By Keith Woedy, VP of Research & Practice Lead

Madison Advisors has just completed a market study addressing the evolution of post composition in the customer communications management (CCM) space. A little more than two years ago, we identified a trend that expanded the boundaries of the traditional definition of post composition as a tool to “fix” applications prior to print production. Little did we know how relevant these insights would become on the heels of a worldwide pandemic.

The participants in this study included BlueCrest, Crawford Technologies, Pitney Bowes, Racami, Sefas and Solimar Systems. All of these companies are extremely capable solutions providers and worthy of significant consideration if you are looking to evaluate or improve upon your CCM delivery platform.

After engaging these six leading CCM solutions providers, I came away with the sense that the current business climate, the evolution of technology and increased importance of customer preferences had moved post composition forward in the realm of consideration for enterprises and print service providers alike. Post comp was once considered a set of tools that helped migrate legacy data streams and assisted organizations in re-engineering and enhancing their documents. It grew into a solution used to optimize data to improve equipment performance while addressing regulatory and security requirements, assisting the digital transformation to omnichannel delivery and improving visibility and management of the production process across the enterprise— and all of these mission critical components of the communications workflow can be accomplished without the need to engage costly professional developers.

The consumer climate was changing and becoming more demanding even prior to the appearance of COVID-19. However, this unprecedented event created a sense of urgency for enterprises, large and small, to embrace digital transformation and the customer experience (CX). As people were required to work from home in large numbers, the demand increased for organizations to take a hard look at how they could become an omnichannel communication distribution hub using post composition tools. Ultimately, the question became how to expedite digital transformation using their current investment in CCM and post composition technology.

The insights provided by the six companies I engaged with during this study provided tremendous thought leadership on this topic. Utilizing existing investments in post composition to make just-in-time content, messaging and format changes to drive omnichannel communications, track and dashboard across all these channels and apply preferences and invoke real-time decisioning to personalize messaging or accompany communications with relevant and precise content were all called out as opportunities to demonstrate true business value. This, of course, should be the ultimate business goal for enterprises and print service providers.

The first version of our post composition market study details strategies for optimizing internal print providers’ and print service providers’ operations to drive costs down--things like mailing efficiencies, white paper factory and enhancing documents and applications to significantly improve critical customer communications. Since the customers we engage with every day are all at different stages of work process improvement, it was important to establish a framework for post composition. As I mentioned earlier in this piece, the boundaries of post composition are being stretched, but in order to understand this, we must first establish a baseline. Our 2021 Post Composition Market Study delivers on that mission and provides relevant data for business process improvement at all levels of CCM implementation.

Going forward, there is great interest in further expanding this market study to address Post Compositions role in the transformation from a cost cutting tool to a true business value proposition that drives business value or competitive value.  We will continue to seek out the industry leaders to provide input to this segment of our market study series.

Post composition can be an extremely effective tool to optimize CCM workflows and enhance your CX strategy. The interest in this segment of the business has attracted a variety of solutions providers. These include the well-known CCM solutions providers but also have attracted some well-known intelligent automation (IA) solutions providers that historically have focused on digital workflow transformation. It is, therefore, imperative for organizations to understand which segments of their process will yield the best return on investment in this technology and to align with the solutions provider that is best suited to address your individual and specific requirements.

Since some vendors are better equipped to address different components of post composition than others, it is wise to engage a trusted advisor that understands the capabilities and landscape related to this mission-critical segment of your business and can assist in aligning your business priorities to the appropriate vendor relationship so you protect your investments and effectively improve your customers’ experience with your organization. Madison Advisors works with clients to understand their specific internal business requirements and utilizes market intelligence to align best-of-breed solutions providers to those requirements and assists in guiding you through an informed decision-making process that maximizes return on investment and create real, tangible business value.