We sat down with Valerie Colin, Vice President of Global Product Marketing at Quadient, to chat about digital transformation and how it's become an imperative for all businesses, from the small to the enterprise. We also picked her brain on the brand new Quadient Hub, and it's helping our customers with this transformation.
Here is our full interview with her:
Quadient: Digital transformation is not a novel concept. Let's discuss what it is.
Valerie: Digital transformation is a strategic initiative that integrates digital technology into all business areas, fundamentally changing how they operate and deliver value to customers. It evaluates and modernizes an organization's processes, products, operations, and tech stack to enable innovation. In the early days, digital transformation focused on replacing legacy systems with modern ones, often based on cloud computing, to remain competitive. Digital transformation evolved from integrating digital technologies in all business areas, fundamentally changing how it operates and delivers value to customers, to a broader cultural and mindset shift towards more agility, innovation, and customer-centricity – to really challenge the status quo. It's important to note that digital transformation will look different for every company, so no clear-cut standard applies to all.
Quadient: And where does digital transformation stand today in 2024? What are the top trends you're seeing?
Valerie: Digital transformation has been high on many businesses' agendas for years. Throughout this year, the area of focus that companies need to address is the rapidly evolving digital landscape. One of the biggest focuses is customer experience. Improving customer experience remains a primary focus for digital transformation. Companies leverage digital channels and personalized communication strategies for marketing or transactional communications. They do this to engage with customers more effectively and strive to satisfy them, create unique experiences, and delight them.
Another trend is hybrid work and collaboration. Hybrid work is the new normal and continues to influence business operations; digital tools for collaboration, communication, and productivity are central to this transformation. And this trend is further empowered by the widespread adoption of cloud technologies. Cloud platforms have become essential in providing flexible, scalable, and secure environments for collaboration and communication tools. They facilitate seamless access to resources and data from anywhere and enhance productivity and teamwork in the workforce.
The next one would be cybersecurity. With the increase in cyber-attacks and fraud businesses face, cybersecurity has become more critical. Companies must take more advanced security measures, including safeguarding the data and infrastructure and preparing to respond quickly to cyber incidents. They must look for proactive routines such as regular security audits, employee training, and AI-driven threat detection systems to anticipate and mitigate potential cyber risks in this digital world.
Quadient: Can you speak to artificial intelligence's role in this context?
Valerie: Absolutely, this also ties into what I just spoke about. AI will play a significant role in data-driven decision-making. Data is a clear business asset, and analytics and AI are reaching their point of maturity, which makes it possible to extract all the value from the data and enable data-driven processes. Businesses can leverage real-time data analysis to extract actionable insights, facilitate informed decision-making, and obtain better business forecasting.
On top of that, generative AI is at the forefront of most people's agenda, radically transforming businesses in 2024. This technology can create new content, and new solutions from existing data can be leveraged for product design, personalized marketing, and improving customer experiences. Its ability to automate creative processes enables businesses to unlock new opportunities, pushing the digital transformation forward.
Quadient: Very insightful. And how are these trends you've mentioned shaping into concrete drivers for businesses?
Valerie: Let me give a couple of examples. When we mention data-driven decision-making, there is a growing focus on data compliance. Over 130 countries have established cloud data protection requirements, such as the GDPR in Europe or the Cloud Act in the United States, regularly evolving towards even more constraints that businesses must comply with. This forces companies to continuously examine how they manage their data and address these needs.
Another example is when it comes to core business processes. Many countries are regulating key finance processes. Regulators are adopting invoicing and tax mandates on a broader scale. Latin America has already undergone this transformation, and now it is expanding quickly in Europe with the ViDA [VAT in the Digital Age] mandate. It has even started in the United States through the leadership of the Digital Business Network Alliance, a collaborative effort of the Business Payments Coalition and the Federal Reserve financial services. We also see that process automation continues to expand at a broader scale, and its adoption accelerates thanks to AI, which will drive automation to the next level. Over 73% of CEOs see AI as the top investment priority for the coming years.
Quadient: We hear many challenges when navigating digital transformation directly from customers. What are their expectations, and how can we help them address these pain points?
Valerie: Through more than 130 use cases we documented last year, we have collected common expectations from our customers. Three distinct areas come up as solid pain points for many of them. The first is operational efficiency, which is a matter of cash scarcity. How can businesses cut costs from their operations? How can they eliminate error-prone manual processes? How can they reduce DSO and accelerate cash flow? How can they ease the integration of their IT system?
An example I have is a local administration in the US that saved over 2000 hours (about two and a half months) of manual labor by automating their processes of sending invoices thanks to the adoption of our document automation solution, Impress. Another college in the UK cut supplier invoice approval from three weeks to under three days. They were able to improve employee satisfaction through the adoption of our Quadient Accounts Payable (AP) solution.
