The launch of Quadient Inspire Release 11 (R11) has generated a great deal of excitement. Since the February 7, 2017 launch, we have received an overwhelming number of phone calls and emails from organizations around the world interested in learning more about what R11 can do for their business. In order to answer some of these great questions, we spent some time chatting with product experts Scott Draeger and Yarun Nahar to better understand what makes R11 so revolutionary. Here's what we uncovered:
Question: What is R11?
Scott: Release 11 began as a pretty ambitious project. We wanted to address the current state of the market and several emerging trends – particularly around enabling the business to improve the customer experience (CX).
Digital natives and millennials are demanding convenience. They live a life that crosses channels and uses a variety of devices. They expect businesses to be available 24/7, follow them were they are and be available through a variety of channels.
However, at the same time businesses needed to be able to make changes faster. The time from when a regulation is created to when a business must comply is becoming more compressed. So, we needed to help the business speed up the process of making changes across a wider variety channels without updating their legacy systems.
Yarun: Ultimately, we wanted to provide the tools necessary for organizations to create remarkable experiences. With R11, we have been able to bring to market a solution that powers these experiences through a highly intelligent customer communications management (CCM) engine that features a beautiful and consistent user interface, and helps the business collaborate in the name of better CX.
Question: What is the true value of R11?
Scott: Release 11 is built upon our industry leading CCM engine, but this time we have added a few important twists.
One of the ways R11 adds value to customers is by fostering collaboration and making the proof, approval and content process easier. This way, we are helping our customers become more agile – to easily adapt to the changing needs and demands of their consumers, as well as changing industry regulations.
50% of customer interaction is through mobile apps, and not many businesses are structured in a way to reflect that. Most large organizations have separate silos for each channel, which is not only expensive to maintain, but also leads to inconsistencies.
With R11, our customers deliver rich digitalized personal experiences across all channels – including mobile – from one centralized hub.
Question: How does R11 facilitate collaboration across the business?
Scott: One of the things you’ll see pervade the entire portfolio is the concept of social commenting. Several years ago, we noticed that CX was beginning to gain significant traction within the business. Since then, we have paid close attention to this trend, and in 2014 we figured out how to incorporate the job of the CX professional into the CCM process.
With Quadient Inspire R11, touchpoints that have traditionally been driven by CCM, such as statements, quotes, reports and policies, are now both visible and accessible to a CX team. CX teams that use our new cloud-based Customer Journey Mapping utility are not only able to see previews of each communication, but they see what it looks like in every channel. If something is inconsistent with the larger customer journey, they simply use the social commenting function to log a comment. That comment is automatically linked with the touchpoint and routed to the communication designer who can make the CX improvement right away.
Social commenting is also built in to Quadient Inspire Interactive. Therefore, the people who are quickly adding, updating, refreshing content, changing rules, optimizing the customer experience by making small changes – all of those people have excess to full a communication history and the respective changes that have taken place to improve the CX.
By having this connection, the CX professional can easily participate in the CCM discussion without any technical training.
Question: What is mobile approval and how does it work?
Yarun: One of the primary objectives of R11 was to put more power into the hands of business users to alleviate heavy reliance upon IT. With R11, business users don’t need to be at their desk to review and approve communications. With mobile approval, projects can be reviewed and approved quickly and easily from a mobile device.
Question: How does customer journey mapping tie into GMC Inspire?
Scott: According to Gartner, over 90% of marketers struggle to seamlessly connect more than 3 channels on their buyer’s journey. So, one of the things that we focused on with R11 is helping our customers elevate the quality of the customer journey. With Inspire R11 we introduced Quadient Customer Journey Mapping which is about giving businesses the ability to create actionable customer journey maps.
We see a lot of organizations conducting customer journey mapping exercises. Sometimes it’s with post-it notes, sometimes it’s on a whiteboard – and sometimes it is created using a digital tool. They look pretty, and are well-intended, but they just aren’t actionable.
Yarun: Quadient Customer Journey Mapping is the only cloud-based journey mapping tool that connects directly to the digital and physical touchpoints your customers interact with throughout the customer journey, providing visibility into every experience from one place. With Customer Journey Mapping, CX teams can share feedback with business users and document designers via social commenting, so improvements are made in real-time.
When we connect the CX professionals who are looking at the overall journey to the CCM designers who are creating those digital experiences – that’s where the magic happens.
Question: How does R11 help from an IT perspective?
