According to Forrester, one-third of their CCM inquiries “concern end-of-life or migration challenges due to aging on-premises systems.” Are you one of the 33.3 percent racing to overhaul your CCM initiatives and make the critical investment into enterprise-grade customer experience management? Have you spent the last year researching, line-iteming, metric-building, and justifying the budget to the C-suites?
Have you been comparing CCM vendors, wondering which one can help you streamline your customer communications and drive excellent CX, despite the daunting challenge of disparate data streams, technology, department silos, a newly distributed workforce, and legacy systems?
We thought you might have. You’re going to want to read on.
Billing is tied to CCM engine efficiency, NOT your budget
CCM vendors might not be telling you the limitations of their CCM engines. An “infinitely scalable“ SaaS solution sounds cutting edge. Indeed, it’s a selling point. But what does scalability matter if the rendering engine is too inefficient to get your complex job done? This is a shiny distraction to a hidden problem that can blow your budget faster than the Grand Prix.
Here’s what might be hiding beneath the hood of that CCM contract:
- Obscure terms and conditions that covers the vendor if inefficient technology triggers bloated fees
- You might have little control to prevent or plan for overages as you empower your users with the UX controls you need to enhance CX
- Poor – or outright lack of – customer enablement and success measures that the vendor leverages for your project’s success
- An outsourced rendering engine which is 10x less efficient and slower than those that have been built and perfected in-house leading to unexpected fees being tacked on to your bill.
Common customer communications management fail
In our line of work, we are often picking up complex projects. Candidly, we save the day uncomfortably often.
Imagine being a national retail bank needing to update customers with agreement changes. Regulatory rules mean that you must deliver these customer communications within 24 hours of the live date. If you don’t, not only do you look like you’re sitting the race out, but you’re slapped with hefty regulatory fees. Unbeknownst to you – your CCM vendor is deploying your project on an outsourced engine. You find out a few hours in that you will miss the deadline by several days and scramble to find a provider with an engine powerful enough to handle the job. Sure, it’s less than regulatory fines, but you’re now spending more than $500,000 in addition to what’s proved to be a bunk CCM investment. You’re now heading C-suites for some uncomfortable conversations.
Whether or not you ultimately choose Quadient for your CCM needs, we want to arm you with the intelligence to avoid this scenario and bring the right car to the races.
Intelligent CCM investing
There is a formula for success – a way to shop smarter. Here’s some basic criteria to consider spending your hard-fought budget dollars. You want:
- A product that has been developed and fine-tuned over time (Quadient’s rendering engine earned a 99 percent score in Aspire’s CCM Leaderboard)
- A product built and owned by expert R&D engineers who incorporate customer feedback and eliminate challenges (Quadient’s R&D team has a combined 2,000 programmer years in our CCM solutions, with 300 programmer years recurring annually)
- Proven longevity of leadership (Quadient’s 30-year-long winning industry record and experience spans twice that of our closest competitor)
- An engine built for efficiency, not verbosity (Quadient's Inspire solution suite was built by teams who fought to be efficient at the byte level.)
We’ve covered rendering engines before - because they're extremely important to staying on budget. Here’s a recap.
Efficient CCM engines in the cloud significantly benefit businesses and recipients with reduced file size. It’s a tangible benefit, sending bloated communications that take up space, render slowly or time out at critical moments. This slow, inefficient processing consumes more cloud-based CPU. The host then charges the vendor for the excess power needed to compute. That cost shows up somewhere, usually in the form of an unexpected surcharge.
As you can imagine, vendors aren’t quick to point out their outsourced engines.
Our promise
We’ve built - and own - the world’s most powerful rendering engine, recognized for its superior efficiency. That means you won’t run into unexpected fees.
More importantly, your customer communication requirements might be complicated, but your Quadient invoice won’t be.
Our pricing (and reporting) tells you exactly what you have and what you don’t – so you (or any one of your users) don’t accidentally blow your budget or incur unexpected penalty fees for exceeding pre-agreed limits like, for example, a 50 percent increase in per-click pricing. Click away, with Quadient there are no pre-agreed limits.
We’re in your corner, committed to positioning you for success with simplicity, transparency and support that enables scalability in alignment with your goals and your budget.
So much so, that we’re sharing the intel you need as you shop for CCM vendors. Here’s a deep dive into the questions you NEED answered before bringing the car to the line.
P.S. Stay tuned for more intelligence that can help you shop for CCM solutions.
