As fans of CCM or CX, you may have read about the launch of Quadient’s Impress solution for Small and Medium Businesses (SMB.) If you haven’t, check it out here. It’s an amazing evolution of the technologies formerly known as OMS-500 and Hybrid Mail, rebranded to reflect their increased ability to impress customers, as SMBs like you digitally transform your organisation. You may wonder what is different about Impress and Inspire and how they work together.
The short answer is that both Impress and Inspire are each great solutions to similar problems, with a different starting point and at a different scale.
Quadient Impress
Most Impress solutions are in full production in one day, sometimes even on the same day. This is possible because Impress almost always starts with precomposed communications that need to be automated or digitalised. Impress quickly modifies and alters existing communications, moving barcodes or adding personalised messages, to wrap automation and process around existing communications. Then, Impress communications are sent through relevant print, email and other channels, relieving significant time and pressure constraints facing many SMBs today. In fact, the COVID-19 crisis increased Impress sales by 20 times in March and April due to the rapid digitalisation of existing processes as firms moved to work from home.
Impress helps SMBs instantly streamline their current outbound business-critical processes to speed customer fulfillment, decrease time to payment and improve customer experience with cloud-based multi-channel customer communications without having to start from scratch. Impress is at its peak when business-critical communications are already in place but need to be quickly brought into the digital age to meet customer demands. With Impress, you can add personalised messages to existing applications, relocate of content on documents and add production markings to improve efficiency and deliverability.
This combination of a cloud-based design environment that moves and adjusts design elements, handles multi-channel delivery and even outsources printed communications, makes it easy for Impress to deliver up to three million communications per year on its cloud-based architecture and more for on-premise deployments.
Impress is a comprehensive outbound document automation platform for SMB's that automates the entire customer communication workflow and gives you the flexibility to send transactional documents via any combination of channels - Print, Digital or Outsourced. Impress is upgradable to add multi-channel delivery, tracking and even physical delivery of outsourced printed communications. This helps smaller businesses grow their technology as their needs grow.
Quadient Inspire
By contrast, Inspire is designed for enterprises and service providers who handle omnichannel communications with a high degree of regulatory complexity, collaboration between multiple stakeholders, touchpoints requiring multiple departments and volumes up to the billions of communications per year. Inspire handles the industry’s most complex designs that create, deliver track and react to bidirectional omnichannel communications at volumes in the billions per month, supporting entire communication infrastructures for every department.
Inspire enables division of labor, by separating IT, design and business components to foster collaboration while eliminating redundancy in communication design. Inspire’s omnichannel UI designs outbound, inbound and interactive experiences that support the entire customer journey for enterprises.
Under the hood, Quadient is leveraging key components of the Inspire engine, specifically the .TNO format and some repurposing algorithms to facilitate production. However, the design interfaces and the underlying designs are not compatible, as they solve different problems at different scales. As a result, Impress and Inspire each stand alone in their respective markets as leading technologies that improve customer communications.