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From here on out, customer engagement is digital-first

The pandemic didn’t just accelerate digital transformation—it rewired customer expectations. “The foundational piece in all this is the nature of communications is really changing,” Kehoe explained. “We’ve moved into that post-COVID time where customer engagement is really a digital-first process.”

Supporting this shift are hard numbers: a 200% spike in mobile banking registrations during the pandemic (per FIS), and Gartner’s prediction that most customer service interactions will be digital by 2025. Aspire’s research echoes this, with nearly 50% of transactional communications expected to be digital-only in the near term.

But it’s not just about more screens—it’s about how we interact with them. “Back in 2019, the average adult spent about six hours per day on a screen,” said Kehoe. “Now it’s more than eleven.” Digital-native generations—Gen Y and Gen Z—expect communications to be fast, relevant, and personal. And increasingly, they don’t want to talk to a person if they can avoid it.

Despite this, many organizations have only superficially embraced digital. “People say, ‘I’ve got to get digital,’ and so they convert their documents to PDFs,” Kehoe noted. “But that’s a terrible customer experience—pinch, zoom, scroll. It checks the box, but it’s awful.”

What makes a great digital experience?

So what should a truly effective digital experience look like?

Speed is critical—both in delivery and production. Customers want instant answers, and internal teams need the agility to get communications out fast. Personalization must go beyond surface-level greetings to reflect the customer’s actual relationship with the brand. “It’s very frustrating to be pitched an offer when you’re already a customer,” Kehoe said. “That kind of disconnect breaks trust.”

Tone, readability, and accessibility also matter. Content should be clear, concise, and consistent across all channels—from SMS to print. Fragmented or contradictory messaging, particularly between acquisition and servicing touchpoints, erodes the brand experience.

Kehoe emphasized the need to “rethink the entire experience” rather than simply digitize what already exists. That means designing for mobile and web from the ground up—not just repurposing print documents.

What’s stopping most organizations from delivering?

According to Kehoe, the biggest barriers are structural and systemic. Legacy technologies are built around document-centric workflows, with content locked inside templates and formats that are hard to reuse. “If you need four product versions across four regions, and you want that in print and digital—you’re talking 20 separate templates,” he said. “Every change means 20 manual updates.”

Silos make it worse. Print, web, email, and chatbot content are often managed by different teams, using disconnected systems. “It’s not unusual for organizations to have multiple CCM systems, plus Word, Excel, and a whole lot of copy-pasting,” Kehoe noted. “It’s inefficient and impossible to scale.”

As a result, personalization often falls by the wayside. Teams are too busy just getting the base content out the door, let alone optimizing it for multiple segments or channels. And any effort to adapt messaging for new digital platforms—like IVRs or mobile apps—runs headfirst into these constraints.

What is Headless CCM?

Enter headless CCM—a fundamentally different approach that decouples content from presentation.

“In a traditional system, the same tool is used to author and present the communication—like WordPress for a website,” Kehoe explained. “Headless separates the two. Content is created and managed in a centralized hub and delivered via APIs to wherever it needs to go.”

This distinction matters. Traditional headless CMS platforms—like those used in web marketing—aren’t built for regulated communications. They don’t support variable data, strong governance, or print output, all of which are essential for industries like financial services, insurance, and healthcare.

Headless CCM brings the separation benefits of a headless CMS, but tailored for high-stakes communications. “You get all the control, auditability, and print support of a CCM system,” said Kehoe, “but with the flexibility to serve digital channels in a dynamic, modular way.”

It’s the foundation for future-proofing communications—allowing content to be reused, personalized, and delivered across any channel, from traditional documents to next-gen digital experiences.

Changing How We Think About Communications

To deliver compelling, scalable digital experiences, organizations must rethink how they approach communication creation. Kehoe made it clear: “You’ve got to move away from a document-centric world.” Instead of building and managing entire documents for every channel and scenario, enterprises need to embrace modularized content management—where communications are composed from reusable blocks of content rather than static templates.

Modularized Content Management

Modular content allows teams to break communications down into smaller, manageable pieces that can be reused and recombined across touchpoints. This enables consistency, reduces effort, and accelerates delivery cycles. “If you make a change in a modular content object, it cascades across every instance it’s used,” Kehoe explained. “You’re not updating 36 different templates anymore—you’re updating one shared component.”

Intelligent Variation Management

Variation management allows for granular control of personalization without ballooning complexity. By assigning variation rules at different levels—by customer cohort, geography, product, or channel—teams can tailor content without duplicating effort. “You don’t need to write 12 versions of something,” Kehoe said. “You define one master, then override it where needed. That’s how you scale personalization.”

Deepening Personalization with Atomic Content

Atomic content goes one step further by breaking content down to the phrase or word level, enabling hyper-personalized experiences. This means swapping out copy dynamically based on customer behavior, profile data, or channel context. “We’re not just talking about ‘Dear John,’” Kehoe emphasized. “We’re talking about changing offers, tone, imagery—everything—to match the individual.”

The Importance of a Centralized Content Hub

None of this works without a centralized place to manage and govern content. By consolidating communication logic, personalization rules, and modular components into one hub, organizations gain full control across all channels—email, print, SMS, mobile apps, and beyond. “You’ve got one place to manage everything, and APIs to deliver it anywhere,” Kehoe noted.

Accelerating Change Cycles by Empowering Business Users

A final piece of the puzzle is speed.  Traditional CCM processes require developer involvement, leading to long delays and bottlenecks. Modern CCM systems with no-code content authoring experiences empower non-technical teams to create, update, and manage communications without IT support.

“We’ve had clients go from 90-day turnaround cycles to just a day or two,” said Kehoe. “Business users can make changes, validate them, and push them to production, without writing a line of code.”

Demo: Cross-selling with Personalization

To bring these concepts to life, Snowden and Kehoe walked through a fictional scenario involving a customer named John—a digitally savvy Grid Financial client. John receives a targeted credit card cross-sell offer across direct mail, email, mobile app, and a personalized onboarding video.

The demo showed how shared content components drive consistency across all touchpoints, while atomic variations personalize the experience based on John’s travel spend, device, and preferred communication channels. All of this was managed through Messagepoint’s intelligent content hub and delivered via headless APIs into existing systems.

This is just a preview of the insights shared in this webinar. Complete the form above to watch the full recording.