Most companies with a large customer base recognise the need to build a modern Customer Communications Management (CCM) platform. These platforms allow you to centralise the production and delivery of all content you’re sending to your customers, consolidating everything from invoicing to promotional emails in a unified communications strategy. When it works, this approach eliminates redundant legacy systems, de-siloes content production, enables greater compliance with brand guidelines and regulatory requirements, and ultimately delivers a better, more personalised customer experience.
That said, decommissioning old technology, redesigning processes, and migrating content isn’t a straightforward exercise. It requires extracting and analysing potentially millions of documents in a variety of formats, creating buy-in from multiple teams that don’t typically work together, and hours of manual and unglamorous work that’s prone to human error if not done strategically and systematically.
AI and CCM migration
Thankfully, artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly eliminating much of the manual work involved in migrating content to a modern CCM platform. Some platforms come with embedded AI functionality, and there are various standalone AI platforms specifically designed for this use case. Here are a few of the ways that these tools are helping:
Content extraction
AI can be used to build an inventory of any asset, in any format, stored in any system. Anything from PDFs, to emails, to HTML web pages can be extracted, read, classified, and stored by your CCM / AI platform, creating a centralised, searchable database of all your assets.
Content metadata
The AI is able to identify and tag different elements used in your content – addresses, titles, sub-headings, introductory paragraphs and closing paragraphs etc. It can also be used to apply changes to these elements across multiple assets simultaneously, for example if your business’ address in a particular city changes, it can be automatically updated across all assets that use that information.
De-duplication
Your AI platform will be able to identify duplicated or similar pieces of content that can be consolidated. As you create new content it can search the inventory of existing assets to identify similar or related content elements that you can re-use.
Enforcing consistency
The AI will identify content that doesn’t conform to brand guidelines (e.g., product names that aren’t capitalised) or regulatory requirements (e.g., customer communications that should include a return postal address). These issues can be automatically rectified wherever they’ve been found.
Tone & sentiment
There are likely some variances in the tone and sentiment you want to convey in your communications. For example, an ‘upsell’ email will likely use a different tone to a notification of an overdue invoice. AI tools can be used to automatically identify where you’ve used an inconsistent or incongruent tone.
Reading level
AI tools can evaluate the complexity of the language and concepts used in your assets to ensure communications are pitched at the right level.
Investing in an AI platform can not only radically simplify your migration to a modern CCM platform, but also enables more efficient content production and better customer experiences in the long run. A centralised, AI-enabled content library allows you to consolidate your content templates, with content creators selecting from a smaller range of brand and audience-aligned content elements. It simplifies ongoing content management by flagging inconsistencies as new content is created and identifying opportunities to reuse or repurpose existing assets. Given the relative novelty of AI, these technologies are only likely to improve, and new use cases and applications will continue to emerge.
