DOCUMENT Summer 2023

A ROCKET INTO THE FUTURE OF WORK

How Modern Cloud CCM Solutions Can Improve Organizational Agility and CX

A TEACHABLE MOMENT: CLASSIFIED DOCUMENT FIASCO IN THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH

THE ART OF MASTERING USER ACTIVITY IN ECM

Get the Most Out of AI in the CCM Space

By Scott Francis

By Atif Khan

By Bill Tidwell

By Brian DeWyer

By Chris Murphy

For

By Ernie Crawford

Kaspar Roos

Information management can be like rolling a rock uphill

Throughout my career I have been told that information management is like trying to roll a rock uphill, only to have it roll back down again because something wasn’t right, someone of importance in the organization wasn’t happy, or something had been overlooked. In other words, they feel like Sisyphus, the ancient Greek mythological person who was condemned to roll a boulder uphill only to have it roll back down once he made it to the top.

The challenges of enterprise content management (ECM) and customer communications management (CCM) often seem like a hill that we are trying to scale in our business organizations. Though the technology has been around for many years, the challenges of getting it deployed is like being Sisyphus pushing that rock uphill.

In this issue, we will try to help you flatten that hill and help you move that rock to a successful end. As you read on, our contributors will provide you with insights and suggestions to help you bring focus and develop strategies for success. You will learn how to identify a teachable moment and learn from it, like that of the classified documents fiasco in the Executive Branch. You’ll see how leveraging case studies can strengthen the customer experience, along with six considerations to strengthen your data security and compliance practices.

With artificial intelligence (AI) appearing everywhere, success still requires the right support from all levels of the organization as do successful implementations of ECM and CCM

to improve operational and organizational agility, and the overall customer experience. More specific to ECM, it is important to step back and take a holistic view of the organization. Considerations must include the origination of documents, how they will be captured, governance and technology to properly manage them, how they will be distributed whether digital or hardcopy via a print production workflow, and how they will be destroyed when no longer needed or required.

In today’s world, there is no hill too high to conquer and no need to feel like Sisyphus. The tools and best practices you need are out there and found in magazines such as this. The key is to do some research, investigate what is available to you, leverage that information and those tools to build a sound strategy and implementation plan, then execute that plan. We encourage you to read through this issue, and as you do so, think about how this information applies to your current project and situation, and begin journey to success across a less daunting landscape.

president Chad Griepentrog publisher Ken Waddell managing editor

Erin Eagan [ erin@rbpub.com ] contributing editor Amanda Armendariz contributors

Ernie Crawford, Brian DeWyer, Scott Francis, Atif Khan, Chris Murphy, Kaspar Roos, Bill Tidwell advertising

Ken Waddell [ ken.w@rbpub.com ] 608.235.2212

audience development manager

Rachel Chapman [ rachel@rbpub.com ] creative director

Kelli Cooke

PO BOX 259098 Madison WI 53725-9098

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DOCUMENT Strategy Media (ISSN 1081-4078) is published on a daily basis via its online portal and produces special print editions by Madmen3, PO BOX 259098, Madison, WI 53725-9098. All material in this magazine is copyrighted ©2023 by Madmen3 All rights reserved. Nothing may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher. Any correspondence sent to DOCUMENT Strategy Media, Madmen3, or its staff becomes the property of Madmen3.

The articles in this magazine represent the views of the authors and not those of Madmen3 or DOCUMENT Strategy Media. Madmen3 and/or DOCUMENT Strategy Media expressly disclaim any liability for the products or services sold or otherwise endorsed by advertisers or authors included in this magazine.

About Bob Larrivee, Purveyor of Autonomous Automation (Retired) Inducted into the AIIM Company of Fellows in 2019, Bob Larrivee is a recognized expert in the application of advanced technologies and process improvement to solve business problems and enhance business operations. In his career, Bob led many projects and authored hundreds of eBooks, industry reports, blogs, articles, and infographics. In addition, he has served as host and guest subject matter expert on a wide variety of webinars, podcasts, virtual events, and lectured at in-person seminars and conferences around the globe.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: DOCUMENT Strategy Media is the essential publication for executives, directors, and managers involved in the core areas of Communications, Enterprise Content Management, and Information Management strategies. Free to qualified recipients; subscribe at documentmedia.com/subscribe.

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FEATURED CONTRIBUTORS

Scott Francis

Scott Francis, Technology Evangelist at PFU America, Inc., brings more than 30 years of document imaging expertise to his position where he’s responsible for evangelizing Fujitsu’s industry leading scanner technology. With over thirty years of experience in the enterprise content management industry, he frequently provides thought leadership on document scanning use cases and best practices in addition to the overall benefits of digital transformation solutions.

Atif Khan

Atif Khan has over 20 years of experience building successful software development, data science, and AI engineering teams that have delivered demonstrable results. As the Vice President of AI and Data Science at Messagepoint, Khan has established a comprehensive AI research and engineering practice and delivered two AI platforms (MARCIE and Semantex) that have brought a fresh perspective to the CCM industry. Through collaboration with the leadership team, he has defined the vision and objectives for these platforms, accelerated their market launch, while forging academic partnerships to achieve long-term product research goals.

Chris Murphy

Chris Murphy is the Vice President of Product Marketing for Smart Communications, a customer communications management technology leader focused on helping businesses engage in more meaningful customer conversations. He is an experienced product marketing leader with a demonstrated history of success in the information technology and services industry.

What’s New

Catch up on all the news, opinions, and current events happening around the industry.

The Transformation from CCM to CXM

Join Us at DSF’ 24 in Boston!

DSF ’24 will be held on May 20-22, 2024 at the Sheraton Boston in Boston, Massachusetts. Interested in attending, speaking, sponsoring or exhibiting at DSF ’24 Boston? Please email: jdunkel@EventEvolution.com

Aspire’s 2023 global research will continue to highlight the industry’s transformation from CCM to CXM. They’ll examine enterprise efforts to centralize communications governance, dive into the impact of employee experience on customer communications and explore evolving buyers and shifting priorities. They’ll also gather data on cloud adoption and how businesses are balancing component technologies against integrated CXP solutions while they weigh the value of deployed software against outsourced services. They’ll also place new emphasis on investments in generative AI and look at the ways in which interactive data collection can complement traditional efforts. Finally, the consumer portion of our survey will zero in on the communication factors that directly influence brand loyalty. For more information, please reach out to Kaspar Roos at:.

kaspar.roos@aspireccs.com

Study: Rebuilding Customer Trust Through Digital Transformation

In research conducted in the Spring of 2023 by Salesforce and Smart Communications, 430 senior executives from across the global banking and lending sector were surveyed, revealing key insights into the industry’s strategic approach to digital technology investment and customer engagement. According to the study, 88% of respondents agreed that the current era of uncertainty presents the best opportunity for banks and lenders to regain customer trust since 2008’s financial crisis. Approximately 90% of survey respondents believe the ability to rapidly scale automated processes when the volume of customer inquiries rises — without increasing fixed costs — will be critical to their success over the next three years. Download the full report: www.smartcommunications.com

Get

from

MOMENT

What companies can learn from the classified document fiasco in the executive branch |

The ongoing chaos around the mishandling of the country’s classified documents by our Presidents (both former and present) and other high-level government representatives continues to dominate the headlines.

