In reviewing the 2019 Aspire Leaderboard, there are several ways to look at the results. With 23 competitors fighting hard to define the CCM market in a time of change, the lens through which you look at the results is important. Some companies are focusing on doing a simple thing very well at scale. Others are pursuing an acquisition strategy to add capabilities to a growing portfolio. Some are investing in growth by acquiring large venture capital injections. While corporate strategy and competition is interesting, it’s not nearly as important as your projects. So, let’s look at the impact of corporate strategy on the projects you have, today, tomorrow and beyond.
There are some companies, mostly the newer ones, who are hyper-focused on their application. Maybe they are focusing on correspondence, onboarding or a single business solution. When you look at these companies, you will often find “ease of use” and “built for <thing>” in the marketing materials. This is absolutely true, and most of these firms deliver on their promise. What happens when your communication needs expand outside of their area of focus?
For instance:
- Maybe Salesforce isn’t your only CRM due to a recent acquisition.
- Maybe another department has a downstream communication that has larger requirements.
- What are the costs associated with matching and managing the design, tone, and experience across business silos?
- Does the solution enable you to communicate across all required channels today?
- Where does the design live, and is that compatible with your business continuity plans?
Other companies are pursuing a growth by acquisition strategy – adding capabilities to the portfolio to round out communication needs. This strategy may help a client have a single point of contact, but usually, these acquisitions do not become integrated in a meaningful way for the clients. Sometimes, these products have separate licensing, support, and service teams that can finger point internally.
When you see the growth via acquisition-based firms, look for the following:
- If there are new and exciting acquisitions, ask how they will be developed together. Ask follow-up questions to see if the development schedules, locations, or releases are aligned.
- Read their compatibility statements to understand upgrade options in terms of product release schedules.
- Examine the history of retirements, EOLs, forced migrations or forced cross-grade events with the company.
- Look at the proposals carefully. Are there separate line items for different support teams? Are services contracts separated out by division?
- Check for “Purchase Order Integration” which means that the only integration is that they are purchased from the same company.
At Quadient, we’re the right size. We can act quickly at scale. We’re not so small that we ignore anything that is slightly outside of our vision. In fact, customers have driven us to transform our Inspire Interactive offering, create innovative mobile and email delivery options, consolidate the omnichannel design UI and improve Customer Journey Mapping.
We’re also not so large that we reduce our offering to a single line item on a spreadsheet of thousands of unrelated products that only get attention based on a number.
With over 300 developers, we have the largest focused CCM development team in the market. We’re large enough to develop, maintain and support innovation. We’re centralized enough to understand that our customers’ projects impact them, which led us to create a unified UI/UX for our entire portfolio.
Quadient believes that your applications collide with other departments, so we can help you grow your communication portfolio as new channels are added, and new customer experiences are demanded. The Inspire Platform enables you to actively manage a flexible portfolio of customer touchpoints that outpace your competitors.
For complimentary Premium Access to the 2019 Aspire Leaderboard, please click here.