CCM Solutions: Build or Buy for Your Business?

Delivering seamless, personalized experiences for customers across channels continues to be a priority for organizations across industries.

To make this goal a reality, they seek out powerful customer communications management (CCM) solutions. However, there’s often a debate on whether to build a custom in-house solution or purchase an enterprise-grade platform.

And I get it – on the surface, building often seems like it might be the less expensive option, especially these days when cloud vendors offer tempting incentives and the tools seem more accessible than ever.

But the truth is, it’s a decision that needs to account for more than the initial cost. You need to consider compliance, scalability, and how it will help you best serve your customers. This is particularly true for regulated industries – where compliance, security, and agility are critical.

If you’re weighing this decision right now, you need to know: which path reduces your risk and ensures compliance more effectively? From my experience, while both options have their place, the benefits of buying – especially when it comes to long-term risk reduction, scalability, and speed – tend to far outweigh those of building. Let’s take a closer look.

What Does it Mean to Build or Buy a CCM Solution?

Building a CCM solution means developing a custom CCM platform internally. It gives you full control so that you can tailor it to your unique business needs (for example, acquiring customers vs. communicating to current customers). Businesses often consider this option to save costs and solve point problems for specific use cases.

However, in addition to the initial cost, you also must commit to continuously maintaining, securing, and scaling that system over time – and ensuring it keeps up with changing regulations and rising customer expectations.

Buying a CCM solution, on the other hand, means investing in a pre-built, enterprise-grade, unified platform. These solutions are built to support both the simple and the most complex communication needs across your business – and, they come ready with compliance certifications, automation capabilities, and built-in scalability and support.

A Deeper Dive into Risk Management

With each of your options defined, let’s take a deeper dive into risk.

Building, understandably, can be very appealing for some organizations. But, here’s what I’ve seen happen all too often: the solution ends up sitting in a silo. Other teams build their own. Then, you end up with multiple systems managed by different teams, using different tools – without shared data, workflows, or consistent oversight.

This can create some real headaches, especially when it comes to compliance. It involves a lot of duplicated efforts and missed opportunities to reuse information that could reduce legal, regulatory, or brand compliance risk.

In that sense, the seemingly cheaper option of building can end up costing your organization more in the long run. It increases your total cost of ownership due to all of the people-related costs. And, it limits your scalability and innovation. Here are some key points to consider:

• Data security exposure. Separate systems mean separate access controls, data flows, and connection points. This makes it harder to manage data security consistently, raising the stakes for your InfoSec team.
• Duplicated efforts across teams. Multiple product or program management teams may be solving the same problems independently within their respective systems – creating redundancies.
• Missed buying power and innovation. When you purchase tools at the department level versus the enterprise level, you often end up paying more for software licensing, maintenance, and support. You’re doing it all in a siloed environment, and missing opportunities to scale and share the benefits of that investment across your business.
• Inconsistent view of the customer. This one is critical. To deliver the personalized experiences that customers expect, everybody across your business needs to be looking at the same data. You need a single, unified view of your customers to ensure consistent, tailored messaging – and you lose that when data is disconnected and siloed.

So really, this comes down to not just technical debt – there’s also people debt. There are hidden costs when multiple teams are doing the same thing differently; when there are missed opportunities to share insights; when there’s strain on legal and compliance reviews; when the burden on your InfoSec team increases.

That’s why buying a trusted solution matters. Platforms like EngageOne™ RapidCX are built with audit trails, version control, and certified compliance baked in. We handle the platform-level certifications, the InfoSec monitoring, and the disaster recovery protocols, so your team can focus on delivering great customer experiences rather than constantly scrambling to mitigate risks.

With that in mind, let’s explore build vs. buy across three major capabilities you need to manage risk – using EngageOne™ RapidCX as a reference point for what a proven solution can deliver.

1. Audit trails for changes and deliveries

Audit trails are needed for a single source of truth, especially for regulated industries. Without audit trails, I’ve seen organizations have to piece together information from email threads, scattered files, and even hallway conversations.

• Build
  Custom-built tools often lack comprehensive tracking for changes and deliveries. Approvals can happen informally, without documentation. This can make the auditing process slow, risky, and potentially very costly when you’re faced with regulatory fines.
• Buy
  Pre-built solutions like EngageOne™ RapidCX capture every change, every step of the way. With version control, end-to-end tracking, and quick access for audits, you save time and reduce your risk exposure and regulatory fines.

2. Data security and compliance

The regulatory landscape is constantly shifting, which means that maintaining compliance isn’t a one-time effort.

• Build
  With custom builds, again, the responsibility to stay compliant falls entirely on your team – and it only grows with every new tool or vendor you add into the mix. Maintaining 24/7 security across a complex tech stack, especially when it includes open-source components and custom integrations, is resource-intensive and prone to gaps.

You need to stay ahead of vulnerabilities with constant updates, patching, and monitoring across systems that may not be designed to work together. And if internal controls aren’t well-documented or regularly trained on, you risk losing essential certifications like SOC, ISO, or HIPAA compliance, and falling short of evolving data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

• Buy
  EngageOne™ RapidCX is already certified to standards including SOC and ISO. We maintain those certifications and provide summaries, audit schedules, and uptime metrics so your team can stay prepared. You don’t have to worry about securing the platform, since we take care of that for you. This gives you stronger data protection and reduces the risk of breaches or penalties.