The haphazard management of our country’s top secret classified documents should alarm all Americans, no matter what side of the aisle you’re on. One of the main problems that will need to be reckoned with once the investigations are complete and the dust has settled is the total lack of consistency and continuity of IT systems, policies and best practices

By Scott Francis

regarding document handling processes in the highest level of our government. This appears to be a pattern of behavior that is endemic from administration to administration. Whether anyone knows the location of our every document marked “Top Secret” may be a perpetual unsolved mystery.

There must be standardized policies that surpass administrations and political parties, in order to keep our country’s secrets safe and secure — and these policies can also be applied effectively to businesses. Let’s face it: most businesses run more efficiently than our federal government and most have very stringent data management and records

management processes in place already. One reason for the more organized and secure approach to records management is that private sector organizations also must comply with a whole swath of data privacy regulations, including the EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA.

Organizations in highly regulated industries, including healthcare and finance, have their own specific regulations to adhere to, such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) which requires financial institutions to protect customer data and disclose all data-sharing practices with customers. Healthcare providers prioritize patient privacy by complying with HIPAA,

which was established in 1996 and protects sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient’s consent or knowledge.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND RECORDS MANAGEMENT BEST PRACTICES

The pandemic accelerated digital transformation. In fact, the International Monetary Fund claims “the surge in digitization saved many firms during the pandemic, helping them to adapt to lockdowns through remote work and online operation.” Indeed, digitizing paper documents to better management data and records is an important component in digital transformation — which is more than just moving processes and applications to the cloud and encompasses making sure all systems and platforms can communicate with each other and empowering organizations to automate processes that were previously manual and employee-driven.

The pandemic has waned (thankfully) but companies are still investing heavily in digital transformation to drive better team collaboration, decrease data siloes and deliver better employee and customer experiences. Through the digitization of processes and records, important information and data can be made available securely to all employees, whether they’re working from Portugal or in the New York headquarters.

The federal government should take some cues from the private sector, and its wholehearted embrace to modernize and transform data and information sharing. While paper records may always have a place in business and government, trusting that classified information are secure because they’re red-stamped “Top Secret” is a house of cards, as we all know now.

A TEACHABLE MOMENT

So, what can these recent incidents involving former President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and our current President Joe Biden teach organizations? Are there any lessons to be learned from the mishandling of classified documents

in our executive branch to improve on their own document management policies and practices?

The answers is yes — there are many lessons to be learned, but the top takeaway is that companies must utilize the digitization and technologies readily available to them to secure corporate and customer data. Three best practices for companies looking to strengthen document and records management processes include:

their position, or the company. Technology is also readily available to secure corporate data on company IT, including desktop computers and laptops, so that information can’t be stolen via a USB drive.

There’s another huge benefit to relying less on paper documentation and more on digitization: organizations can take stock of their processes and work to decrease paper usage and their carbon footprint. Most companies are spending a lot of money on office and paper storage space. Digitization enables companies to decrease the paper they store in file cabinets and storage rooms and helps them to build their sustainability portfolio by committing to more “green” work processes. Less office space equals less energy usage (and costs) for lighting, heat and a/c. While the much-hyped “paperless” office may never happen, we certainly can meet the goal to be less paper-dependent.

1. Don’t rely on paper to drive business. As mentioned previously, there are perils related to just using paper documentation to drive business processes. Paper is less secure because it can be photographed, folded up, or stashed in a briefcase — never to be seen again. True records management requires chain of custody protocols which include check-in and check-out privileges and other security safeguards.

2. Use modern content management systems. Content management systems provide the ability to track and secure documents, even suppressing documents from being printed and copied. In 2023, it’s virtually impossible to boast of records management best practices without a modern content management system in place.

3. Do utilize a private cloud. Companies should store data in a private cloud for true document security. Access privileges to cloud data must be monitored and updated regularly, especially when employees leave

Hopefully this very public debacle is a teachable moment for the government because the inconsistency of policies and procedures from administration to administration, and the inability to secure highly classified documents, could potentially put our country and citizens in danger. The first order of business for government IT officials is to invest in the technologies that will enable them to modernize processes, using digitization best practices to secure our nations’ secrets and decrease reliance on outdated paper records management — processes that are also very relevant and necessary for businesses, nationwide.

SCOTT FRANCIS, Technology Evangelist at PFU America, Inc., brings more than 30 years of document imaging expertise to his position where he’s responsible for evangelizing Fujitsu’s industry leading scanner technology. With over thirty years of experience in the enterprise content management industry, he frequently provides thought leadership on document scanning use cases and best practices in addition to the overall benefits of digital transformation solutions.

The top takeaway is that companies must utilize the digitization and technologies readily available to them to secure corporate and customer data.

By Atif Khan

GETTING THE MOST OUT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN THE CCM SPACE

As we stand at the dawn of a new era in artificial intelligence, the debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has elicited a broad range of responses. The spectrum of reactions spans from jubilation and awe to skepticism and apprehension, reflecting the diversity of perspectives towards this technological breakthrough. Amid the buzz, it’s vital to strike a balance between the optimism of tech evangelists — who herald ChatGPT as a gamechanger in productivity and customer engagement — and the cautionary voices warning of potential regulatory and societal implications.

This groundbreaking technology undeniably holds immense potential. Yet, to harness its benefits while mitigating risks, we must cut through the noise and foster a clear, comprehensive understanding of ChatGPT and its capabilities. As we navigate these uncharted waters, let us embark on this journey with an open mind, ready to explore, learn and adapt to this remarkable innovation in the realm of artificial intelligence.

