Madison Advisors’ senior analyst, Gina Ferrara, will lead an educational session at PRINTING United, being held October 23-25 at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, Texas. Ferrara will present “CCM as a Service? What Every Service Provider Needs to Know” on Wednesday, October 23 from 11:00 to 11:40 a.m. in Room C144.

Colleyville, Tex. – Madison Advisors—Madison Advisors’ president, Kemal Carr, EDP, will be discussing the state of the print service provider market in an educational session and on a panel discussion focused on successful document print and mail outsourcing strategies at the 2019 Xploration Tour in Omaha, Nebraska on October 15, 2019. Xploration Tours focus on the best practices and technologies that drive customer communications.

By Kemal Carr, President

At the end of September, Neopost, headquartered in Paris, France, announced that it’s changing its name to Quadient – previously the name of one of its business units, the one that provides primarily multichannel CCM capabilities and likely some portion of Neopost’s Business Process Automation (BPA) services and customer experience management (CXM) solutions as well. In fact, it’s difficult to untangle these lines of business, and for the reason that they probably are not meant to be untangled. Rather, Neopost (now Quadient) appears to be moving toward the comprehensive integration of all that it has to offer.

With the name change, Quadient’s management seems to be taking another step ahead and is creating a vision—for itself and for customers and prospects—of its own future in the integrated CCM, CXM, and BPA spaces. This is where we’re seeing growth in the field of digital automation and transformation as organizations move away from traditional, physical customer communications to digital channels and management.

The more Quadient can pull all the pieces together into a unified CCM, CXM and BPA solution for enterprise, the more I think they’re on the right path. Our enterprise clients don’t want to add complexity to an already complex and broken process, so using two solutions where a single unified offering exists, makes managing the offering far less difficult.

Adding to this, traditionally what businesses have done when they have a very specific need in one line of business is to buy another point solution. However, this then creates a whole separate silo outside of the normal existing process and only makes support and related costs go up. Isolated customer data silos become obstacles to overcome in developing and delivering consistent messaging and direct and personalized interaction with customers.

What we see is that enterprises today are looking for a complete digital and physical solution—one-stop convenience. Executives are frustrated with buying CCM solutions from this vendor and digital services from that vendor, and then having to cobble them together themselves, or spend money on integration services or hire more IT staff.

As Quadient, the rebranded Neopost is looking to satisfy both current and future customer demand for integrated communications solutions, now under a single and well-respected name. It will be exciting to keep watching this space to see how Quadient continues to adapt.

After its introduction close to three decades ago, the quick adoption of email led many to believe the predicted obsolescence of printed communications was inevitable. As time went on, consumers were able to enjoy interacting with their favorite brands through a variety of digital channels. However, despite the focus on using digital channels to communicate with customers, organizations are not ruling out print as an important communication tool. Why? Because they know consumers still open and read their mail. Monthly bills and statements represent 12 opportunities to communicate information to customers.

Colleyville, Tex. – Madison Advisors—Madison Advisors’ senior analyst, Gina Ferrara, will be leading a breakout session focused on customer communications management (CCM), in addition to moderating the Management Circle Seminar at the Papyrus Software Open House and User Conference 2019, held October 13-15 in Southlake, Texas. Ferrara’s session, “The Importance of Inbound Customer Communications,” will be held Tuesday, October 15 at 12:30 p.m. The Management Circle Seminar will be held Monday, October 14 at 4:00 p.m. and Tuesday, October 15 at 2:00 p.m.

Print service providers seeking to expand their offerings beyond print and mail may want to consider offering customer communications management (CCM) as a service to their clients.

“CCM is a critical component for customer experience – yet enterprises are riddled with legacy technology and a disjointed infrastructure that includes point solutions for electronic delivery,” says Gina Ferrara, senior analyst, Madison Advisors.

Over the past two decades, Madison Advisors' industry-neutral expertise enables enterprise organizations, service providers and technology providers to achieve their strategic objectives around today’s evolving customer communications management (CCM) requirements.