Scott: For any enterprise dealing with a fractured channel-based communication infrastructure, the CIO is usually the one who is stuck ‘carrying the bag’. They are responsible for funding and supporting multiple legacy systems, multiple design systems and delivery functions. Our objective with R11 was to really break down those silos, enabling IT to allocate more time to innovation.
What we know is that CIO’s are spending only 16% of their budget exploring new technology options, and the rest is spent maintaining the systems they already have. This needs to change.
So, we thought: how can we help turn their existing technology into something that will support the innovation their C-level peers are demanding?
With R11, we focused on reusability and removing any friction from the collaboration process.
Let’s take the use case of a minor regulation change that requires the product managers to update some text. In most organizations, the change must be replicated by several teams, using several different platforms (for different channels), and then it must be sent to the compliance team in several formats to be approved, followed by multiple deployment teams.
Yarun: With Quadient Inspire, all content changes are channel-agnostic. This way, the person making the change will instantly see the communication in every format. Then, the compliance team is presented with a clear package of what the communication will look like in every channel, so there are no ‘errors of omission’. By empowering business users to become more self-sufficient, the IT team can focus more time on innovation.
Scott: R11 also marked the launch of Inspire Scaler, a revolutionary cloud-enabled automation solution that allows you to manage your entire production environment from one easy-to-use dashboard. It provides scalable and fault-tolerant support for on-demand and batch communications through the public cloud and on premise, so you are never vulnerable to unexpected spikes in demand.
Scaler is a single point to manage both on-demand and batch communications, which are typically separate infrastructures. Scaler also features dashboards to monitor the progress of all of your Inspire jobs.
Scaler also allows you to match infrastructure with demand so you can proactively manage how communications are executed across all channels.
Question: What is the difference between R10 and R11?
Scott: In past releases, we have focused heavily on helping our customers make great communications and elevating the quality of the customer experience. We’ve also worked hard to successfully streamline the management of enterprise communications.
With R11, we help our customers not only create amazing experiences, but also understand how every touchpoint impacts the overall customer experience.
Quadient has the advantage of leveraging the industry’s largest CCM-focused research and development team. We have over 250 innovators that are constantly working in the Inspire product line - from the same location. That is really rare.
We all know that consistency is a critical factor to delivering an exceptional customer experience. But what about business users?
If you look around the industry, you’ll find that many products are composed of acquired products that were never really integrated. We wanted to break the industry trend of what we call ‘purchase order integration’, (where the integration stops at the purchase order) to really create consistency that spans our entire portfolio.
Therefore, R11 features a new seamless graphical user interface (GUI) across all applications. This not only helps to expedite employee on-boarding, but also eliminates frustration and increases user efficiency. Automation, Scaler, Designer, Customer Journey Mapping, Messenger – every one of our products received a UI upgrade, so they all look the same, feel the same and act the same. We know that a consistent user interface helps to foster collaboration across the business.
Question: Why should customers upgrade to R11?
Yarun: With every release, we really put our customer’s maintenance dollars to work. The best reason to upgrade to R11 is to add more value to your investment, stay ahead of the market trends, and become a more agile organization.
Scott: From Release 10 to Release 11, there’s a strong case for everyone to upgrade.
Let me start with the CFO. For the CFO, Quadient extends its streak of delivering the highest return on maintenance (ROM) in the marketplace. Quadient is committed to putting more effort into improving the products you’ve already purchased. We are committed to making the product significantly more valuable with every release.
For the CXO: according to Gartner and Forrester, you may be new to this role, and your position is on the rise. You’ve probably been in your role for a relatively short period of time. R11 enables you to curate a portfolio that spans every channel without spanning IT silos. With Inspire, the CXO has an opportunity to make a big impact with little effort.
For the CIO: this is a chance for you to deliver, more with less. We delivered a streamlined UI for your team, so that you can deliver a consistent omni-channel experience quickly and easily. We believe that IT shouldn’t be wasting time re-keying things from the product, marketing or compliance teams. Instead, business users should be empowered to change and approve the content themselves.
For the CMO: R11 is a great opportunity to eliminate channel silos (including mobile), create more consistency, and deliver a better overall customer experience. With Mobile Advantage, you can now integrate CCM projects into your mobile app with little to no extra development time.
The Designers: At Quadient our favorite people are the communication designers. 20 years ago, we were first to market with a visual WYSIWYG design interface. Now with Inspire, the concepts of digital delivery, responsive design, multi-channel design is embedded deep into the DNA of a product. The designers now have an opportunity to really drive some of these key omni-channel communication projects.
With the release of R11, there is really something for everybody.
