By Kemal Carr, President

Quadient Inspire Days Americas, held at the Boston Sheraton, September 19 – 21, was the fifth in the Inspire Days series and the last of Inspire Days events held earlier in Melbourne, Singapore, Hong Kong and The Hague—touching five continents. In Boston, the general theme revolved around enhancing customer experience, and of course, offered a 360-degree look at how Quadient’s Inspire software platform, including its latest R12 version, supports these efforts.

Chris Hartigan, Quadient’s new president and general manager of the Americas, kicked off the two-and-a-half-day event with a welcome address, followed by keynoter Jeanne Bliss, president of Customer Bliss and author of several books defining and promoting the concept and practice of customer-centricity. Both Chris and Jeanne set the general tone of the conference by detailing the why and how of improving customer experience, one of the most talked about trends in business today.

Attendees were a mix of enterprise and print service providers. One of the areas I found most interesting and of special value is when clients like RBC, IWCO, Shutterfly and Quad Graphics presented their own experiences with Quadient applications in the three breakout tracks:  Innovation, Engagement and Boosting Productivity. Their presentations tended to cut through the marketing chatter to provide a true picture of the implementation, usage and results of using Quadient Inspire. For the most part, their reports were positive, though not entirely without a predictable glitch here and there.

Quadient Inspire’s R12 version adds several enhancements and additions to earlier versions. Because of the dynamic and rapid pace of upgrades for Inspire, as well as Quadient’s other types of software, the best option for many enterprise users may be to purchase and deploy the platform via an HMS (Hosted Managed Service Provider). That way the enterprise can gain all the benefits of the latest upgrades while leaving the technical nuts and bolts to the service provider, who should be the expert.

This concept is consistent with the findings of our most recent report on the CCM HMS market, which outlines how this market is growing and how verticals such as financial services, insurance, utilities, telecommunications and others that generate large volumes of transactional communications benefit from hosted managed services relationships.