Making Customer Communications Management easy

Last week, we launched the newest version of Messagepoint.com, and we’re pretty excited. As with prior releases, our unwavering focus was on simplifying the complex and speeding your time-to-market for your customer touchpoints.

How did we make Customer Communications Management (CCM) easier?  Here are just a few of the additions we’ve made to the new release.

Touchpoint Healthcheck

For one, we built a powerful new feature called “Touchpoint Healthcheck”. The challenge we addressed? When you take control of messaging and rules previously relegated to a composition tool, you’re now responsible for lining things up correctly, every time. And there are a lot of moving parts in today’s complex communications, things you may forget to configure. Running Healthcheck on your touchpoint lets you know what elements of your touchpoint are complete and which ones still require your attention. Kind of like a report card, but with links that take you back to the specific items needing remediation. Or, it’s like the final sanity check at the end of your favorite online tax program. Simple, yet powerful, and means you’ll spend less time troubleshooting and more time adding value to your customer communications.

Layout Manager

Another cool addition was to make it easier (maybe even fun?) to set up and configure your content zones. The challenge? When you own the content, you also own and control the content zones where messaging will be placed, and you control what fonts and styles should be used that correspond to your branding guideline. And there are typically many many zones. We made it faster and easier to draw zones and parts, even to assign background thumbnails that provide greater clarity and context. We also make it easier and more intuitive to configure your zones in bulk. Fewer mouse clicks, greater accuracy, and faster “time to content”!

Sharable content

We also added more granular control over all share-able content, even your rules. The challenge? In a word, scale. Owning and managing content in Customer Communications Management requires a smart system that harnesses and controls volumes, especially as adoption grows and more touchpoints are added. You’ll want to promote re-used and sharing of content and rules between touchpoints, but not among all touchpoints all the time. For any content or rule, you can now easily configure whether it should be truly global or restricted to just one or two touchpoints. This means that content authors in Messagepoint can be given the exact set of building blocks they need to quickly create touchpoints, no more and no less.

Email Variations

One last innovation worth mentioning is our new extended support for email variations. The challenge? Managing content variations is the bread-and-butter of Messagepoint and it works the same from print to email, but when it comes to email itself, many of our customers wanted to extend branding to email beyond the words and images. Think about “From:” and “Reply–to:” addresses, or the content layout, or the background color for each client-branded email. Now imagine sending out a single email communication that spoke to 100 unique segments with variations in content, perhaps client-branding and messaging, and the “From:” and “Reply–to:” addresses used mapped to your individual clients’ requirements? What would have taken 100 individual email assets configured differently for each client, and 100 unique segments and send jobs, can now be done in one simple, easy to manage touchpoint.

Now that’s CCM made easy!