By Gina Ferrara, Senior Analyst, Madison Advisors

I had the opportunity to present at XPLOR19, which was held April 23-25 at the Mandalay Bay Conference Center in Las Vegas. I have had the pleasure of attending this conference every year since 2014.

With the hope of increasing attendance and interest in XPLOR19, two big changes were made for this year’s conference. The first was location. For the past 15 years, XPLOR had been in Florida. As a native of New England, the Southeast is always a welcome change from the cold winter months. This year, it was located in Las Vegas, also warm, but, of course, much farther to travel. Second, the conference was co-located with the ISA (International Sign Association) Expo and although ISA boasts somewhere north of 20,000 attendees, the Xplor team did a great job of making sure our conference within the conference was centrally located, with the educational sessions and the exhibitor forum conveniently located within the same section of the conference center.

XPLOR prides itself on providing attendees with high-quality educational sessions, typically broken out into three different tracks. This year, the tracks were business, delivery and marketing. All of the sessions were part of the overall conference theme, “Linking People, Technology & Solutions” and provided a mix of topics that covered print, digital transformation, customer experience and artificial intelligence.

In addition to the educational sessions, there were four general sessions that were specifically focused on the topic of customer experience and how CCM has become the pivot point for increased consumer loyalty and market share. Although the convergence of CCM and customer experience is not a new topic, it still captured the interest of attendees hungry for the latest insights and ideas to bring back to their respective organizations.

As the post-conference dust settles, and the post-conference surveys have been distributed to attendees, it will be interesting to see what is in store for XPLOR20. While moving to Las Vegas and co-locating with the ISA Expo might not have provided the boost in attendance hoped for, one thing is for certain: No matter how big or small, you can always count on XPLOR for quality presentations and an opportunity to learn and network with industry peers. I am definitely looking forward to next year.

Colleyville, Tex. – Madison Advisors—Madison Advisors today announced that Susan Cotter, senior analyst at Madison Advisors, and Jason Fonner, director, business development print operations at HM Document Solutions, will be speaking at the In-Plant Printing and Mailing Association (IPMA) 2019 Conference. The event will be held June 2-6 at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, KY. Cotter and Fonner will present a breakout session, “Digital Transformation Using Customer Communications Delivery Hub With Inkjet Technologies,” on Monday, June 3 from 3:45 to 4:30 p.m.

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Digital printing technology and variable data publishing (VDP) software help print providers cost-effectively produce fully personalized materials and communications. Market trends like digital transformation, increasing amounts of data, and the need for enhanced customer experiences shape VDP software improvements.

Before selecting a VDP software provider, print and marketing service providers should consider whether the solution is designed for ease of use and fast turnaround. It’s also important to determine if a standalone solution or an integrated option works best for the shop’s particular needs.

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By Gina Ferrara

Developing an optimized customer communications management (CCM) strategy is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle—to complete the picture, all the pieces need to be interlocked together. When implementing a customer communication strategy, all of the necessary components need to be part of an integrated technology solution to successfully manage the communications lifecycle and enhance the customer experience. However, while technology is important, other factors are required for a successful CCM strategy.

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The introduction of color inkjet technology more than a decade ago has changed the world of print, and with it came numerous opportunities for the transactional printing industry. Transactional communications are business-to-consumer (B2C) communications, such as statements, bills, and customer letters, and span a variety of highly regulated verticals such as financial, insurance, healthcare, and utilities. These communications, historically regarded as documents that were required to satisfy regulatory requirements, are now being revitalized as part of an omnichannel communications strategy to enhance the customer experience (CX) with eye-catching and colorful document designs, personalized content, and targeted marketing messages to cross sell or upsell to existing customers.

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Colleyville, Tex. – Madison Advisors—Madison Advisors today announced that COO, Warren Lederer, will be speaking at DOCUMENT Strategy Forum (DSF) ’19, being held May 7-9 at the Hilton Anaheim in Anaheim, CA.

Lederer will present “Adopting a Digital-first Mindset to Improve Automation and Efficiency” on Wednesday, May 8, 4:30 to 5:20 p.m. Lederer will discuss how automation technology improves workflows and back-end processes to ensure successful digital transformation and more seamless and efficient operations.

