March 30, 2016, Colleyville, TX—Madison Advisors—Madison Advisors today announced that Stephanie Pieruccini, VP of research and enterprise & technology consulting services, and Gina Ferrara, senior analyst for Madison Advisors, will be speaking and sharing insights on the advancements and the future of customer communications management (CCM) at Xplor’s 2016 annual conference being held April 5-7 at the Caribe Royale Orlando in Florida.

On Monday, April 4, Pieruccini will be part of GMC Software’s Pre-conference Leadership Forum presenting a whitepaper, “One Platform to Rule Them All.” She’ll also participate in a Q&A session after the presentation. Additionally, on Tuesday, April 5, Pieruccini will be part of a four-person industry panel in the Evolving Trends track of the conference designed to offer views from industry analysts and consultants. This panel will seek to answer the question “What’s next?” by discussing the evolution of technology, the changes in human behavior it will drive and how it will affect how we communicate with customers.

Ferrara will also be part of the Evolving Trends track. Her presentation “Outsourcing Print: Inevitable or Avoidable?” on April 6 will outline changes with the in-plant transactional print and mail market due to a number of competitive constraints that include advancing technology, excess capacity and significant pressure to reduce costs. Attendees will learn what has and hasn’t worked as she shares Madison Advisors’ case studies of innovative companies that have engaged various strategies to address these issues. Attendees will come away with the six converging factors that create the “perfect storm” for making the decision to improve things in-house or prepare to outsource print.

Pieruccini will also be moderating a panel in the Customer Experience track on April 5. The panel “The Great CCM Debate” is comprised of panelists from top CCM providers and will explore such questions as what is the real definition of CCM, what has been accomplished in this area so far and what does it mean and what it will take to move from customer experience to customer engagement.

For more information on Xploration 16 visit http://xplor.org/xplor16/.

March 23, 2016, Colleyville, TX—Madison Advisors—Madison Advisors today announced its 2016 CCM Executive Roundtable, held at The Vinoy® Renaissance St. Petersburg Resort & Golf Club, March 7- 9 was deemed a huge success by attendees and sponsors alike. More than 50 attendees representing top enterprises in the insurance, finance and banking industries spent two and a half days with recognized industry leaders participating in thought-provoking discussions that addressed today’s most pressing customer communications management (CCM) challenges.

Now in its 6th year, Madison Advisors’ CCM Executive Roundtable has proven to be an incredible opportunity for enterprises of all industries to join in highly focused interactive sessions with peers who face similar challenges and successes in their implementation of CCM. Each roundtable session explored the most current issues around the state of CCM and the technologies involved, with the goal of gaining a comprehensive understanding of how to improve the quality of the customer experience and advance a company’s CCM processes.

Along with an impressive list of attendees, the 2016 CCM Executive Roundtable welcomed a roster of notable sponsor companies that included Canon, FIS, Inlet, Broadridge, Crawford Technologies, DST Customer Communications, Fiserv, RR Donnelly, CEDAR Document Technologies and NEPS. Each sponsor was given time to present to the group their unique insights on CCM best practices, share case studies and discuss what firms should be doing today to better improve existing CCM processes. Attendees also heard from Madison Advisors analysts on the latest research findings on CCM trends. Additionally, there were opportunities to connect with analysts, sponsors and fellow attendees during networking breaks throughout the day and during evening events.

The group also toured two facilities while at the Roundtable. The first tour was at Valpak, North America's leading direct marketer, that has built one of the most advanced and automated manufacturing centers in the world. The group also visited Florida-based FIS, the world’s largest global provider dedicated to banking and payment technologies.

“We’ve designed Madison Advisors 2016 CCM Executive Roundtable to be an opportunity unlike any other to connect with peers and industry leaders who recognize that having a solid CCM strategy in place determines how effectively you engage customers throughout the entire communication lifecycle,” said Kemal Carr, president of Madison Advisors. “We are proud to say that 85 percent of firms that participate in this event come back every year. We want this year’s attendees and sponsors to know how much we appreciate and value their enthusiastic participation that made this event a success. Plans are underway for 2017 with several sponsors already committed and we look forward to seeing our return attendees.”

3/15/16

By Stephanie Pieruccini, Vice President of Research and Enterprise & Technology Consulting Services, Madison Advisors

Managing customer communications continues to be a challenge for today’s insurance organizations. Customer communications and their corresponding workflows quickly become very complex due to the need to maintain compliance and make regulatory changes along with making communications more personalized, relevant and actionable. Add in the growing channel delivery expectations in the digital world and these hurdles have caused many insurance organizations to fall behind when it comes to achieving strategic communication goals and engaging with customers.

As might be expected, these rapid changes in customer communication requirements have driven software providers to build additional capabilities into their solutions. Unfortunately, these ever-increasing capabilities can often create a technology proficiency gap that leaves companies struggling to make effective use of or generate a return from their customer communications management (CCM) investments. Moreover, document composition tools represent only one element of customer communications lifecycle management, leaving internal IT departments with the burden of integrating numerous tools into an already disparate CCM infrastructure.

