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 the 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, end-to-end CCM solution innately addresses government-mandated language, translation, quality, and accessibility requirements. Present your case as a future-proofing strategy, where the business will be empowered to rapidly respond to regulatory changes with a centralized system that simplifies the rollout of new templates and content updates, eliminating chaotic scrambles that drain resources. 

• Aligns with the Larger Digital Strategy

  Digital transformation is a priority 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 real change. To shift this mentality, show that CCM consolidation will drive the company's goals by empowering LOB users with automated workflows that allow them to collaboratively drive an omnichannel CX. 

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 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. The best way to do this is by demonstrating that licensing is only a tiny fraction of the overall expense to the business. 

Running several or more CCM products is far more expensive than perceived when you consider the overhead costs of the IT teams involved in maintaining the hardware, equipment, and applications, as well as the many running costs. To illustrate the full financial burden on the business, create a cost 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 of the IT teams that maintain and manage each of your CCM products, including analysts and programmers.

Running Costs

• The hardware, development, and IT operational 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 overhead costs of having contact service reps. manually create individualized, paper-based communications, plus the additional costs of on-site mailing and manual quality control processes. 

Failure Demand Costs

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

3. Gain Stakeholder Buy-in

The best way to obtain 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. 

If your business is using a variety of channel-specific platforms, then the budget allocated to CCM has to be spread across each of those platforms and their support teams, making operational transformation impossible and IT faced with constant time and resource constraints. Having a single, cloud-enabled CCM solution dramatically changes this reality and unlocks benefits for every business leader who has customers their teams need to contact. 

Help stakeholders understand the operational transformation that they can expect to see within their department, specific to their role and aligned with their KPIs, such as:

Faster Time-to-Market & Immediate Change Capacity

Legacy products are highly technical and don't allow non-IT users to create or update template content. 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 agile communications management and speed-to-market 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. This means you can use your existing resources to enable immediate change capabilities.

Enhanced Productivity of Customer-facing Employees 

Legacy systems don't address the fact that branches, contact centers, agencies, and front offices need to send personalized communications on-demand, whether it be in response to a customer inquiry or as part of process fulfillment. Often, employees turn to MS Word to create templates, where content can be edited without any built-in rules or guardrails, causing employees to spend hours manually crafting and reviewing communications.

Inspire solves these challenges with interactive, AI-driven template authoring and editing capabilities that allow users to select from a library of pre-built templates, edit defined template fields via a guided workflow, and send the communication to the customer's channel of choice—no on-site printing or mailing required. The result? Rapid output of high-quality, compliant communications and happier employees who can focus on the customer. 

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, aren't viable or 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. 

Objection #1: Our MAP Can Do That (?) 

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 template once and deliver it across all channels. CCM solutions are uniquely designed to support the orchestration of multiple touchpoints across channels to create a connected, omnichannel CX. 

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. It is only with this level of dynamic composition that insurance policies, welcome kits, bank statements, and other complex regulatory communications can be produced. 

Objection #2: It's Safer to Do Nothing

Another 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 offer migration tools that leverage AI and machine learning to accelerate and simplify the process of template rebuild. With migration tools like InspireXpress, content is analyzed and extracted from your legacy communications, and new templates are automatically built for your complete communications portfolio. 

Many also suggest doing nothing because they believe that there will be no way to measure the impact of communications transformation post-migration. This may have been true in the past, but today, solutions like Inspire offer integrated customer journey mapping that allows users to measure the performance of every communication across specific KPIs and drive continuous improvements. Analytics reveal customer sentiment, engagement, and resulting behaviors. 

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, implementation, and application management for you, fear of change is no longer a viable excuse. The time for change is now. 

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