Check the budget

Check the budget

Comparing the price of a new platform with the cost of the old one only tells part of the story.

There are obvious budget line items, the software, infrastructure, support, and professional services themselves.

The real cost of a legacy CCM environment is spread across the business, and the price of inertia can be harder to spot. The costs rarely arrive as one large invoice, which is exactly why staying put can continue to look cheaper long after it stops being so.

Then there’s the less visible cost, hours spent developing custom integrations, rebuilding templates, finding manual workarounds for new regulations plus the business cost of duplicated systems, delayed channel launches, and routine changes.

There’s also the cost of delay. A campaign waits weeks for a template change. A regulatory update requires manual intervention across hundreds of communications. A new channel sits in a backlog because the integration work is too heavy. A communication is delayed while teams figure out how to make it accessible for people using assistive technology, from tagging to reading order. A customer needs changes faster than the platform can respond.

The business case is therefore not old platform cost versus new platform cost. It's the cost of maintaining the environment you have, plus the cost of each change the system makes harder, compared with the cost and value of modernization.

For Quadient, the value comes from reducing that recurring change burden. Greater business-user control can reduce dependence on development resources. Reusable content and logic can reduce duplication. Flexible deployment can lower the cost and risk of future infrastructure changes. Model-agnostic AI can protect the investment organizations make in their own AI capabilities. Built-in accessibility capabilities can make it easier to create WCAG-aligned emails and universally accessible PDFs, while helping teams identify accessibility issues earlier in the process. Productized migration tooling can reduce the manual effort required to leave the legacy environment in the first place.

Our customers feel the impact:

• A global banking customer decreased form error rates from 80% or more to ZERO and saved 37,500 person hours per year with automation and error reduction from streamlining one process, able to make changes to forms in days not months.

• A retail pharmacy reduced patient intake forms from 15-45 min to less than 5 mins

• A large health plan achieved $1.2M in cost savings due to Inspire automation - additional $444K+ projected in recurring annual savings across 10+ communication types.

Pacific Life has seen a tremendous impact on customer relationships and cost:

“With Quadient Inspire, we have leading edge capabilities in terms of how we present customer data and deliver content to our customers. Moving some of the large volume to e-delivery and with a focus on generating print ready output to reduce print vendor programming, will also significantly reduce our costs…And we recently asked our internal users about their experience so far with Quadient Inspire and we were very excited by the positive responses. They can hardly believe how much easier it is for them to process their daily correspondence and how much more they can accomplish. Quadient Inspire has been a real game changer for us.”—Randi Gordon, director, customer communications management, Pacific Life.

The question isn’t simply whether a new CCM platform fits this year’s budget. It’s whether continuing to fund the limitations of the current environment makes sense for the years ahead.

A legacy platform can look less expensive because its costs are distributed across IT, operations, compliance, marketing, and customer experience. But every workaround, manual update, delayed launch, and specialized resource adds to the real cost of staying put.

Modernization changes that equation. The right platform can reduce the cost of maintaining what you have while making future changes faster, easier, and less dependent on technical resources.

Before deciding that modernization is too expensive, calculate what it costs not to modernize. The bigger number may already be hiding in your budget.