As a technology executive who has spent three decades at the intersection of science research, engineering logistics and customer communications management (CCM), I’ll admit to being in the camp of those who are enthusiastic about the AI advancements exhibited by ChatGPT. Generative AI has many benefits to offer the CCM space, including streamlined processes, better quality communications and increased personalization, to name a few. However, what we might miss amid the noise is that, while generative AI may appear to be thinking for itself, its capabilities ultimately reflect human understanding of how it works and the skill with which we prompt it.

One of the most widely discussed aspects of ChatGPT is its ability to be

Why the right support is still crucial for the success of generative AI

convincingly lifelike in its responses to user-generated prompts and questions. This linguistic command is based on language prediction, a hallmark of generative AI technologies classified as large language models (LLMs). Like other generative AI models, LLMs are “trained” by processing vast quantities of data unsupervised, deducing and learning the rules of grammar, syntax and composition that govern natural language. In internalizing this data, LLMs note words that typically appear together, honing their ability to predict which word should come next in a sequence. In addition to helping the technology generate sentences without obvious logical errors, this predictive capability means that LLMs can be trained over time to use the specific lexicon of an organization or industry, enabling them to employ field-specific language at various levels of complexity and readability.

The widely cited shortcomings of ChatGPT, whose acronym stands for generative pre-trained transformer, are perhaps the best evidence of why this training is so important. Users have reported their ChatGPT queries have returned factual inaccuracies, strange tangents and evidence of bias, all stemming from the terabytes of data fed to it by human users. In other words, the success of a generative AI model is dependent on human input and our understanding of how to train, prompt and hone it.

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the potential of LLMs, such as ChatGPT, Google’s Bard or Microsoft’s Bing, with AI is being harnessed to revolutionize content creation from drafting persuasive advertising copy to crafting precise responses for customer service queries. However, utilizing this technology efficiently necessitates an understanding of ‘prompt engineering,’ akin to carefully crafting a wish told to a

genie to steer the outcome towards a desired result.

While LLMs are progressively becoming a vital tool in CCM, their use does raise concerns about data security, particularly around private personal information (PPI). Therefore, it is essential to choose packaged solutions that not only optimally leverage the capabilities of LLMs, but also ensure that PPI does not inadvertently leave the safety of an organization’s firewall.

specific to your industry, organization and data protection protocols. Moreover, these vendors can help enhance your LLM by feeding it only the most accurate and relevant data, ensuring the generated responses are not only accurate, but also free from bias and compliance issues. This way, your organization can fully harness the power of AI while maintaining data integrity and security.

In other words, generative AI can offer a great starting point for the creation of your customer communications and save significant time and energy on the content authoring process. However, we’re still a long way off from generative AI models that can function without input from human users, which means finding knowledgeable support remains a necessary and important first step. This will help you take full advantage of these new and improved capabilities by determining the data, prompts and feedback that will train your model most effectively, allowing you to be sure that your AI-generated starting point accurately reflects your organization’s standards around critically important parameters, such as desired reading levels and sentiment.

The ultimate goal is to develop these AI models to function autonomously. However, the current reality is that they still require significant human feedback. The silver lining, though, is that you don’t need to be an AI expert to reap the benefits of these technologies. The right vendor can provide a customized solution, training and fine-tuning the LLM

ATIF KHAN has over 20 years of experience building successful software development, data science, and AI engineering teams that have delivered demonstrable results. As the Vice President of AI and Data Science at Messagepoint, Khan has established a comprehensive AI research and engineering practice and delivered two AI platforms (MARCIE and Semantex) that have brought a fresh perspective to the CCM industry. Through collaboration with the leadership team, he has defined the vision and objectives for these platforms, accelerated their market launch, while forging academic partnerships to achieve long-term product research goals.

While generative AI may appear to be thinking for itself, its capabilities ultimately reflect human understanding of how it works and the skill with which we prompt it.

THE NEW FRONTIER FOR CCM EXCELLENCE

6 KEY CONSIDERATIONS TO ENSURE DATA SECURITY AND COMPLIANCE

BY BILL TIDWELL

What can go wrong without rigorous data security and compliance? In short, everything. According to Statista, a market leader in providing reliable market, company and consumer data, cybersecurity risks are on the rise and the average cost of a data breach in the United States soared to $9.44M, marking a significant increase from $9.05M in 2021. Not only is a data breach costly, but it can chip away at your brand’s hard-earned credibility and make even your most ardent, longtime customers question their loyalty.

For industries such as insurance, financial services and healthcare, the

stakes are even higher when handling sensitive documents and navigating an ever-changing regulatory landscape. In the past year, one of the country’s biggest hospital chains had a data breach that put 20 million patients at risk. In another incident, a Texas-based hospital system suffered a ransomware attack that compromised personal data like health records and social security numbers of some 500,000 people. Also in 2022, Credit Suisse, one of the largest global private banks, had a data leak impacting 30,000 clients representing $100 billion in assets.

It’s clear that data security risks are ever present and on the rise. However, with careful planning and

the right customer communications management (CCM) tools, even at-risk industries can securely manage their customer communications and sensitive emails. Here are six important steps you can take to protect your data:

1Adopt a prevention mindset. To completely transform your data security and compliance, it’s critical to take a strategic, long-term view that’s laser-focused on prevention. Ensure your CCN system has the ability to travel with the data, safeguarding it at every step to avoid a breach in the first place. As cybercrime grows, your safeguards must keep pace. SC Magazine, a resource for cybersecurity

professionals, recently reported that cyberattacks on hospital systems are expected to rise in 2023. Among the reasons: inadequate IT budgets, highly incentivized hackers seeking patient data and the challenging tangle of HIPAA and other compliance issues.

Reference the industry CIS Security Controls standards. As you’re assessing risks, take advantage of these established industry standards from the nonprofit Center for Internet Security (CIS). Known as the CIS Critical Security Controls, the set of 18 recommended actions are designed to protect organizations and data from the most prevalent cyber attacks.

Look for a CCM system that’s built with data security in mind. Cobbling together products from multiple vendors complicates integration and increases the chance for data breaches. You want a comprehensive CCM platform that’s built with security in mind and incorporates compliance tracking, reporting and enforcement into the core of the product.

with constant encryption. Additionally, a closed-loop feature offers protection from file receipt to output management to ensure you have a log of all access. This type of intelligent protection technology provides the optimum security available and minimizes your risk of breaches and costly penalties.

Secure the unsecured — the proof is in the audit trail. With today’s advancements, you can expect your software to offer one-click convenience for customers and delivery to multiple devices for immediate access. Even in the most highly regulated industries, secure delivery of sensitive emails is now possible. You also need a platform that offers real-time tracking capabilities for both proof of delivery and proof of access. Securing data is a worthwhile investment, especially considering the very real cost of penalties or legal action. Every GDPR violation, for example, can cost up to 4% of a company’s annual revenues or up to about $22 million.

