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What’s New in Customer Communications Management (CCM)

Posted on July 26, 2022October 19, 2026 by Chris Murphy

By: Chris Murphy, VP of Product Marketing, Smart Communications

An ever-changing digital landscape, increasingly high customer expectations and more are forcing enterprises around the world to rethink how they interact with customers. In highly regulated industries like insurance, financial services and healthcare – where customer interactions can be stressful and/or high-stakes – the experience enterprises deliver at every touch point is more important than ever. In fact, recent benchmark data from Smart Communications revealed that communications are important to 81% of consumers’ overall experience with a company.

So, what does all of this mean for businesses?

It means that as the market has changed and evolved, so too have the requirements and capabilities that business leaders are seeking in their customer communications technology solutions. And, with an increased focus on the end-to-end customer experience, the strategic importance of communications strategy is rising. As a result, enterprises are seeking modern, cloud-based CCM solutions that provide flexibility while increasing productivity, speed, scale and efficiency.

Recent analysis from IDC and Aspire reflect these changing market conditions – outlining where the customer communications landscape is now, and more importantly, where it’s heading. In this post, we dive into our biggest takeaways from these new reports, highlighting:

How (and why) the CCM vendor landscape is evolving
What enterprises should look for in a modern CCM solution
Why Smart Communications is a CCM leader

RELATED READING | Enjoy complimentary access to the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cloud Customer Communications Management Applications 2022 and the Aspire Leaderboard for Customer Communications Management.

The CCM Marketplace is Evolving to a CX-centric Approach … and It’s Supported by Cloud

Marci Maddox, Research Vice President, Digital Experience Strategies at IDC, shared “In 2020, the focus was on establishing remote work, setting up systems in the cloud, and retaining customers. As companies moved into a more stable environment in 2021, the focus on the customer experience began to take hold and customer satisfaction was the most frequently cited top priority driving customer experience initiatives.”

So, with an increasing number of enterprises prioritizing customer experience as a strategic priority, taking a digital-first, cloud-based approach is the only way to meet customer demands both today and in the future. Cloud-based CCM solutions allow for:

Integrations
A complete view of the customer
Speed and efficiency
Omnichannel communications
Business user control
Optimized customer experiences

What’s more, early adopters of digital transformation are already seeing the benefits. The latest IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Customer Communications Management indicated that “organizations cited a 26% improvement in customer satisfaction as a result of embracing digital transformation.”

“Cloud is a strong differentiator for Smart Communications. The company was one of the first in the industry to move toward SaaS and it has embraced a cloud-native, DevOps way of working since the mid-2010s” – Aspire Leaderboard 2022

What Enterprises Should Look for in a CCM Solution

Just like with any technology investment, the best CCM solution depends on an enterprise’s unique challenges and goals. However, we know what is important to customers – and what frustrates them – when they are interacting with a business. For example, recent research revealed customers’ biggest sources of frustration with communications:

Information being provided through the inappropriate channel (61%)
Irrelevant messages (58%)
Frequency of contact being too high (54%)
Poor timing (48%)
Lack of personalization (41%)
Frequency of contact being too low (36%)

Channel preference, message relevancy, frequency and timing are only achievable with cloud-based technology. Simply put, legacy, on-premise tools cannot meet the demands of today’s customers.

It’s key for enterprises to keep in mind that customers are comparing every interaction they have with a brand to their last best digital experience. Whether that’s with their bank or an Uber Eats delivery, the businesses that choose to take an outdated approach to customer communications will unfortunately be left behind.

INTERACTIVE GUIDE: Looking for a checklist for must-have CCM Software Features & Capabilities? Check out The Ultimate Guide to CCM Software.

Smart Communications is a Leader in Cloud-based CCM

Unlike other providers in the space, Smart Communications has been fully committed to a cloud-first CCM approach for years. We have enabled countless enterprises to shift from delivering one-way, transactional communications, to two-way, interactive conversations. Mature cloud offerings like the Conversation Cloud^TM offer innovative technology solutions and facilitate personalized, omnichannel interactions.

For these reasons and more, Smart Communications has been named a leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cloud Customer Communications Management Applications 2022 and Aspire’s SaaS Cloud Customer Communications Management Leaderboard.

It’s clear that the future is cloud-based technology, and we are thrilled to once again be named a market leader best equipped to enable enterprises to meet their customer experience goals via a sophisticated CCM solution. In the Aspire leaderboard in particular, vendor-hosted SaaS is viewed as a pivotal strategy due to the benefits that it provides relative to other types of deployment (i.e., scalability, security, agility, business continuity and more).

Additional benefits of Smart Communications, according to the analysts, include:

Cloud leadership
Fast time-to-value
Robust partner ecosystem
Increasing focus on AI and Machine Learning
Emphasis on the customer experience

As business leaders are challenged with creating exceptional, end-to-end customer experiences having the right CCM solution in place enables businesses to meet the customer needs of today while also laying the foundation for a successful future.