March 09, 2016

By Stephanie Pieruccini, Vice President of Research and Enterprise & Technology Consulting Services, Madison Advisors

Managing customer communications continues to be a challenge for today’s insurance organizations. Customer communications and their corresponding workflows quickly become very complex due to the need to maintain compliance and make regulatory changes along with making communications more personalized, relevant and actionable. Add in the growing channel delivery expectations in the digital world and these hurdles have caused many insurance organizations to fall behind when it comes to achieving strategic communication goals and engaging with customers.
Read More

By Mandy McCoy

Published on Mar 1, 2016

Every month, like clockwork, your organization has a prime transactional opportunity with a captive audience — your customer. Whether print or digital, your company has the opportunity to interact with your customer to drive an overall customer experience. Through the use of transactional communications . . .

By Stephanie Pieruccini

The state of customer communications has been a roller coaster of changes over the past decade with new communication channels and an influx of solutions for managing and delivering. Understanding the current market and what is expected of enterprises by government regulations, security certifications, and ultimately their customers, can be a huge undertaking for organizations.

This endeavor becomes even more considerable when trying to build an infrastructure of solutions to manage all of these requirements; and thus, has resulted in the current state of enterprise communications infrastructures consisting of a mix of integrated legacy and modern platforms, post-composition, data management, and point solutions designed to fill gaps or deliver communications to specific channels. Many of these infrastructures are managed solely by talented IT developers.

By Stephanie Pieruccini, Vice President of Research and Enterprise & Technology Consulting Services, Madison Advisors

Today’s organizations continue to face challenges in managing customer communications. From maintaining compliance and regulatory changes to making communications more personalized, relevant and actionable, customer communications and their corresponding workflows have become very complex rather quickly. Combined with growing channel delivery expectations in the digital world, these requirements have caused many companies to fall behind as they attempt to achieve their strategic communication goals and engage with customers.

By Casey Houser

Madison Advisors provides both research and consulting services to enterprise clients in the communications management, digital communications delivery, and print markets. Its latest report, “CCM (News - Alert) Hosted Managed Services: Changing the Paradigm in Customer Communications Management,” focuses on customer communications management (CCM) and provides readers with a look at hosted managed services (HMS), which it believes can help businesses reduce the strain on managing their communications infrastructures.

October 29, 2015, Colleyville, TX—Madison Advisors—The gap between customer communications management (CCM) software technology capabilities and utilization by enterprises is changing the paradigm in CCM, says a report from Madison Advisors, an independent analyst firm that provides strategic consulting and market research to clients in the enterprise CCM, electronic delivery and print industries. Madison Advisors’ latest report, “CCM Hosted Managed Services: Changing the Paradigm in Customer Communications Management,” identifies the emergence of Hosted Managed Services (HMS) as the ideal solution for many organizations looking to lighten the load on IT resources and focus initiatives on an overall customer engagement strategy, rather than the day-to-day logistics of creating and distributing communications.

“While conducting this research, we found that organizations continue to be challenged by the requirement for communications to be compliant as well as personalized and relevant, while striving to support complex products with clarity and appropriate calls to action,” said Stephanie Pieruccini, VP of research and enterprise & technology consulting services at Madison Advisors. “Combined with growing delivery expectations in the digital world, these requirements have caused many companies to fall behind in the attempt to achieve critical strategic communication goals.”

Rapid changes in customer communication requirements have driven solutions providers to build additional capabilities into their software, often creating a technology proficiency gap that leaves enterprises struggling to generate a return from their investment. As communication infrastructures continue to grow instead of evolve, overly complex environments of unsupported solutions, homegrown systems and software that is far behind the current version are the result.

These challenges led to a number of key findings within the study:

Technology delivery and support models offered by CCM solutions providers are an issue. Installation combined with professional services is not enough to guarantee customers’ desired outcomes.

The result of this lack of software utilization widens the gap between capabilities of the software and the resulting ROI realized by the purchaser.

A new service delivery model is needed that can guarantee results and lead to ROI and overall value organizations desire.

A small group of solutions providers (named in the report) demonstrate a clear understanding of the gap between software capabilities and utilization by enterprises, creating a new category of technology delivery services called CCM Hosted Managed Services.

CCM HMS is not the same as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

The market opportunity for CCM HMS is significant, forecasted to exceed $3 billion in the U.S. alone.

Madison Advisors contends that rapid advances in communication technology and related customer expectations have accelerated the pace of change beyond the reach of most, if not all, companies. A CCM HMS approach makes deployment, integration and support of all related technology and services the responsibility of the software provider. It also makes the provider accountable for the results of using its technology.

The report anticipates continued growth for this delivery model in the coming years as new providers are poised to enter the market.

To purchase the full report “Hosted Managed Services: Changing the Paradigm in Customer Communications Management,” click here. This trend and others will be discussed at Madison Advisors’ 2016 CCM Executive Roundtable, March 7-9, 2016 in St. Petersburg, FL.

Over the past two decades, Madison Advisors' industry-neutral expertise enables enterprise organizations, service providers and technology providers to achieve their strategic objectives around today’s evolving customer communications management (CCM) requirements.