THE ROAD TO DATA AND SECURITY EXCELLENCE

Be aware of industry-specific regulations. And expect more privacy laws. To meet the stringent requirements of vertical-specific regulations like HIPAA, PCI, FISMA, SSA16 and GDPR, data must be encrypted. When PHI data is encrypted, even if stolen, hackers can’t access the data without the privacy key. With consumers placing more pressure on legislators, privacy regulations are expected to increase. In 2022, state legislatures introduced nearly 200 consumer privacy bills and 5 states (California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut and Utah) have already enacted comprehensive privacy laws.

Settle for nothing less than end-to-end encryption. To truly address industry-critical compliance issues, your software solution needs protection embedded into the data file, allowing it to travel through the workflow

The new year is an ideal time to re-evaluate your data security and compliance protocols. With the right planning and tools, you’ll be on track to securing the trust of your customers and avoiding the exorbitant costs resulting from breaches. Ensuring data security and compliance is achievable — even for companies with inherently higher risks. A comprehensive, integrated solution will put you in control of all your customer communications and help you achieve operational efficiencies you didn’t think were possible.

BILL TIDWELL is Chief Executive Officer and founder of Transformations, Inc. In this capacity, he oversees the direction and development of Transformations’ core products, ensuring that the company stays loyal to its mission of “creating innovative solutions that enable our clients to gain a significant competitive advantage.” Throughout his career, Bill has focused on using technology as a tool for improving business practices and operations. For more information, visit www.transfrm.com or www.uluro.com.

With careful planning and the right customer communications management (CCM) tools, even at-risk industries can securely manage their customer communications and sensitive emails.

What We Learned at DSF 23

By Eric Stevens

The recent Document Strategy Forum (DSF ’23) was a huge success, bringing together form and document experts to explore the latest technology, learn about new practices, and gain insights into the future. As a proud sponsor of the conference, 4Point had the opportunity to engage with numerous individuals, discussing their challenges and plans in the industry.

The morning keynotes offered insights into the future of technology, particularly Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT. Chuck Gahun of Forrester Research and Alan Pelz-Sharpe of Deep Analysis emphasized the need for a new approach to content, documents, and forms in light of ML/AI tools. Forrester refers to this as “modular content,” breaking down content into smaller components. 4Point has been promoting this shift towards modular form content, known as form fragments, for years. Adopting these fragments is crucial

for efficient form and document creation, and the rise of AI and ML tools is expected to accelerate this transition.

Modularity in form and document structures goes beyond using simple elements like “text fields” or “email addresses.” It involves creating reusable objects that encompass all the necessary components for them to function correctly within any form or document. For example, an Address Block could contain all the fields required for an address, including knowledge about different states, the ability to validate zip codes, and the capacity to adjust its appearance and fields based on the selected country. Such form fragments hold immense value today, enabling faster form and document creation, reducing maintenance costs (as changes to a fragment automatically reflect across all forms utilizing it), and significantly enhancing consistency.

At the conference, our 4Point session “Adaptive Forms Design Guidelines” showcased how organizations can transition from fillable PDFs to browser-based, mobile-ready forms that generate PDF outputs. Many organizations still rely on fillable PDFs for data capture, despite their limitations. Deploying fillable PDF forms in browsers poses challenges as browsers have their own handling methods that may not align with organizational requirements. This often requires users to download Adobe Acrobat Reader for form completion.

By adopting Adaptive Forms, organizations achieve a browserbased, mobile-friendly user experience while generating PDFs for internal processing. This shift enables future data integration as backend systems mature, facilitating functionalities like pre-populating forms, direct data transfer, and data validation, empowering organizations in data integration.

Another significant topic of discussion at the conference was form design improvement, be it for online forms, fillable PDFs, or flat documents. 4Point introduced a design concept aimed at enhancing the user experience across all forms and documents. This concept revolves around three key elements: Be Clear, Be Consistent, and Consider the Consumer.

Being clear implies users should immediately understand their tasks and how to complete them. This can be achieved through clear field labels, visual cues like boxes, and guided form completion. Unlike paper or some fillable PDFs, well-designed online forms automatically present relevant sections based on user input. This ensures clarity, improves the user experience, and reduces data errors that hinder organizational processes.

Prioritizing the consumer is vital in the design process, whether they are internal employees, partners, dealers, agents, or end consumers. Ensuring an effortless form-filling experience is part of considering the consumer. This involves providing clarity, consistency, and identifying the necessary information users need to gather. Additional features such as saving form progress, resuming filling later, pre-populating user information, and dynamically adjusting the form based on user input or existing data all contribute to a user-friendly and streamlined experience.

Document Strategy Forum ’23 was a resounding success. Thank you to the staff that arranged and managed this event and all the wonderful people we spoke to. We look forward to seeing all of you next year.

Eric Stevens is Vice President of Strategic Engagement, 4Point.

THE ART OF MASTERING USER ACTIVITY IN ECM

processing payments, loan documents, accessing design specifications or viewing lab reports, understanding and managing the time of these transactions is critical for business. In addition, user response time impacts Service Level Agreements (SLAs); knowing real user response time with document context allows organizations to identify and resolve service level issues.

Along with document responsiveness for users, knowing the scope of user activity allows proper planning for growth. Without insight into transaction volumes or repository usage, attempting to plan capacity needs could result in problems that may have otherwise been prevented. Knowing your current performance footprint is necessary when considering ECM workload rebalancing using on-premises, cloud hypervisors, private cloud or hybrid architecture options. Otherwise, even ‘lift and shift’ approaches, commonly used for speed and simplicity, will not be effective.

2. Dramatically Reduce Mean Time to Detection (MTTD) With Correlated ECM Platform Information

By Brian DeWyer

Enterprise content management (ECM) applications form the backbone of many vital digital document processes in businesses today. These systems serve as a hub, potentially thousands of users accessing repositories daily, seeking to view and interact with an organization’s most secure and valuable digital assets. The magnitude of user activity generates an immense quantity of document transactions. In light of this, comprehending the nature of user interactions with the repository content and their usage patterns becomes crucial. This

understanding paves the way for effective content management, improved user experience, and enhanced security measures, thereby contributing to an organization’s overall operational efficiency and success.

Given the context outlined, the importance of effectively managing ECM user activity cannot be overstated. There are four primary reasons for this emphasis.

