Making the Case for CCM Consolidation

BE MORE by Streamlining CCM Systems

Quadient Connects brought together customers, partners, and solution leaders from all of Quadient's lines of business to unite under a common cause: to explore how to be "be more" by embracing the limitless possibilities of digital transformation. Andrew Stevens, Product Marketing Manager for Quadient's Intelligent Communications Automation (ICA) line of business, presented a captivating session as part of the Customer Communications track titled, "Less cost—more efficiency: The business case for consolidation and centralization." 

Whether you're an existing Inspire Customer Communications Management (CCM) customer or are in the process of evaluating our solution, you've likely faced the pain of different lines of business using different tools to create and send customer communications. Some of these tools might be newer, purchased to support a specific digital channel (i.e., email, SMS), while others are likely ten or more years old and only support the generation of printed documents. Now, you have to contend with a messy patchwork of systems that are preventing you from delivering an omnichannel customer experience, while creating unwanted costs and risks.

If you've concluded that it's time to retire your legacy systems and consolidate by migrating onto a next-generation CCM like Inspire, then the first step to embarking on your transformation journey is gaining stakeholder approval. Below, we share the four critical elements to make a business case for CCM consolidation, as defined by Andrew Stevens. 

The Four Elements of a Winning Consolidation Case

According to Stevens, to make your case to the leadership team, you need to be able to define a clear business problem, show the positive return on investment, illustrate the benefits to individual stakeholders, and evidence that it is the best option in comparison to all other alternatives. 

Let's take a look at how to build out these four essential elements:

1. Define the Business Problem

Business cases for communications consolidation often fail at the approval stage, making buy-in the biggest obstacle. But what are the main reasons for business case failure and how can you build a case that addresses them? 

Singular CCM Product Focus

Cases normally are rejected because the individual proposes transforming a singular legacy CCM product. This leads to comparing like-for-like licensing costs, but the licensing costs of a solution that only supports one channel compared to that of a world-class omnichannel CCM will yield a negative ROI. Modern CCM solutions are built to support omnichannel communications design and delivery, serving as a central platform for managing all digital and physical customer touchpoints, including regulatory communications and dynamic digital interactions. 

Consolidation must be at the heart of the pitch, as it is only when you bring the full range of active CCM products into the picture that the ROI and operational benefits become clear. 

Pressurized Response to Regulatory Change 

Another reason cases are rejected is that they're presented in response to a sudden regulatory change, with too tight a turnaround and too much at stake to give stakeholders confidence. When leaders do have the time to review the proposal, the sense of urgency has passed, and the project gets moved to the "someday" pile. The ability to respond with speed and agility to regulatory-driven changes is critical to effective customer communications management, but a looming government deadline is not the optimal time to propose a transformation initiative. 

Failure to Show Larger Business Impact 

Since the pandemic, there has been a surge of digital projects, with only so much budget to go around. Investment is mainly going to digital innovation, while legacy platform demises are being put on the back burner. However, as leaders prioritize digital channel expansion projects, weaknesses in the underlying communications infrastructure are preventing leaders from realizing desired results, such as improved CX and customer satisfaction. 

After years of digital investment, businesses are only now realizing that the "build it and they will come" approach can only go so far, and that extends beyond the core digital platform and into digital communications as well. - Andrew Stevens

Now that we've defined the problem, let's look at the key attributes of a successful business case that secures stakeholder engagement and budget approval:

• Proposes Product-wide Consolidation

  Your business's digital channels are only as strong as the backend systems that drive customer engagement and communications across them. Getting a single communication live on a website, mobile application, or customer portal can take weeks, if not months, if using a large technology stack of archaic CCM products that are dependent on IT for even the smallest change. To make a strong case for CCM consolidation, you must show how siloed, aging products are holding the business back and limiting digital platform adoption. 

• Pre-empts Regulatory Change

  Rather than waiting for a new regulatory policy to be announced, prepare for the evitable changes ahead now. Show how a modern, unified CCM can innately address government-mandated language, translation, quality, and accessibility requirements and eliminate the scramble every time a new regulation is imposed. Present your case as a future-proofing strategy, where the business will be empowered to rapidly respond to regulatory and market changes with a centralized system that simplifies the rollout of new templates and content updates. 

• Aligns with Larger Digital Strategy

  Digital transformation is a key objective of nearly every organization; however, many leaders believe that all CCM systems are "legacy" because they've only experienced them as being difficult to use and resource-intensive. Leaders are resigned to finding workarounds and worry that investments in transformation will fail to deliver tangible results. To shift this mentality, show that CCM consolidation will drive the company's digital goals by empowering business users with automated workflows that allow them to collaboratively drive the omnichannel customer experience. 

By following the three suggested tactics above, IT and CX leaders can address the most common causes of business case failure. 

2. Demonstrate the Positive ROI 

To make an effective case, you'll need to break through the notion that CCM technology in general is "legacy." To do this, you'll need to show that replacing your network of disconnected communication products with a single, unified, best-in-class CCM platform doesn't just deliver outstanding operational benefits, but incredible financial gains. To do this, you need to show that licensing is only a tiny fraction of the overall expense to the business. 

Running several or more separate CCM products is far more expensive than originally perceived when you consider the overhead costs of the IT teams involved in managing and maintaining the hardware, equipment, and application, as well as the many running costs. 