The second area is mitigating risk. They also strive to reduce risk in the context of increased cyber-attacks and fraud. They're looking for solutions to manage sensitive customer data securely. They need to comply with regulations like e-invoicing and finance automation or, more generally, GDPR. They're also seeking to mitigate non-payment risk via credit assessments and seek more analytics on their financial process. We have a customer in the UK who has had very complex invoicing processes and a significant number of overdue debts. We helped them reduce their DSO by adopting our Quadient Accounts Receivable (AR) solution and its cash application.
Our customers are focused on customer satisfaction. They focus their attention on how they can better satisfy their customers. They seek efficient tools that can help better personalize their communications and set up tailored customer journeys. They are also looking for tools to bring them all physical or digital channels to communicate efficiently.
Quadient: What key challenges prevent businesses from moving ahead with digital transformation?
Valerie: First, they lack technological resources. We've found that 40% of global SMBs have no IT staff to deploy these solutions. Bridging the gap by providing easy-to-use and easy-to-deploy solutions is imperative to support the SMB digital transformation journey. They also still have a strong dependency on paper-based processes and manual tasks. For over 82% of businesses, it prevents them from being efficient, and they struggle to keep up with the pace of data management. We also see a lack of collaboration between departments within companies. Many work in silos without any common objectives, making new technologies challenging to deploy and adopt.
They also lack continuity in their activities. Businesses are constantly evolving, so their needs are always changing. They may find it challenging to engage in more long-term projects.
Finally, they may face a limited budget, which drives them to search for a clear ROI when purchasing a new solution. These challenges can prevent many businesses, especially those in the SMB space, from fully embracing digital transformation.
Quadient: So, what if we could provide businesses with a way to address all these challenges and help them successfully navigate their transformation journey?
Valerie: This is the exact goal of the Quadient Hub, our AI-powered intelligence automation platform. Its platform allows businesses to automate their front-office, financial, and back-office processes. We help customers manage the creation, digitalization, and delivery of communication at scale.
With the Quadient Hub, customers get an intuitive and easy-to-use platform that facilitates integration with an expansive ecosystem, from the ERPs, the core system used in financial automation, to integration with payment providers to simplify cash management, from CRMs like Salesforce to a broader range of partners that can complement the benefits of the Quadient suite of solutions when it comes to managing business-critical communication. The Quadient Hub also evolves with business needs. It will provide a comprehensive list of features that will help facilitate the organization's deployment and management of solutions. Regardless of your solution, the platform provides a centralized user management and authentication system.
Its API-first strategy makes it easy to integrate with your ecosystem – ERPs, CRMs, or any other specific systems used in your company. Powered by AI, the Quadient Hub provides advanced analytics, guiding you to more intelligent decisions regarding customer engagement or core financial processes like cash management.
Quadient: And what documents does this include?
Valerie: This includes policies, statements, notifications, invoices, and other financial documents. Some of these documents can be simple or complex in structure and format. All companies, regardless of size and industry, must ensure that this communication and the business interactions they depend on are compliant, secure, and consistent across all channels based on customer delivery preference. Our customers also need to ensure that communication and business interactions are highly personalized and enhanced with the correct data and content to deliver the right experience to the right customer in the right way. For invoices, which is why many of our customers use our platform, we also provide solutions that automate invoice presentment, e-invoicing, and all the following collection activities. This helps them better manage the workflow supporting payment inflows. When that communication flow is reversed, and our customers need to manage payable activity, they must also retain automation solutions. Hence, they're fully in control of payment outflows as well.
Quadient: Can you tell us more about how it fits with the rest of the Quadient solutions?
Valerie: Ultimately, the platform will be a gateway to share data across solutions. Through the Quadient Hub, we want to deliver ease of use, which starts by offering one unified and secured access to all Quadient solutions. You'll experience a single way to seamlessly log in, access all Quadient applications, and navigate from one to the other in the same environment. We'll also provide advanced authentication methods like SSO [single sign-on] and authentication security with multifactor authentication protection against cybersecurity threats.
With the Quadient Hub, we intend to help you overcome the challenges of reaching a successful digital transformation. We want to enable you to save time and effort with an easy-to-use platform tailored to your needs that provides seamless navigation through the services you need.
Quadient: Amazing! Is there anything else you want to add? Do you want to highlight anything that can further benefit our customers?
Valerie: Absolutely, the Quadient Hub will also be the place for enhanced collaboration between your teams. You'll also have access to Quadient University, our resources for education on our solutions. You'll also find tips and best practices from other users to take full advantage of your solution and learn from your peers. You'll also find news related to Quadient solutions, like information on new features, enhancements, events, and critical resources that will provide you with additional ways of maximizing the business outcomes for your company.
Quadient: Where can we find more information about the Quadient Hub if we want to learn more?
Valerie: I recently ran a session for Quadient Connects about the Quadient Hub titled, The Quadient Hub: A suite of solutions at your fingertips. You can watch that session on-demand and stay tuned as we release more information in this coming year.