1. Know Your Business Performance and Plan Ahead

Users dealing with objectively slow content retrieval must be equipped to perform optimally. Whether they are

Proper insight into your ECM system and user activity allows for quicker identification of issues. The ability to have a snapshot of the ECM user, repository and infrastructure when a threshold is passed — dramatically reduces the time of an investigation.

For example, in Figure 1, an issue occurs at 15:30:25 EST. This organization has decided that a search above 4.8 seconds for user response time warrants notifying appropriate personnel. This instance is a snapshot, along with the data from the same time for the repository and infrastructure. This type of user activity insight (correlated with ECM platform fault domain identification) allows for quicker issue detection and resolution.

3. Insider Threat Detection for Content

One of the most significant security challenges modern organizations face is insider threats and identifying the location of malicious activity. Understanding whether documents are being improperly accessed, how

4 reasons why doing so is indispensable in today’s business operations

users are utilizing them, and whether irregular login patterns are occurring is essential for high-value regulated content. Therefore, large organizations must know the following:

 When users access ECM applications

 Content access patterns are indicative of a security anomaly

 Content use and misuse are characteristic of insider threats

 Irregular document access by privileged insiders

 Suspicious login attempts from inside the firewall

 High-volume movement of content to endpoint devices

 Irregular download and upload of content

Any of the above conditions can trigger a detect, respond and contain response action. Once an event is detected, a response and contain action can be triggered depending on the severity classification. For example, for a severe event, user access can immediately be revoked, and endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools can be signaled to disable browser access and even remove an endpoint device from the network.

4. User License Management “Right-Sizing”

Understanding the number of unique users accessing your repositories is

tantamount when evaluating ECM user license requirements. This is especially important during software upgrades, cloud migrations and license agreement renewals. Tracking your user counts, growth trends and users by ECM application provides a detailed context for ECM licensing conversations. This information can also feed chargeback analysis as it provides objective information on ECM usage by divisions, business areas or department user groups. Therefore, organizations need to understand this critical licensing information:

 External user count by application or repository

 Internal user count by application or repository

 API gateway application access using “shared” user accounts

 Native ECM application user count

 User device types such as desktop, mobile or tablet. It’s worth noting that knowing the device types aids in understanding ECM application platform preferences, investment, and DevOps process focus.

Effective user activity management within ECM systems is indispensable in today’s business operations. ECM applications are at the heart of critical document processes, handling vast user interactions and document transactions daily. Being attuned to

these user interactions and their usage patterns is crucial for efficient content management, enhanced user experience, and robust security protocols. It ensures smooth operations, planning for future needs, swift problem detection and resolution, securing valuable content and optimal resource allocation. Managing ECM user activity with appropriate context is vital for organizations aiming for improved security and overall operational effectiveness.

BRIAN DEWYER is CTO and Co-Founder of Reveille Software. With more than 25 years of experience in technology, Brian DeWyer provides product strategy and technical leadership in his role as Reveille CTO and board member. Brian leverages his extensive knowledge from his tenure as a senior IT leader at Wachovia and previous role as a process consulting practice leader for IBM Global Services delivering on-premises and cloud-based solution implementations for Fortune 1000 commercial and government clients. He has led process change efforts within large organizations, building on content-driven solutions for high-volume transaction processing applications. He is a past board member of the Association of Image and Information Management (AIIM) industry association. Brian graduated from Virginia Tech with a BSME and holds an MBA from Wake Forest University.

Figure 1

LIKE A ROCKET INTO THE FUTURE OF WORK

How modern cloud CCM solutions can improve organizational agility and customer experience

By Chris Murphy

In today’s fast-paced and ever-changing business world, organizational agility has become more important than ever. Today’s businesses must quickly adapt to new market conditions, respond to unpredictable events, and bring new products and services to market faster. How they respond, and the speed of their response, might end up being one of the most critical factors in long-term success or failure. Cloud-based, multi-tenant SaaS solutions, particularly in customer communications management (CCM), have emerged as key enablers of organizational agility, helping enterprises transform the way they create, deliver, and manage customer communications,

forms processes and customer engagement strategies.

WHAT’S DRIVING THE INCREASED NEED FOR ORGANIZATIONAL AGILITY AND SPEED-TO-MARKET?

Agility is a capability that is hard to measure empirically, but when compelling events occur and the need for change arises, the lack of agility within an organization can be all too evident. Continuing economic uncertainty is just one factor that’s leading some companies to explore new markets to enable margin expansion and profitability. Their ability to be agile as they look to serve these new markets, create new offerings and services, and go-to-market frameworks will have a lot

to do with their success in these new ventures. These challenging global headwinds require companies to have tools in place to quickly respond to unpredictability and bring new products to market faster.

Another important factor driving the focus on agility is the changing behavior of customers. Customers, across all demographics, have adopted newer technologies and expect to have intuitive experiences with businesses as a result. In fact, research from Salesforce showed that 84% of users said the experience a company offers was just as important as the products and services provided. These changing customer behaviors, which continue to evolve, need companies to consistently

match pace by adopting technologies to manage complex tasks while still diminishing customer burden. As a result, employee experience will remain a top priority in terms of giving employees the right tools and technology they need to be agile and innovative.

Finally, organizations especially those in insurance, financial services, healthcare, telco and local and state government entities are constantly required to change their business practices, their processes, and their communication content to conform to the changing regulatory landscape. These changes can be incredibly disruptive to businesses as they grapple with tight deadlines and unwieldy and outdated technology ecosystems in attempts to reduce their compliance risk. The IT debt that companies are forced to face in situations like this results in significant impact to operational efficiency.

Cloud solutions and multi-tenant SaaS CCM software can help mitigate some of these issues by delivering rapid innovation, enabling operational agility and simplifying the management of data. This allows companies to learn what works best for their organization by failing fast, making way for agile sprints that allow them to get customer feedback quickly.

BUILDING A COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY FOUNDATION THAT PROMOTES AGILITY

If what we’ve established is that change is inevitable, building a technology infrastructure that is adaptable, flexible and malleable to change should be a no-brainer. These intelligently architected solutions can help to foster agility inside organizations. Everything from multi-tenant SaaS solutions to cloud deployment to business-friendly tools and utilization of modern technology are all critical to achieving agility. Interoperability is also an essential factor in creating an environment that is responsive to change.

For instance, many organizations are still solely reliant on their IT teams in order to make any changes to their communications. This can be a long and

arduous process as lines of business are forced to create tickets that are added to IT backlogs and could entail months of delay even for the simplest changes. Empowering business users with the ability to make changes to communication content — while still including other key stakeholders such as legal and compliance — can have a significant impact on the speed of change when alterations do need to be made.