SmartCOMM^TM, part of the Smart Communications Conversation Cloud, is a cloud-based CCM solution that enables enterprises to deliver personalized interactions throughout the entire customer experience – enabling enterprises to create and deliver personalized, contextual and compliant communications across customers’ preferred channels and at scale. Businesses who partner with Smart Communications for CCM realize tremendous benefits, including improved business user efficiency, enhanced customer experiences, reduced costs and more.

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To view the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cloud Customer Communications Management Applications 2022, click here.

To view the Aspire Leaderboard for Customer Communications Management, click here.

More resources include:

Reimagining the Workers’ Compensation Process for Today’s Digital World

Posted on June 20, 2022October 19, 2026 by Smart Communications Team

By: Ruth Fisk, VP Insurance Strategy at Smart Communications

Most insurance professionals don’t just happen into the industry—they’re here because they want to give back, be part of something bigger and contribute to the greater good. But in an industry that’s been around for centuries, creating real change can be challenging.

When it comes to the workers’ compensation process, change has been especially difficult. Strict regulations, manual efforts and a “we’ve always done it this way” mentality are all barriers. But with the advances in cloud technology, insurers now have the necessary resources at their fingertips to create fundamental change.

With a purpose-built conversational platform, a digital-first workers’ compensation process puts the injured worker at the center of every stage of claims management and makes a positive impact on the people it serves.

The modern workers’ compensation service model is built around empowerment, person centricity and empathy—and it’s driven by long-overdue digital transformation.

Setting the New Standard in the Workers Compensation Process

Communications are at the heart of the claims management process, from the first report of injury (FROI) through settlement and closure. All involved parties have to communicate and collaborate to ensure a swift recovery and speedy return to work. This includes the injured worker, the employer representative, the insurer’s case manager and medical officer, not to mention physicians, physical therapists and other medical providers. And, key documentation must also be communicated to regulatory bodies.

By streamlining communications and making it easy and convenient for the entire ecosystem to exchange information, insurers can empower injured workers and help them achieve the best possible life outcomes. At the same time, increasing efficiency with intelligent automation and systems integration helps to minimize financial implications for both the employer and the insurer.

A cloud-based conversational platform keeps the lines of communication open, while transforming processes with automation, form pre-population and omnichannel access for consistency. The modern workers’ compensation process is all about reducing the hassle factor for everyone involved—bringing the ease and convenience we expect in other areas of our life into a stressful situation, to everyone’s benefit.

A More Complex World Demands Simpler Solutions

Our world is changing faster than ever, and complexity will continue to rise. As jobs evolve, so do hazards and exposures that increase the risk of injury. In fact, according to the International Labour Organization, 270 million accidents and 160 million work-related diseases are reported around the world annually, with more than two million lives lost from workplace accidents. In addition to the human cost, the financial cost of workplace accident, injury and death exceeds $1.25 trillion worldwide.

The good news is, that helping an injured employee return to the workplace even just one day earlier can reduce costs significantly while also – most importantly – improving life outcomes. This makes adopting a modern service model and digitally transforming the claims management process critical for insurers, who share the burden of these costs with employers.

Change the Conversation in Workers’ Compensation

Smart Communications enables the top workers’ compensation insurers to embrace change and engage SMARTER across the entire claims management lifecycle. With the Conversation Cloud^TM insurers can turn today’s tedious workers’ compensation process into easy, effortless conversations – streamlining and simplifying the experience from start to finish.

Below are how the key capabilities of the Conversation Cloud empower a reimagined workers’ compensation process:

Collect

Accelerate the claims intake process with dynamic digital forms for initial injury reporting, witness statements and material evidence gathering, and add photos easily to enhance the investigation stage. Prepopulating forms with policy information saves time and effort and omnichannel access lets case managers guide stakeholders to the most appropriate channel while maintaining consistency.

Communicate

Automatically generate and share key documentation to maintain compliance with government regulatory bodies. Examples include an FROI acknowledgment letter, occupational safety review reports, accident summary, medical treatment plan, certificate of capacity and return-to-work authorizations. Making communications more dynamic throughout the claims management process helps to keep the injured worker’s recovery on track and optimize outcomes for everyone.

Collaborate

Successful claims resolution requires collaboration between a wide range of individuals. With the Conversation Cloud, insurers can easily connect the case manager to the injured worker, employer, medical officer, physicians and physical therapists, support groups and anyone else with a vested interest in getting the employee back to work quickly.

Coordinate

Easily orchestrate communications between involved parties with a cloud-based platform powering end-to-end claims management workflows. Create a single source of truth to mitigate version control issues, drive faster resolution and support a speedy recovery.

