The theme of the conference speaks to the need of organizations to rapidly improve communication and other customer-facing initiatives such as CCM projects, digital transformation, accessing Packaged Business Capabilities or microservices and generally upgrading the IT infrastructure without taking on a huge expense.
One way or another, this much is clear: due largely to COVID-19 and the need of business leaders to create more efficiency in a down economy, communicate more effectively with customers, save money and secure investments in technology, what were once future plans are now ongoing projects.
Digital Transformation, AI, cloud-based, edge-based, SaaS, Customer Experience, Packaged Business Capabilities, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) -- technology is exploding across the board, in every vertical, with varied capabilities delivered in varied ways.
In rapid succession, Compart added new customers seeking to improve document-related processes: the Internal Revenue Service, Taylor Corporation, World Wildlife Fund. Existing customers added more Compart capabilities: Broadridge Financial Services, Federated Insurance, Volkswagen Financial Services ... Compart also looked inward and created new ways to deliver value to customers with big IT Projects impractical due to social isolation and lack of resources, distributed computing and resources, and so on. All of this was on full display at Comparting 2020, the first virtual version of the popular international conference on customer communication.
Comparting 2020 - a Two-Day Event That Combined Presentations From Compart Resources, Partners, Industry Experts and Customers.
The conference kicked off with a panel -- a fireside chat -- between Compart founder and CEO, Harald Grumser; CMO Thorsten Meudt; and the President and CEO, Compart North America, Brian Gasteier. The main topic was how Compart is rapidly evolving to meet the needs of our customers; two years ago, SaaS and cloud offerings were emerging as important. This year they are mature technologies that deliver material value for those that invest in them. Compart has made a point of hiring experts in these technologies and has greatly expanded the range of products offered in these ways.
Digital Transformation: Aligning Business Priorities with Customer Expectations
The keynote session for day 1 of the conference was delivered by Matt Swain, who is the Director and practice leader of CCM for Broadridge Financial Services, one of Compart's most valued customers (the keynote at the first Comparting USA was also delivered by Broadridge and the relationship continues to grow in depth and value). Matt's presentation was mainly about how COVID-19 is affecting change in the way that customers expect to be treated by companies they do business with. It is true that where DX meets CX, we have CCM. Matt Swain has a long history of researching CCM and understanding the value proposition; he brings this expertise to Broadridge and to our audience with this excellent presentation.
Brian and Matt had a spirited discussion of the future of customer communication in the Q&A, culminating with a discussion about the holographs used to communicate in the Star Wars movies. Matt underscored the theme of the conference when he noted that the technology does exist and that Compart is not too far off from what once looked to be fanciful science fiction.
Next up was Compart CMO Thorsten Meudt talking about how the technologies discussed by Matt in his presentation will be supported by Compart going forward. Organizations that have a good, trusted partner in these endeavors will succeed at a greater rate than companies that try to do it all themselves. Thorsten's main point is that if you find best of breed software from some source you should be able to combine it with other best of breed software from other sources without worrying about collapsing the entire IT infrastructure.
Compart will find the best people and companies to work with for our clients and we can be relied upon to do our bit and let others do theirs. The key is to have a platform that one can build on. This is all made possible because of containerization and the many ways one can deploy software now without engendering a big expense.
Building Around Standards Instead of Proprietary Software
This presentation was followed by the always exciting "Out of the Lab" session delivered by Joerg Palmer, VP Customer Experience Management at Compart. Joerg explained the latest and most innovative new solutions and products being developed by Compart. It was gratifying to see that predictions made a few years ago about the importance of building around standards instead of proprietary software has come to fruition. Several of our customers thoughout the conference expressed gratitude for making our software more easy to integrate than many of our competitors tend to do.
Andrew Young, from Ricoh, made his second appearance at Comparting with a presentation about the importance of automating the workflow, whether in print or other channels. Compart's DocBridge® Auditrack software was built for this, and DocBridge® Gear has a built-in workflow measurement tool capable of ensuring that the entire process can be measured, managed and continuously improved.
Federated Insurance: Early Adaptors of DocBridge® Impress
Day 2 kicked off at 9 am the following morning with a keynote speech by Mark Breading, a leading insurance industry expert with the infotech advisory firm Strategy Meets Action. The title of his presentation at Comparting 2020 was “Digital Transformation and the Role of Customer Communications” Mark shared a lot of data with our audience about the need to communicate more efficiently and effectively. Mr. Breading described a highly complex business environment.