Situations like these are compounded when there is no common framework or architecture for understanding the various locations of where specific content might be included amidst their jumble of document templates. This often means that companies spend as long trying to locate all the various instances of a certain content fragment, or logo, or disclaimer as they do enact any changes to it.

A sophisticated CCM solution can solve these issues and more. It can provide multi-channel document creation and management, enabling businesses to manage and distribute customer communications across various channels. When it comes to digital forms management, the right forms solution will do more than simply automate forms processes in a business — it will empower business users to create, manage and automate customer communications, reducing the burden on IT, allowing IT to support strategic initiatives and double down on customer experience.

Cloud-led agility is also critical. On-premise solutions can be costly, slow and difficult to scale. Cloud solutions provide speed, scalability, elasticity, extensibility and business user control. Take for example, the financial institution that was tasked with redeploying hundreds of their employees to work from home during the start of the pandemic. Providing access to the critical communications infrastructure needed to happen immediately — with new users being provisioned within minutes resulting in uninterrupted business continuity. Empowering employees with the tools they need to do their jobs properly — and scaling when the need arises

— allows organizations to drive agility and innovation.

Low-code or no-code solutions can also be used to reduce IT dependency, enabling business users to take control of their communications and reduce the time it takes to make changes. And by diminishing the use of paper-based forms in favor of digital forms, delivery speed and cost reduction can be improved.

A FOCUS ON THE FUTURE

It’s essential for businesses to be agile and to quickly respond to changing market conditions and customer needs, a fact that will continue to change how organizations manage processes and workflows. Multi-tenant, intelligently architected SaaS solutions can enable businesses to transform the way they manage customer communications and forms processes, helping them to be more agile, innovative and future-focused.

Whether the initiative to enhance organizational agility and customer engagement is led by IT or business users, it is crucial to identify projects that can deliver fast ROI to gain the trust and approval of leadership. This not only ensures continued support for future projects but also helps to build confidence in the organization’s ability to leverage technology to improve its operations and customer experiences. By focusing on initiatives that can deliver measurable benefits quickly, organizations can demonstrate the value of their efforts and build momentum for broader digital transformation initiatives. Onboarding new tech that helps an organization achieve rapid ROI, while empowering business users to be more agile and innovative, can be the initiative that rockets a business into the future of work.

CHRIS MURPHY is the Vice President of Product Marketing for Smart Communications, a customer communications management technology leader focused on helping businesses engage in more meaningful customer conversations. Chris spoke about CCM and operational agility at the DSF’23 in Charlotte, NC.

PROTECTING AGAINST DATA BREACH

For the key to document security, take a close look at your print production workflow

BY ERNIE CRAWFORD

It seems like every day there’s news of another multimillion-dollar data breach with yet another organization scrambling to deal with negative media attention, preserve their brand reputation and pick up the pieces of

their consumer base. The financial repercussions of such breaches are growing increasingly severe. According to Statista’s market and consumer data, the average cost of a data breach soared to $9.44 million in 2022 from $9.05 million the previous year—an

increase that reflects not only the rise in sophistication of these attacks, but also the devastating consequences of losing customer loyalty.

While data breaches can affect any organization or industry, security efforts are mostly concentrated on mitigating the risks of outside attack on firewalls, networks and other internal IT-related systems. This makes customer communications processing a particularly target-rich environment for bad actors who seek to gain access to “protected” information. This is especially the case in the healthcare, financial services and insurance industries, which transmit communications with a high density of private health information (PHI) and private personal information (PPI) that can be compromised for malicious activities such as identity theft.

Firewalls, passwords and other forms of access control are not enough to

prevent a breach. Although it is certainly important to determine who can gain access to protected data to begin with, these security measures do not prevent or diminish the impact of negligent acts by those with clearance to override them. Many software solutions tout regulatory compliance (HIPAA, PCI-DSS, etc.) as a way to prevent breaches and it’s true that adherence to governmental or industry-specific regulations is an important step in securing customer data. However, compliance with regulatory standards for firewalls, as well as network infrastructure and design, is not the only way to mitigate risk.

Many regulatory frameworks completely ignore the security risk inherent in documents and document files — particularly those that contain PPI and PHI. For document security to be commensurate with existing network and data security guidelines, a close examination of the print production workflow for potential and existing gaps in security is required. By implementing protective measures throughout the print production process, customer communications providers (particularly those who handle PPI and PHI) can limit the number of points within the workflow when data is vulnerable to threats, greatly reducing its exposure to malicious activities. Extending the regulatory mandate of “encryption of data in transit and encryption of data at rest” to that same encryption mandate for files containing documents can go a long way in eliminating a potential weak point as a target for attack.

HEIGHTENING SECURITY AT ALL STAGES OF PRINT PRODUCTION

As a customer communications provider, one of the most important ways to enhance the security of customers’ data is to find a solution that reduces the number of points along the workflow that require decryption. Whereas a typical end-to-end process involves decryption during verification, processing and printing, some modern

solutions make it possible to maintain the encryption until printing.

In addition to reducing the number of workflow stages that require decryption, the most advanced document security solutions will maintain encryption during printing. Whereas a typical printing process involves decrypting or “unzipping” the entire print file, page-level decryption with each page of the entire document file assigned a unique encryption password, reduces the amount of data exposed during the printing process.

With news about data breaches becoming all too frequent, document security — particularly for customer communications in healthcare, finance or insurance — is more important now than ever. While the astronomical regulatory fines are certainly daunting, just as important and potentially damaging to an organization is the loss of brand integrity and consumer loyalty that accompanies a breach. According to PCI Pal: In the US, 83% of consumers claim they will stop spending with a business for several months in the immediate aftermath of a security breach and 21% claim they will never return to a business post-breach.

In identifying a document security solution for your customer communications, it is critical to ensure data is protected at all stages of the workflow, whether the document is in transit or being stored. By decreasing the number of times data is decrypted and exposed throughout the workflow, you can greatly diminish opportunities for negligent error and make an investment in your reputation for keeping customers’ sensitive data secure.

An electronic document industry pioneer, ERNIE CRAWFORD is the President/CEO and founder of Crawford Technologies. One of only a small number of people worldwide with a Master Electronic Document Professional (M-EDP) designation, Ernie has more than 30 years of senior marketing and management experience in the high-volume electronic printing market.

THOUGHTS ABOUT

Would AI take us back to the future?