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By Warren Lederer, COO, Madison Advisors

So many people attended Automation Anywhere’s Imagine user conference, held in New York City on April 16-17, that a second room was opened up to accommodate the crowd, and even the caterer was hard-pressed to keep pace with the traffic.  The whole RPA (robotic process automation) and AI (artificial intelligence) marketplace is rapidly developing, and we’re seeing a lot of enthusiasm and interest.  In fact, RPA platform provider, Automation Anywhere, is ramping up its 36 offices and doubling its 1,500-person workforce this year to satisfy the exploding demand.

What’s driving this interest?

Often, when people think of robotics and artificial intelligence, their first thought is of reduced head counts and pushing manual workers off the payroll.  While there may be some truth to this in industries like manufacturing, most people at the Imagine conference were in enterprise IT and finance and they are grabbing onto RPA/AI to make their lives and jobs easier.  This is in line with the more realistic and positive message that Automation Anywhere tries to convey, which is to say, “What we’re really providing you is a digital worker.” I think it would be even more realistic to call it a “digital co-worker.”

RPA actually works alongside human beings so that instead of having to spend two or three hours on a Monday morning manually building a spreadsheet from a variety of reports drawn from a number of different sources, humans can hand those repetitive, mundane tasks over to robotics process automation so they can start their workday with more meaningful projects where they’re using their unique cognitive knowledge ability.

Currently within enterprises using RPA, 50% of the robotic processes are initially deployed within the finance department, because finance is still using multiple spreadsheets that have to be updated on a regular basis.  Without RPA, humans are doing this, spending hours each day just collecting and integrating this data before then can even begin to analyze it usefully. An unattended RPA basically self-starts, pulls up the spreadsheet, goes to Excel, goes to a system, copies the information from that system, puts it in Excel, goes to a website, adds that data—and it cycles through all this in milliseconds.

RPA also can do automatic look-ups.  For instance, when you get new data and have to verify it using the Internet every day.  An RPA can do that for you.  This is where AI comes into play, because as things change, you don’t necessarily have to reprogram the RPA.  The AI component automatically recognizes a new form by comparing it to something similar it’s encountered before, and then adapts the RPA process.  In the service provider market, this can eliminate all manual intervention.

From my perspective, RPA is having a huge impact in the customer communications management (CCM) marketplace, because CCM providers and enterprises are using RPA and AI to eliminate the repetitive tasks that are currently being done manually.  It’s making enterprises more efficient.  And this should be a wake-up call to CCM service providers that it’s time they think about getting involved with RPA/AI processing if they aren’t already.  Automation Anywhere, along with developers UiPath and Blue Prism, offer RPA as a standalone product. These are technology solution providers (TSPs) to watch—and all TSPs in this market will find the first to be adopted wins. Once an RPA/AI solution is adopted by an organization, there will be no reason for IT to swap one out for the other.

One message from the conference that stayed with me is that many of the service providers who are using RPA are using it internally.  They’re not waiting for a customer to pay for it.  They’re doing it so they can eliminate inefficiency and speed their processing from an operations perspective.  This drives a stronger bottom line for those service providers, but it also makes for potentially lower prices for their enterprise customers.  In addition, one of the larger capture software providers also has developed RPA and is using it to leverage its installed software for capture.  They have an interesting advantage here, in that they’re able to build it into their core software products.

Another interesting and important benefit of RPA/AI was pointed out by conference keynoter Garry Kasparov.  Kasparov is a World Chess Champion who’s famous for playing chess against he lost to the IBM supercomputer, Deep Blue.  In this duel between human intelligence versus artificial intelligence, Kasparov won the first match, but lost the second.  He noted that chess isn’t about being perfect, it’s about making fewer mistakes.  This parallels RPA/AI in that, though they may not always deliver perfection, they will deliver fewer errors than a human.  Where robotics will eliminate 90% of errors, your human only has to check that last 10%.  That’s a significant improvement over what we’re doing today.

The RPA/AI race will be very interesting to watch.