3. Disaster recovery

Continuous access to your customer communications is essential when something goes wrong – like an unexpected outage or breach. In those cases, you need a clear, tested plan for recovery.

• Build
  Backup systems are often under-resourced in custom systems. This increases your vulnerability during outages – which is amplified when you have multiple disconnected systems.
• Buy
  With EngageOne™ RapidCX, you ensure high availability with mirrored hot sites and regular disaster recovery tests. That means that you can maintain operational continuity, reduce downtime and prevent lost revenue when you’re faced with the unexpected.

Build vs. Buy: Key CCM Considerations

Operational Efficiency through Automation and Archiving

I recently heard a stat from one of our customers: using EngageOne™ RapidCX, they improved their approval time by 40x – which, in turn, helps them get to market faster.

This is a great example of why automated review and approval workflows are a must in your CCM solution. It’s how you ensure that all your communications go through the proper checks before being sent – so you can minimize errors, unauthorized changes, and regulatory violations.

EngageOne™ RapidCX automates workflows, supports multiple approval tiers, and provides full audit trails so that you can reduce manual effort and get approvals faster.

Alternatively, when you build your own solution, you’re often left to rely on manual processes that are prone to errors (remember those hallway conversations and email threads I mentioned earlier?)

Another crucial governance control is single source archiving. This ensures that all your customer communications are stored in one place – reducing your risk of lost or altered records and making it easier to prove compliance.

In a custom-built environment, managing communication archives can be complex and inconsistent. Whereas in a unified platform like EngageOne™ Rapid CX, you store as-delivered versions of your communications in a single, secure archive. With controlled access and template management, you’re able to save time searching for communications and streamline your workflows. 

Building for the Future: Scalability, Innovation, and AI (Artificial Intelligence)

Really, your decision to build vs. buy is all about the future, so let’s focus on that for a moment.

Technology is evolving fast, and your customer expectations are growing accordingly. If your CCM solution is hard to update, scale, or extend to new channels, you’re going to fall behind.

Let’s use AI as an example. It’s no secret that everyone is talking about these technologies – they hold such tremendous potential and will continue to do so, which is why everyone’s eager to incorporate them into their solutions for greater innovation.

When you do so, however, you need to understand how to use it in a way that meets data privacy standards. This is a lot to take on internally, especially considering that these standards are continuously evolving.

That’s why we’ve embedded AI capabilities directly into our EngageOne™ solutions – from natural language processing to accelerate time to issue resolution in chatbots, to voice synthesis (also known as text-to-speech or TTS) in personalized video content.

Again, these capabilities are embedded right into our solutions – you don’t need to do any additional vetting, purchasing, or integration. They’re ready to use, and you can feel secure in the fact that they’re already compliant – we’ve taken the heavy lifting around data privacy, security audits, and more off your plate.

And as new customer engagement channels emerge, we’re ready to continue to accommodate them within our solutions – that means you’re able to keep scaling and innovating, without disruption.

What’s the Real Cost of Doing Nothing? Customer Trust.

A final takeaway, and perhaps the most important, is this: the biggest risk in building your own system isn’t a regulatory fine or delivery delays.

It’s losing your customer’s trust – and their business.

When customers feel like you’re not communicating clearly, not protecting their data, or not treating them consistently across channels, they leave. And when they leave, they talk.

That’s why I always come back to this: your CCM strategy is about more than compliance. It’s about confidence. Your customers need to trust that you know them, respect them, and can reach them in the moments that matter.

The biggest cost of not having a unified platform is the damage it can do to your customer base.

CCM Solutions: From Decision to ROI

Let’s recap what we’ve covered here. While building a CCM solution may seem like the more flexible or cost-effective choice at first glance, my experience working with customers across industries – from telecommunications to banking and everything in between – has shown that the long-term costs and risks can quickly outweigh the initial appeal. Disconnected systems, duplicated work, inconsistent compliance, and limited scalability can all undermine your efforts, increase your total cost of ownership, and result in customer churn.

Buying a unified CCM platform, on the other hand, gives you the advantage of proven, scalable technology that has security, compliance, and innovation built in. It enables you to do more – faster, and with less risk.

That said, it’s not always a clear-cut decision. Over the years, I’ve worked with organizations at every stage of this journey – some are planning to build from scratch (or have started the process and realize that it’s more complex than anticipated), and some are simply ready to buy a pre-built, unified solution.

And of course, there are those who are on the fence and just want to understand the best path forward. That’s why we offer ROI workshops as part of our process. We sit down with your teams and walk through your current setup to discover what’s working and what’s not – this includes uncovering any potential hidden costs like manual workflows, InfoSec risks, and inefficient approvals.

From there, we break it all down and develop a picture of what it’d look like to build your own customer communications management solution vs. investing in ours. We want you to have all of the information you need to make an informed decision and investment. You can get in touch with our team any time to learn more about how we can work together to meet your goals, reduce risk, and deliver the best experience for your customers.

Whether you’re deciding to build or buy your CCM solution, selecting the right partner plays a key role in your ability to deliver consistent and compliant customer experiences. Read our eBook to explore the top considerations for choosing the right digital transformation partner and set your organization up for long-term success: Digital Transformation Partner – Top Considerations for Selection.