What does "Freedom in Communication" mean? This was the central question addressed by Comparting on December 1-2, 2021. The international expert forum for omnichannel communication of companies, public administration and organizations discussed opportunities and challenges of barrier-free, transactional and interactive customer communication and presented various solutions for practical implementation to this end. Around 250 participants followed the online conference, which was again held virtually, in two live streams.
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"Freedom in communication" - today and in the future: This motto ran like the famous thread through the entire Comparting and thematically linked the numerous live demos, practical reports and discussion rounds. The topic was deliberately discussed against the background of new technologies such as cloud, API and serverless deployment - after all, these enable users to align their document and output management flexibly, cost-effectively and quickly to rapidly changing customer communications. In this context, digitization, multichannel and increasing transaction processing are the most important drivers to which companies must respond.
Innovative examples of this were on display at Comparting, including from Profideo, Broadridge Financial Services, AirDocs, RR Donnelley and Ricoh. The practical reports made clear the scope of the topic of "freedom in communication" and how this freedom of choice can be sensibly applied by means of innovative technologies for the benefit of both the customer and the company.
In his keynote, Kaspar Roos of market analyst Aspire CCS, explored what technology and business decisions companies need to make from a customer-centric perspective to give both employees and customers the freedom they need to interact according to their evolving communication needs.
Starting point of his explanations: The more the acceptance and maturity level on the topic of customer experience increases in companies, the clearer it becomes that both transactional and classic (batch) documents are essential touchpoints in customer communication. This makes it all the more important to optimize them and provide them in line with customer preferences via the respective analog and digital channels.
Debbie Pavletich and Denise Iannuzo from Ricoh USA discussed with Mia Papanicolaou, Senior Analyst at Aspire CCS, the current challenges on CCM, moderated by Brian C. Gasteier, CEO Compart North America.
What became clear: The Customer Communications Management (CCM) market is transforming the way enterprises not only compose but send interactive and enhanced communications to improve the customer experience. This change is being driven by a fundamental shift in enterprise priorities based on increasing consumer demands. Customers want relevant, timely communications in the channels of their choice. The industry experts made clear how to best deliver on the omnichannel promise including trends for breaking down siloes and implementing change across organizations.
Philip Gyuling, Head of Product Management, and Dr. François Charette, Chief Architect (both Compart), also presented DocBridge® Central at Comparting. This is an end-to-end web-based environment with a uniform 'look and feel' and a central user login for quick access to DocBridge® products.
Users benefit from a user interface that meets their needs and allows selected products and functions to be flexibly deployed, extended and orchestrated as granular microservices (packaged business capabilities) within the framework of customer communication management (CCM) - both on premise and in cloud environments. The presentation showed examples of how companies use the component-based architecture of DocBridge® Central to gradually and flexibly adapt their CCM to changing business requirements.
One thing became clear at Comparting: "Freedom in communication" has many facets. Complete solution or selected microservices, on premise or cloud, private or public cloud - the bandwidth is wide and the batch world with its monolithic software packages for output management will not disappear overnight. Paper will be with us for years to come. But the world of customer communications is becoming more transactional. As a consequences, flexibility is in high demand, and expectations of speed and quality in customer communications will continue to rise
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Five years ago, people were still satisfied with response times of several days, but today they feel nervous if the answer is not immediate.
Two worlds, then - the print-oriented, batch-driven document world on one hand, and transactional processing on the other. Many companies now rely on hybrid approaches, as was heard in several presentations.
With their component-based architecture, both worlds are covered - the "monolithic approach" as well as the way to the cloud. The interesting thing here is that are most DocBridge® solutions executable in the "cloud", but many functions of a specific product - for document conversion or creation, for example - are also available as granular microservices that can be scaled, distributed and orchestrated in the cloud as desired. Depending on the company's requirements and communication structure. Freedom of Choice, responsiveness and personalization will continue to be an important charateristics customer communications now and in the future.
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