Integration

To further streamline and simplify case manager workloads, the Conversation Cloud integrates seamlessly with core back-end systems such as Guidewire ClaimCenter, Duck Creek Claims and Sapiens ClaimsPro. Automatic updates enable straight-through processing so insurers can easily determine the best next step at any stage.

Intelligence

Engage with all involved parties by infusing intelligence into every conversation. Take advantage of automation to pre-populate forms and ensure compliance. Turn static, one-way interactions into dynamic, two-way experiences. Personalize at scale and maintain the proper tone to help alleviate anxiety and stress.

Transform the Workers’ Compensation Claims Process

Being injured on the job can be stressful on many levels—physically, emotionally and financially. Piling a whole lot of paperwork on top of that certainly doesn’t help. Anything insurers can do to alleviate stress will also help to facilitate recovery, which is the ultimate goal.

With a modern conversational platform at the core of the workers’ compensation service model, insurers can get back to what they care about most: making a difference, giving back and putting people, not process, at the center.

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To learn more about how Smart Communications supports modernizing the workers’ compensation process, check out The Future of Workers’ Compensation.

Modernizing the Workers’ Compensation Claims Process

Posted on May 12, 2022October 19, 2026 by Smart Communications Team

By: Ruth Fisk, VP Insurance Strategy at Smart Communications

Our world is rapidly changing. Technology advances across industries and all kinds of interactions have elevated the expectations for convenience, immediacy and ease for businesses and individuals, alike. Unfortunately, the typical workers’ compensation claims process is largely manual when it comes to claims communications. The good news? There is an opportunity for insurance companies to improve efficiencies and return-to-work results by adopting a more digital-first approach.

A Proven Approach Ready for a Refresh

Workers’ compensation was first introduced in the late 19^th century during the second wave of the industrial revolution – a time of rapid changes in the technology and social landscapes. A flurry of innovations reshaped the world — the steam engine, the metal detector, seismograph, telephone and the first working automobile. These innovations and others simplified and sped up work, but they also posed a higher risk of accidents and injuries.

In 1871, wanting to win the loyalty of workers, Chancellor Bismarck of Germany issued the Employers’ Liability Law. It provided limited social protections to workers in certain factories, quarries, railroads and mines. He later expanded on these initial protections by establishing the Workers’ Accident Insurance in 1884, creating the first system of workers’ compensation.

Workers’ compensation guidelines and policies continued to evolve as new technologies and innovations were introduced. Often, these developments were created to address new and evolving risks that workers faced. Fast forward to today: while the widespread adoption of new, digital-first consumer technologies continues, workers’ compensation schemes remain complex and highly manual. There is a clear opportunity to modernize the worker’s compensation claims process.

Improving Life Outcomes with SMARTER Conversations

Since innovations and workers’ compensation policies have long developed in tandem, the opportunity to reimagine the approach is appropriate at this time. For insurers, their clients and injured workers, modernizing workers’ compensation claims communications can improve outcomes across the board.

When an employee gets hurt on the job, it has large-scale impacts on the individual, company productivity and even the broader GDP. For everyone involved, it is an emotional and stressful process. By optimizing orchestration, personalization and timing of communications through a unified customer conversations management platform, everyone benefits.

The primary objective of workers’ compensation is to get people back to work and resume productivity as quickly as possible. The Smart Communications Conversation Cloud^TMprovides a seamless approach from policy inquiry, reporting of First Notice of Injury and managing claims to coordinating care and billing communications. By digitizing the effort, insurers can improve the process for everyone. And most importantly, better, more regular communications have been shown to improve life outcomes for the injured worker.

The Conversation Cloud provides a seamless experience for all. It is fully compatible and can be integrated with common core systems such as Guidewire ClaimCenter, Duck Creek Claims and Sapiens ClaimsPro. It is easy and fast to deploy and can quickly and positively impact the process. Instead of manual, siloed communications, Smart Communications unifies them under one solution.

Creating a Workers’ Compensation Claims Process for the Future

From emails and chatbots, to social media platforms and more—there are endless ways to interact with individuals today. Instead of the traditional one-way communications of the past, now case managers have the opportunity to start conversations with injured workers, company representatives and even care providers. By deepening the level of personalization and improving the immediacy of communications, insurers have a powerful opportunity to meet today’s expectations and advance workers’ compensation approaches for everyone.

When communications are conversational, personalized and SMART, everyone is more willing to engage. Think of it as the latest improvement to what has been a revolutionary approach from its earliest days. By transforming the approach to the workers’ compensation claims process, insurance companies have the opportunity to literally change lives.

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Interested in learning more about how modernizing the workers’ compensation claims process will impact the case manager? Download “The Case Manager of Tomorrow” to learn how a cloud-first approach enables case managers to work SMARTER.

Download the white paper now!

