By Kemal Carr, President, Madison Advisors

Those hosting the recent Quadient Analyst Day gave us a status update of the company unification with Neopost, as well as the direction it is taking for the future.  Themed “Mission CXM,” Quadient Analyst Day discussed their move from CCM to CXM—the more nebulous customer experience—and how it is working to develop more sophisticated components to take its customers along that path as well.

Quadient Inspire R14, the latest version of Quadient Inspire, is slated for release in February 2020 and one of its elements is an update of the cloud-based Scaler tool, now equipped with AI components that can identify and extract errors.  Quadient reported they’ve been successfully running that product through customers’ documents, identifying and uncovering typos or errors in general. For example, in one instance, an insurance company’s document was missing the word “not” in a message that stated, “We are responsible for...”  That would certainly be a significant material omission.

Inspire Scaler may function primarily as a rapid deployment tool for those migrating or upgrading to Inspire R14, which Quadient has revised for a simplified user experience, enhanced personalization and preference management, and connected stacks—and it can be built to scale.  All of this facilitates the evolution from CCM to CXM, which is a fuzzier concept since it involves customer interaction and can vary from business segment to business segment, and even between lines of business. CXM doesn’t only push out messaging, it also receives customers responses and processes and analyzes those responses.

Apparently driven by the different and precise needs of the various industries it serves, Quadient plans to focus on promoting R14 to vertical markets and has hired experienced vertically focused leaders in banking, insurance, utilities and additional fields, to reach these clients. These experts know and understand the challenges of their business areas and can speak with considerable knowledge to prospects.

Quadient also will be working through hosted managed services partners. This is different from using SaaS (software as a service) or the public cloud.  With hosted managed services, the customer works with a dedicated and highly skilled third-party service provider who leases dedicated servers and will do the setup and maintenance, day-to-day management and other tasks, depending on the negotiated contract. The arrangement takes the burden off an in-house IT department, yet still gives the customer more security and control than a SaaS provider or public cloud services.

Compared to taking a do-it-yourself approach with the attendant learning curve, as well as trial-and-error deployment, hosted managed services offer the best solution for successfully implementing a complex CXM system. We like to use this analogy:  You want to fly from Chicago to Dallas.  You can build your own plane and learn how to fly it, or you can go to United or Delta and simply buy a ticket.  The choices a business makes depends on its specific situation, of course, but there are several options available for them, and on the software development side, Quadient is making intelligent use of these options.

Quadient’s Analyst Day was held at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air & Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia.  Part of the day’s agenda was a tour through this amazing facility, which houses among other items, the B-29 Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and the space shuttle Discovery.  They were installing a Predator drone as we toured.  Quadient tends to take you to places you might not think of going on your own—and that applies to its products and services as well.