In your presentation, create a cost comparison model that includes the following:

Licensing Costs

• The perpetual license for each of your existing CCM products and your annual maintenance fees. 

Maintenance & Development Costs 

• The costs for the team of people that maintain each of the CCM products, including the analysts and programmers.

Running Costs

• The hardware, development, and IT operations costs of managing an on-premise product, including electricity, cooling power, server monitoring, networking, security, risk management, change management, etc. 

Front Office Communication Costs

• The cost of having contact service reps. manually create individualized, paper-based communications using Microsoft Word and other homegrown tools, combined, plus the additional costs of on-site mailing and manual quality control processes. 

Failure Demand

• The cost of handling customer complaints/fielding inquiries, restoring brand reputation damage, or paying fines for non-compliance when there's a communication issue, such as incorrect or confusing information or unattended exposure of sensitive data.

Running a myriad of CCM platforms on a day-to-day basis is far more expensive than the leadership team may think. Expose all of the hidden expenses that come from the IT teams and equipment required to manage each of these platforms and the costs of fielding inquiries due to failure demand. 

3. Gain Stakeholder Buy-in

The best way to get buy-in is by giving stakeholders the confidence that operational transformation is possible and that the challenges they're facing today, such as slow time-to-market, can be solved with the right CCM technology. Current CCM budgets have to support all of the changes that must be made across all communications and channels. If your business is using a variety of channel-specific platforms, dollars have to be spread across all of the different platforms and their support teams, making operational transformation impossible and IT faced with constant time and resource constraints. 

If business leaders want to roll out new and updated communications faster, they'll need to increase the number of resources dedicated to managing each communication platform...or...they can empower non-technical business users to create and update communications themselves. Legacy products are highly technical and don't allow non-IT users to create or update template content. And, as these products become older, the talent pool of those who know how to manage them becomes smaller, which limits change capacity and requires you to pay more for niche expertise. Modern CCM solutions like Inspire dramatically change this reality, bringing operational transformation and agile communications management within reach. 

Inspire puts template management into the hands of non-technical users—safely, so each line of business can have its content experts manage the development and design of communications from one intuitive interface. This means you can use existing resources to enable immediate change capabilities and create a globally used solution that isn't dependent on a small subset of specialized CCM developers. 

Legacy systems also don't address the fact that branches, contact centers, agencies, and front offices need to send customers communications on-demand. Often, employees turn to MS Word to create templates, where the wrong template can easily be picked, the wrong data can be added, and content can be edited without guardrails, causing employees to spend hours manually crafting communications and conducting quality control audits. Inspire solves these challenges with interactive template authoring and editing capabilities that allow users to select from a library of pre-built templates, edit defined template fields via guided workflows, and send the communication to the customer's channel of choice. The result? Faster output of high-quality, compliant communications, and happier employees who have more time to focus on superior customer service. 

Engage stakeholders by demonstrating benefits specific to their role and aligned with their KPIs. There are unique benefits for every business leader who has a customer they need to contact. Help them understand the operational transformation they can expect to see within their department. 

4. Prove that it's the Best Alternative

As you make your case, you'll likely receive opposition in the form of alternative options that "appear" to be the easier route, but in reality, only exacerbate the challenges at hand. You'll need to be able to handle these objections and demonstrate that consolidation is the very best solution. 

One of the most commonly proposed alternatives is to use your existing marketing automation platform (MAP) to handle your communication demands. The differences between a MAP and a CCM are vast though. Be prepared to answer this suggestion by explaining how MAPS are designed to support channel-specific campaigns, while a CCM allows you to create a communication template once and deliver it across all channels. With a CCM, you can orchestrate the delivery of multiple touchpoints across channels to create an omnichannel customer experience. In addition, a MAP cannot handle complex data integration and personalization. CCM systems are driven by powerful dynamic composition engines that flow data from various systems into your templates according to prescribed logic that factors a multitude of conditions and data attributes. It is only with this level of dynamic composition that complex insurance policies, welcome kits, bank statements, and other complex regulatory communications can be produced. 

The other most commonly suggested alternative is to do nothing because the time, complexity, and risk involved in migration outweigh the benefits. While in the past, this statement may have been true, today, solutions like Inspire have developed migration tools that leverage AI, machine learning, and natural language processing to dramatically accelerate and simplify the process of template rebuild. With migration tools like InspireXpress, content is automatically extracted from legacy communications, and new templates are automatically created for your complete communications portfolio.

Many also suggest the "do nothing" approach because they believe that there will be no way to measure the impact of communications transformation or to drive performance across defined KPIs. This may have been true in the past, but today, solutions like Inspire offer integrated customer journey mapping so users can visualize and measure the performance of every communication in the context of the customer journey. Analytics reveal customer sentiment, engagement, and resulting behaviors, accelerating the path to communications transformation.

Realize the Value of Consolidation with Inspire

Eliminate overlapping, channel-specific products that create bottlenecks, limit your ability to connect with your customers, and drain your IT operations budget with Inspire—an award-winning enterprise CCM platform that brings you to value realization faster than ever thought possible.

With the world's most powerful AI-driven migration tool, a history of legacy migration customer success, and a managed service option that handles all aspects of migration and application management for you, fear of change is no longer a viable excuse. 

The time for change is now. Your customers and employees expect more, and your competition is racing forward. 

This isn't just about money anymore; it's about meeting the company's strategic goals by underpinning those critical customer connections with world-class technology. - Andrew Stevens