By Kaspar Roos

This year’s DOCUMENT Strategy Forum (DSF ’23) was held from May 22 to 24 in Charlotte, NC. Many CCM professionals meet annually at DSF to discuss evolving trends and best practices. Artificial intelligence was the most discussed topic at this installment, its popularity driven by the emergence of large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT that are quickly finding their way into CCM and CXM solutions. In this article, I’d like to offer a few projections on where I see AI impacting the space now that we’ve had an industry-wide update on the latest developments.

While many vendors took the opportunity to showcase their AI offerings at DSF, the most impressive demo I saw

was actually presented by O’Neil Digital Solutions the day after the show. As analysts, we often get sneak-peaks at beta versions so we can help clients prepare products for market launch. The technology that O’Neil presented will soon enter the market as a highly disruptive offering that will begin to join the dots between data analytics (which tell businesses what messages to send to which customers in order to achieve a specific business outcome), content (longer-form generation of the message in full alignment with the objectives) and coding (the generation of the form, template or workflow steps in this particular instance).

When I began working as an analyst at InfoTrends (before launching Aspire), Apple had just launched the iPhone to

similar industry buzz. It was clear this new piece of technology would have a very big impact on the wider world, (and therefore our industry as well). When I think about how ubiquitous the smartphone has become in our daily lives and how much change the CCM industry has gone through as a result, it tells me that we should buckle up because AI will surely disrupt the communications space to an even greater degree than we’ve seen thus far.

The CCM industry is sometimes a strange one because its definition is dependent on perspective. At Aspire, we use three major definitions. In Figure 1, we’ve analyzed AI’s present and future impact on the industry through each of these lenses.

The first and oldest tells us that customer communication management is all about processing high-volume communications (usually of the printed document-centric transactional variety). This view is relevant to enterprises, service providers or tech vendors that still produce a lot of printed communications and are looking for ways to achieve operational excellence in omnichannel communication production.

Artificial intelligence has already been applied in this space — which we

define as enterprise communications processing (ECP) — to intelligently tag communications so they can be easily transformed into accessible documents that leverage text-to-voice technology for recipients with impaired vision. Crawford Technologies demonstrated some new developments in this area at DSF. Other developments include metadata extraction and classification for better processing, as well as intelligent setup for faster onboarding. There is an opportunity in this segment to apply AI for fully automatic post-composition re-engineering with the ultimate goal of creating highly intelligent systems that can rework templates and business logic based on a finite set of documents. These systems would have the intelligence to alter print workflows (and the associated devices) on the fly based on next-level decisioning and orchestration.

Next, there is an upstream view of communication generation. Traditionally known as document composition, software in this segment is focused on communications content, business logic, and generation (often digital generation in today’s market). In this space, AI is typically leveraged to analyze content on reading comprehension levels or to accelerate

migration by finding and eliminating or consolidating duplicated content in communication templates. But now, with the arrival of ChatGTP, vendors are beginning to integrate generative content capabilities, content re-writes, and coding for templates, forms, and business logic. At DSF, Messagepoint announced general availability of its ChatGPT integration for suggested content re-write, the first in the industry. We’ve yet to see much focus on artwork or image generation, but it is only a matter of time.

As AI matures and develops, we expect AI engines to begin writing code and developing content that is superior to the quality of human output. Once that threshold has been breached, AI will fundamentally disrupt the market, promising tremendous opportunities for those who master it but doling out severe consequences to businesses that fail to adapt quickly enough. Nevertheless, we cannot be completely sure of the future since governments and regulatory bodies may introduce new relevant rules and legislation, particularly in Europe, where data privacy and protection of labor are important themes. This will put Europe and the United States on different development tracks.

Finally, the third definition of CCM categorizes it as part of the customer experience management (CXM) space. CXM is all about optimizing a customer’s perception of the brand. In the context of CCM, this means communications should always be relevant, highly personalized, delivered to the customer’s preferred channels. As the market evolves, enterprises will either build their own Communication Experience Platform (CXP), or they will adopt a SaaS model through a service provider or tech vendor.

CXPs combine document composition with adjacent capabilities from the CX space, such as dashboards, data analytics, forms, e-signatures, payments, portals, conversational messaging (chatbots), and increasingly, campaign management as well. AI is poised to make a tremendous impact in this field, not only by powering the delivery of emerging, bi-directional channels, but also through big data analytics and real-time orchestration that will push the correct content to the right recipients at the optimal time, boosting desired consumer behavior and positive business outcomes. We’ve seen the market take its first steps in this direction and looking at the rate of

development in the MarTech space, we expect AI to make significant inroads here in the years to come. Just look at how easy it’s become to generate graphics from text.

So where does that leave us? With the arrival of large language models (LLM), many analysts think AI has moved from narrow intelligence to general intelligence. The big question is to what extent the AI we see today will evolve into something that is called “Super Intelligence.” This is the AI’s

ability to autonomously increase its own intelligence and quickly outstripping that of its human counterparts.

The bigger question we must ask ourselves as a society (and soon), is whether we want this to happen and if so, how confident are we that we can contain this new power and use it for the benefit of humanity. These are fundamental questions, and again, new pertinent legislation will soon be introduced that will also factor into future projections. For instance, the European

Parliament has taken up discussions of the newly developed AI Act. That said, I don’t see how content creation or template coding can be regulated in a globally connected world.

If AI overtakes our human ability to efficiently create and deploy communications (and that is still a big if, since many experts argue that creativity is linked to emotional intelligence, which AI cannot ever possess) the widespread effects will first impact our industry in places like India and Eastern Europe

Source: Aspire, 2023. Not for reproduction.

Figure 1: The impact of AI on the CCM-CXM space

where large offshore development teams will be replaced by self-coding AI solutions that transform text-to-templates at a faster rate and with better quality than human teams. Service providers, particularly those relying on labor augmentation, will then need to offer technology-enabled services or focus on other industries with less risk of AI displacement.

Another consequence of more AI would probably, paradoxically enough, be a swing back to print. We’ve already seen a strong correlation between digital maturity (such as the ability to better segment customers) and the effective use of direct mail. In addition, if AI evolves to a point where the best digital experiences are becoming a commodity and every interaction with a brand is fully automated and essentially performed by robots, it wouldn’t surprise me to see the pendulum swing back to a world where people (particularly Gen Z and Gen Alpha) place more value on having physical experiences. In that scenario, well-designed print pieces (perhaps, ironically, developed by AI) that are part of a true omnichannel communication mix driving desired outcomes, would surely bring us back to previous times. Thanks to AI, print-BPOs looking at the future shouldn’t get rid of their graphic arts print kit just yet...

