Exstream

Designed for omnichannel CCM, Exstream leverages the data and content that's already available within businesses to transform typical customer communications into highly personalized, engaging customer experiences on their customer's preferred channel, screen size, and device. 

Pricing: Unavailable

4. Smart Communications

The Smart Communications customer management (CCM) solution helps enterprises deliver personalized, interactive communications via customers' preferred channels. The Smart Communications CCM engages with customers using tailored communications that are brand consistent, relevant, and provide meaningful value.

The software is difficult to set up initially and for creating content layouts can be time-consuming.

Pricing: Unavailable. Need to fill out the lead gen form for more details.

5. Zoho SalesIQ

Zoho SalesIQ is an AI-powered live chat and analytics platform that promotes proactive customer engagement. It offers businesses a variety of digital customer engagement tools to communicate with every site visitor at every stage of the customer lifecycle. 

However, some of the chats go unnoticed because of the lack of notifications from the software's end. The software also doesn’t support the integration of 3rd party apps that are not part of the Zoho marketplace.

Pricing:

Why is Freshdesk the right customer communication platform for you?

Maintain one continuous conversation across channels
 

Freshdesk lets you engage with customers on all channels from a single platform. This way, your team can keep track of issues on different channels with one tool. With Freshdesk, you can easily access the requests that a customer has raised in the past. This helps you have contextual and personalized conversations with your customers.

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Give your customers a better way to engage with self-service
 

Freshdesk helps you provide effortless and low friction experiences with self-service with:

  •  Self-service portal: Give your customers a one-stop-shop to access all your help guides and FAQs. Customers can also search for their questions and find relevant answers. 
  • Chatbot: Embed a chatbot on your website or mobile app to help customers find answers without leaving the screen. 
  • Community forums: Foster an active community to encourage customers to engage with each other, share stories and help each other resolve issues. 
self service portal self service portal

Predict issues and proactively delight customers
 

Freshdesk helps you incorporate a proactive approach to customer support in your strategy and up your customer experience game. Using Freshdesk, you can automatically trigger a dialog box when a customer displays signals of frustration such as rage clicks, and dead clicks. This way, customers can easily ask for assistance, and help your team deliver moments of wow when your customers most require it. 

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Collaborate on an issue without breaking a sweat
 

To ensure that your team can collaborate effortlessly without compromising on visibility, you can leverage Freshdesk’s features like shared ownership and the Freshdesk-Freshconnect integration. This way, all teams can stay on the same page and you never have to keep a customer waiting for an update ever again. 

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Monitor key support metrics and team performance


Having data-backed insights on your customer conversations can give you the complete picture of how things are looking for your customers as well as your team. By keeping track of the number of customer conversations that come in and how well your team is able to handle their workload, you can improve workflows. With Freshdesk, you can get these insights in a few keystrokes.

Plus, with Freshdesk’s dashboards, you can get a birds-eye view of the number of open or pending conversations, your team’s performance, customer satisfaction ratings, and more.

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More reasons to choose Freshdesk

Get started in no time

To use Freshdesk, you do not need a complicated onboarding process. You can simply sign up, get your team on board and start supporting customers.  

Integrate different apps

Extend the capabilities of your Freshdesk account by plugging in different tools from the Freshdesk marketplace that has over 1500+ apps.

Keep your account secured

Freshdesk is GRPR and HIPAA compliant and lets you host data in centers across the globe and offers IP whitelisting, custom email servers and SAML SSO.  

Frequently Asked Questions

Learn more about our software:

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