CCM and CXM Are Redefining What Counts as Data

In a recent cXm Professionals LinkedIn poll, we asked: What is the biggest CXM challenge right now?

The top response wasn’t tools, channels, or even customer expectations. It was process and data issues.

While not surprising, it is telling. Despite continued investment in platforms and technologies, many organizations are still working through foundational challenges in how data is structured, managed, and used across customer communications.

This insight aligns with what we’ve been hearing across recent cXm Professionals educational sessions, and what I continue to see in communication platform modernization engagements, where several consistent patterns have emerged.

First, data is often prepared for a specific communication or channel, limiting reuse. Second, communication data is fragmented across systems supporting different lifecycle stages. And third, teams still spend significant time preparing and reconciling data before automated workflows can produce communications.

As organizations expand digital channels, these challenges become more visible. The same communication is expected to exist consistently across formats, touchpoints, and moments in the customer journey, placing greater pressure on how data is structured and managed upstream.

But what’s beginning to shift is what we consider “data” in the first place.

For years, most organizations have focused on variable and metadata, the structured fields used for composition and indexing. Increasingly, organizations are expanding the types of data they generate and retain for future use cases.

Content, messaging, and even entire communications can be:

• Summarized
• Indexed
• Analyzed
• Reused as insight

These data use cases introduce a new layer of value. Communication summaries, fragments, and derived insights are emerging as high-value data assets, particularly as organizations begin to explore search, retrieval, and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) use cases. The ability not only to generate communications but also to understand and reuse content and context is becoming a differentiator.

This shift is also becoming more apparent as AI influences how communications are accessed and used. As demand grows for faster access, summarization, and reuse of communication content, the ability to retrieve and work with communication data is becoming just as important as the ability to generate it.

As these conversations continue to evolve, it is becoming clear that organizations that treat communications as assets and experience touchpoints, not just regulatory output, will be better positioned for what comes next.

Advancing CCM and CXM together,

Advancing CCM and CXM together,

Scott Mulkey, M-EDP
Principal Consultant
Quantre Solutions