By Kemal Carr, President, Madison Advisors

Although it seems unlikely that Ralph Waldo Emerson originated the phrase, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” he has been credited with something similar: “If a man has good corn or wood or boards or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.” In any case, it’s a thought that holds true even in the age of digital communications.

In a business environment like the current one, with more remote workers, as well as remote consumers, communication is critical for providing positive customer experiences and securing customer loyalty. The obvious challenge is achieving this with less face-to-face customer interaction and more through customer-preferred, often digital media channels. CCM solutions have already been an important area of operations for many organizations, but the need for effective CCM strategies and solutions is now even greater than ever before. Madison Advisors’ new report, “Customer Communications Management Hosted Managed Services Market Update, 3^rd Edition,” indicates that more providers are entering the field to meet these needs.

As demand increases, most organizations using CCM still face the same need to orchestrate a conglomeration of legacy systems, multiple document composition tools and content repositories, thousands of document templates and multi-channel delivery. Upgraded, cutting-edge capabilities provide stronger support to navigate successfully through all this, but the newer systems can be more difficult to run and taking on new and more complicated tasks is probably not a priority for the IT department. Previous reports on CCM Hosted Managed Services (HMS) have detailed how third-party providers—the HMS part of the equation—have taken on some or all CCM functions so that corporations can focus their attention and resources on their core business.

Print service providers (PSPs) for years have partnered with organizations in many industries, most often to take in, process, print and mail transactional materials such as monthly invoices and statements, but often including other items like targeted marketing insertions or even correspondence. These PSPs have also seen their capabilities expanding with newer and more complex hardware and software, at the same time that many of their clients are migrating away from hard copy communications to digital channels. Having seen and kept pace with these changes, they are recognizing the opportunity that CCM HMS offers them. They are already trustworthy and reliable providers, why not expand services to also cover CCM?

Our new report outlines six companies engaged in CCM HMS. Three of these offer traditional CCM services with or without print included, and three of them are PSPs that have moved into the CCM HMS field with less emphasis on print. Although these firms offer a wide variety of CCM services, all of them turn CCM functions from a capital expense (CapEx) to an operating expense (OpEx), giving their clients a better return on their investments. They also allow for a level of flexibility, in that clients can pick which specific services they want—for example, those particularly suited to insurance carriers or banks, and/or handling only certain types of communications, like customer outreach or tracking customer journeys for improved personalization.

At Madison Advisors, we have believed for some time that PSPs were uniquely positioned to expand into CCM HMS and, while this has been happening, the migration has been slower than expected. Privacy concerns and a sense of a loss of control on the part of potential clients account for some of this, although many successful PSPs already have met stringent security certification standards and may be delivering an impressive percentage of communications through email, SMS text, HTML for websites and so forth. For them, CCM HMS is the logical next step in their own evolution.

Whether a business is considering using outside CCM HMS support or is a PSP seeking a more sustainable future, they will find a wealth of new ideas and in-depth insights in this new report, and perhaps a way to attract clients to “beat a path to their door.”

Visit this link to download “Customer Communications Management Hosted Managed Services Market Update, 3rd Edition.”