Let’s face it, when it comes to customer communications, relevance resonates.  And thanks to innovations in composition software, our ability to communicate in a significantly more personalized and relevant way with our consumers is more attainable and practical than ever before.

As purveyors of customer information, especially dealing with transactional communications such as bills, statements, and other customer correspondence, we also know it’s hard work to adjust and manage our communications to appeal to different audiences – ideally honing our message to a segment of just one — the nirvana of true personalization and maximum relevance! The reason is that it involves a great deal of content, rules, and stakeholders, as well as careful planning and coordination. Not to mention its still a very manual spreadsheet-and-coding process today.

We could describe today’s state as “Touchpoint Messaging 1.0”, where elements of personalization and targeting are enabled through composition tools and certainly a lot of possibilities and opportunities are opened up, but like any 1.0 phenomenon, it doesn’t quite go far enough to truly unleash the full potential. What’s been missing is a platform that bridges the goals and needs on the business side with composition technology on the operations side.

Let me introduce “Touchpoint Messaging 2.0”, which is about taking the next step in aligning the right technologies behind the people and processes to support the way we need to start communicating with our customers with even greater relevance in 2012 and beyond.

So what might a customer messaging platform – one that lets users own and manage the messaging lifecycle from inception to delivery – look like? The next series of posts will start to unpack what you might look for to get to 2.0.