At the heart of successful digital transformation is the ability to manage interactions and communications in an omnichannel world – especially as customers demand more and more digital options. Many companies are shifting to an outside-in view, understanding customer needs and mapping customer journeys. It is vital that a modern platform for the capture, creation, management, and delivery of communications be leveraged to operationalize strategies to improve customer communications.
The next presentation was by three of our most favorite people: Erica Coan, Karl Wurdak and Jacob Schmidt, all from Federated Insurance. Karl and Jacob have attended our live conferences in Minneapolis and told us that they wanted to be early adopters of DocBridge® Impress. Their team has done an amazing job helping us phase in this software solution.
They needed to drive dynamic documents created by the marketing team at Federated Insurance using MS Word into an omnichannel output instance. This is a technical presentation; it is all "how to" and not "why to." And the innovation and creativity shown by this team is very inspiring. This is a presentation that should be viewed by many organizations worried about customer communication. It is gratifying that they found the software useful and flexible, with a special call out to DocBride® Impress' use of industry standards instead of proprietary elements. Not only was it familiar to the team and easier to integrate into their environment, but it is more likely to be future-proof than competing solutions.
In the end, the bottom line is happy customers, and this slide says it all. Compart congratulates Federated Insurance for their vision and intelligence and Compart looks forward to developing more applications as Compart moves forward. It is more than likely that others can profit from their experience.
Documents From the Cloud
Following the presentation by Federated Insurance, back to Compart presentations raised the bar for the delivery of communication technology. First, Reinhard Fischer, Head of Application Development, delivered an amazing presentation about how the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) in Switzerland is using DocBridge® Impress directly in Salesforce.com, drawing data directly from their SaaS CRM solution and creating targeted documents to raise funds.
Documents created with DocBridge® Impress are omnichannel and barrier-free according to PDF/UA and WCAG. DocBridge® Impress gives users fast access to all modern, digital communication channels in a single workflow. For the WWF in Switzerland, the challenges included creating the document in various languages.
Documents can be created and sent to all relevant channels and media: as printed pages, as a PDF in an email attachment, as a responsive HTML page in a web browser and on a smartphone/tablet, via messenger services, etc. Each new document only needs to be generated once and is available for all media without duplicating the effort for each or bifurcating the process for batch mode and/or a single transaction.
Packaged Business Capabilities - A New Way of Providing Software
No matter what CRM tool you use, this is an important presentation for anyone reaching out to customers via multiple channels. The question of how to build a software solution is becoming more and more important in the current COVID-19 tainted business world. Monolithic software solutions such as those seen in the early part of the century have given way to microservices-based architectures that simplify scalability and reduce application development time, enable innovation, and shorten time-to-market for new features.
As a rule, microservices are deployed in a cloud and make use of their own or external APIs. In this context, the increasing prevalence of cloud plays a crucial role and makes web APIs more important. Dr. François Charette, Compart's Chief Architect, delivered a presentation on these capabilities.
API services are used by almost 55% of them to develop new B2B solutions, followed by products for mobile communication (approx. 36%) and consumer goods production (B2C, approx. 28%). Every year, 2,000 new services are added. The pioneer in the development and use of API services is the financial industry. What is certain is that the business world, and with it communication itself, has become more agile, which is reflected not least in a growing demand for microservices.
DocBridge® Document Viewer - A New SaaS Offering by Compart
From down under came a presentation by Compart's business partners, AirDocs, entitled The Future Is Here – delivering on the promise of CCM with SaaS. AirDocs is a SaaS Client Communications Management Platform as a Service provider.
The platform provides composition, archiving, delivery and management of communications using a range of channels such as email, print, SMS and DocuSign. The solution uses the DocBridge Mill Toolkit as part of the print generation process.
The second day wrapped with the launch of DocBridge® Document Viewer as Compart's new SaaS offering by Andreas Wechsler, Head of Product Management, and a brief panel discussion. The future is not some distant thing anymore. These technologies are here now and can deliver real value for organizations that choose to deploy them. Gartner research has found that such teams deliver business outcomes 20% faster than their peers.
This is how Compart views the future of business applications -- and that future is here.
