Despite starting this post by talking about GAAP accounting for software, I promise it will get less boring by the end. The Aspire Leaderboard for 2019 identifies Quadient as the Overall Leader in the CCM market. While that’s great for 2019, let’s look out to 2024.
Why 2024, well, GAAP accounting allows for the straight line amortization of capital software assets for the useful life of the asset, generally regarded as two to five years. Per transaction, per seat and other subscription models are treated as an operational expense, and not a capital expense. Whether you prefer capex or opex, you are likely to have a long-term relationship with your software. Quadient can meet your accounting preferences in a variety of ways.
Today, I’ll let the upper end of GAAP put a five-year limit on a CCM future, but I have personally seen applications as old as 30 years in production at insurers, banks, utilities and telcos. Your CCM selection will likely last a long time, so what does that mean when you interpret the 2019 Aspire Leaderboard for CCM?
You need to think of your 2024 business structure.
How does your business grow? Will you have a major acquisition in the next five years? Are you reconfiguring your business model in a way that changes how you communicate with clients? Will you have a flatter organization? Will accounting preferences change in a major way? Will you change your sourcing strategy?
Once you think of these things, you can look at opinions regarding ease of upgrade, ability to move production easily between departments (or outsourcers), the balance between batch, on demand and interactive communications within a portfolio to ensure flexibility as business changes. Quadient has the highest combined score for Batch, Interactive and On-Demand, backing up the strong, but balanced offering we bring to the market. If the finance or operational strategy changes, you may look at vendors who have a variety of ways to adapt their offering to changing buying preferences.
You need to think of your 2024 channel mix.
Will you have more social channels like WeChat, WhatsApp and Messenger? Will you have new smart connected devices? Will you finally shut off that fax channel (probably not, as much as you hate that thing!) Whichever of these things happens, or not, you can be certain that your portfolio of communications will be different in 2024 for certain.
As you envision your 2024 business, you need to ensure that your communication portfolio can deliver. On the 2019 Leaderboard, Quadient has the highest scores for Digital (mobile) communication and Omni-channel orchestration in the market! If you believe you will be communicating with customers more often, and through more channels, you need to look at how CCM vendors are proving innovation in terms of centralizing management and design of these communications.
You need to think of your 2024 CX expectations.
We are living in the “age of the customer,” according to Forrester and others. As customer expectations rise, you need to make sure that your 2024 communication portfolio understands what it is doing at every step of the way. The 2019 Aspire Leaderboard is beginning to measure this, awarding Quadient the highest score for Journey Visualization (with a full 20-point lead over the next leader.)
This is a recognition that context is important for the future. The customers of 2024 will not tolerate separate and disjointed experiences from vendors who are not internally consistent. The customers of 2024 will not expend effort into making things easier for you. They don’t want to do your job.