Aspire is a strategic consulting and analyst firm specializing in the evolution from CCM to CXM. We're currently planning a ground-breaking study on the future of AI in customer communications. Please visit https://blog.aspireccs.com/new-ai-researchfrom-aspire to learn more.

JOIN US IN 2024!

If you are interested in sponsoring, exhibiting, speaking or attending DSF ’24 Boston, May 20-22 at the Sheraton Boston, please email jdunkel@EventEvolution.com.

What We Learned at DSF ’ 23 Charlotte

 DSF ’23 Charlotte Received 4.4 Stars out of 5!

 97% of Attendees Say They Would Recommend Attending DSF to Their Colleagues

A fantastic DOCUMENT STRATEGY Forum (DSF’23)! I learned so much from our advisory board members, sponsors, exhibitors and attendees:

1. We all face similar challenges regardless of industry. Paper is still here and postage is only getting more expensive but there are many options and strategies to move the needle.

2. Center-led models are a best practice for cracking the code and providing a better customer and advisor experience.

3. We all recognize that Generative AI will be a game changer. How we harness it successfully while practicing good governance will be a big part of the conversation by the time we get to Boston next year.

Leslie Sapienza, Vice President, Customer Communications Management

It was a great learning experience, and the possibility to share best practices and new developments.

Edwin Nuijten, Product Domain Manager Communication Platforms, NN Group

We choose to place a larger emphasis on DSF ‘23 than any other industry shows. DSF ‘23 attendees are the perfect mix of customers and partners, and there are so many great sessions and networking opportunities. We attend every year and we always leave the conference with multiple leads. Great job, DSF! We are looking forward to DSF '24 Boston! Michelle Livingston, Governance Director, Neps, Inc.

From a panel of CCM enterprise executives. Someone asked a question, ‘what’s the most important thing for you to partner on?' Everyone said technology is the easy part. The part that makes a really good partner is ability to help with implementation, integration and then the distribution. Because they’re not the experts… they’re experts in insurance, banking, (etc.) but they’re not experts in how to get customers to convert to digital channels or how to implement the technology to get the most value to the consumer. Service providers, that’s where you can add value and help your customers really leverage the technology. They want partnerships. Even though you’re a vendor, the partnership makes a difference.

Elizabeth Stephen, Customer Communications Strategist and Consultant

My biggest takeaway was from IDC. From their perspective, they see that customer satisfaction scores will go away and instead, to look at the customer effort scores. I think that is exactly what we should be asking: How much effort does it take a customer to do something that we want them to do? And is it effort that we want them to be spending? I think it’s a far better way to understand whether you’re hitting the notes on your customer experience.

Mia Papanicolaou, Customer Experience Strategist and Consultant, Communications Specialist and CCM-CXM Professional

DSF is the goldilocks forum. It’s just right. It’s not too big, it’s not too small. The ability to come and meet with like-minded CCM experts is paramount. And last but not least, really seeing how CCM is evolving and impacting the customer experience is what I gained most.

Nannette Mears, Assistant Vice President, Document Fulfillment Leader

WHAT THE ANALYSTS SAY…

2023 SPARK Matrix for Customer Communication Management by Quadrant Knowledge Solutions

The Quadrant Knowledge Solutions

SPARK Matrix ™: Customer Communication Management includes a detailed analysis of global market dynamics, major trends, vendor landscape and competitive positioning. The study provides competitive analysis and ranking of the leading CCM vendors in the form of its SPARK Matrix. It gives strategic information for users to evaluate different vendor capabilities, competitive differentiation, and market position.

The Future of AI in Customer Communications

Aspire will soon launch a new primary research project aimed at understanding the challenges and opportunities associated with AI in the CCM – CXM space. We’ll complement our global enterprise research with qualitative insights from vendors and service providers and then publish a report designed to help businesses effectively leverage AI to drive better communications and more automated customer engagement. We will also prepare an additional report for technology and service providers to enable them to assess and prioritize AI investments. To learn more, you can pre-register your interest here and Aspire will be in touch.

https://blog.aspireccs.com/ new-ai-research-from-aspire

Innovation In Banking and Payments 2023

From its humble beginnings in 2007, Celent Model Bank has grown into a well-known global program. Each year, Celent solicits nominations from financial institutions seeking examples of innovative applications of technology in banking. As the program grew over the years, it began offering us an unparalleled insight into the state of the banking industry—its priorities, focus areas for innovation, and how both change over the years.

This report looks at the state of technology-led innovation in banking and payments in 2023 through the lens of the Celent Model Bank program. It analyzes and discusses the leading content themes based on this year’s submissions and offers important “lessons learned” from our synthesis of many initiatives. The report is available at no cost.

www.celent.com/insights/496939953study-2022-january

Customer Data Influences on Content Marketing and the Customer Experience

The magic moments in a customer’s experience that create a loyal and trusting customer are getting smarter, faster, and more dynamic. With digital innovation, we are all producers and consumers of customer data across more digital and physical channels than ever before. It is the activation of customer data that delivers greater business success. IDC found the customer experience is a top investment area for digital leaders with 78% stating customer data plays an extremely significant role. Every department wants to gain insight into their customer preferences to make informed decisions that drive successful experiences. Read more in:

https://blogs.idc.com/2023/04/24/customer-data-the-revenue-engine/

Think About It

A COMPANY THAT PRIORITIZES PROVIDING PRODUCTS OR SERVICES THAT MEET CUSTOMER PREFERENCES BUT OFFERS A POOR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE COULD RESULT IN A DISSATISFIED CUSTOMER, LOOKING FOR ALTERNATIVES.

IN IDC RESEARCH EARLY IN 2022, 46% OF RESPONDENTS INDICATED THAT IMPROVING OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCIES IS THE TOP BUSINESS OBJECTIVE FOR CONTENT SERVICES INVESTMENTS.

Your digital transformation should be about more than just turning off print. It’s about adapting today’s technology to create better customer experiences and build loyalty.

According to PCI Pal: In the US, 83% of consumers claim they will stop spending with a business for several months in the immediate aftermath of a security breach and 21% claim they will never return to a business post-breach.

If you are in the 20% not currently using digital signatures, what are you waiting for? At minimum, you could assess where and how it can be used and do some research to see where this could take you.

/ BOB LARRIVEE /

/ PATRICK KEHOE /

/ ANDY FEEST / / HOLLY MUSCOLINO /

/ ERNIE CRAWFORD /