New Research Reveals Which Digital Customer Experience Trends to Watch

Posted on May 3, 2022October 19, 2026 by Smart Communications Team

By: Leigh Segall, Chief Strategy Officer at Smart Communications

As customer expectations change faster than ever, it may feel difficult to pin down which key digital customer experience trends should be priorities for businesses. Even in this continuously shifting environment, it’s possible to identify the major forces shaping the customer experience (CX) and establish plans and processes to meet these ever-increasing expectations.

To better understand customers’ changing preferences, Smart Communications recently surveyed business leaders and consumers from around the globe. As we dug into their thinking about communications practices in the financial services, insurance and healthcare industries, interesting patterns began to emerge. In this post, we highlight a few of the key findings, plus how Smart Communications can help enterprises tackle these digital customer experience trends head-on.

Trend #1: Businesses Will Try to Close the Communications Satisfaction Gap

Communications are at the heart of a great digital customer experience. So much so that how enterprises communicate with their customers can determine their level of satisfaction with a business overall. Aside from offering effective products and services, there are few areas of business more essential than customer satisfaction.

The challenge is that across the financial services, insurance and healthcare industries, there’s a disconnect between how well businesses think they communicate versus how customers feel about it. That gap — up to a 20-percentage points difference — represents a big opportunity to rethink customer engagement.

By ensuring communications are timely, personalized and digital-first, businesses can ensure the end-to-end customer experience builds trust and loyalty.

How Smart Communications Can Help

By investing in a technology platform that empowers interactive, two-way conversations, businesses can ensure an exceptional experience across channels and devices. Businesses who operate across geographies and multiple brands can benefit from the Conversation Cloud: the only scalable, pure cloud customer communications management platform. It’s specifically designed to take away the pain of template management while enhancing the ability to collect information, all while making it easy for customers to initiate conversations, regardless of channel.

Trend #2: Businesses Will Take Customer Channel Preferences More Seriously to Avoid Negative Impacts to the Digital Customer Experience

Today, customers are increasingly willing to speak up and share exactly how they want businesses to interact with them. And for enterprises, it’s more important than ever to ensure customers’ preferences are taken into account.

According to our research, 61% of consumers said that information being provided through an inappropriate channel was a major source of frustration. And yet unfortunately, our research suggests that on average, only around half of communications are distributed to customers based on the channel they prefer.

A key digital customer experience trend moving forward will be revamping communications efforts to ensure greater alignment with customer wants and needs. Enterprises must adopt interactive, omnichannel conversations to succeed.

How Smart Communications Can Help

It’s one thing to know how customers want to be communicated with – and quite another to deliver on that – especially as the complexity of communications grows just as new channels continue to proliferate. It’s important to partner with a technology provider with the right solutions and real-world expertise to deliver on the “right channel, right place, right time” promise. Our experience working with the world’s most sophisticated businesses across financial services, insurance and healthcare gives us the necessary resources to provide amazing digital customer experiences via orchestrated, omnichannel interactions at scale.

Trend #3: Businesses Will Continue Migrating to the Cloud

Customer expectations around digital are greater than ever. And while interactions across healthcare, insurance and financial services are very different from impulse buying on Amazon, consumers are comparing every interaction to their last best digital experience.

That’s why it’s more important than ever to have the infrastructure in place, allowing enterprises to compete with companies that deliver incredible digital experiences day-in and day-out. Unfortunately, legacy systems simply aren’t built this way and struggle to keep up with the pace of change.

While not a new trend, leading firms will continue their migration to the cloud. Our research shows that on average, 57% of business’ core systems will be cloud-based within the next 12 months.

How Smart Communications Can Help

We get it – the idea of moving systems that serve as the foundation of your business can be scary but it doesn’t have to be. The benefit of partnering with Smart Communications is that you can quickly go “pure cloud” for your customer conversations – or ease into it over time by starting with our powerful integrations that connect with your legacy systems. The world is moving to cloud – there’s no doubt about that. But, you can control how it happens in your business with tools like Migration Studio. The important thing is to remain focused on the customer – and Smart Communications is the leader in enabling incredible end-to-end customer experiences.

What’s Next?

When change is the only constant, it’s nearly impossible to predict what might come next. But, investing in the customer will always pay dividends. We hope that knowing these digital customer experience trends will help your business achieve greater success today and in the days and months that follow. To learn more about each trend, and how you can prepare for it, download the full report, The State of Customer Conversations.

How to Streamline Health Insurance Policy Renewals

Posted on March 31, 2022October 19, 2026 by Dani Duffy

By: John Zimmerer, VP Healthcare Marketing at Smart Communications

Health payers are always looking for ways to streamline health insurance policy renewals. That’s because the process of renewing a health insurance policy varies widely by line of business. Everything from the set of communications and documents required to how a plan is offered differs from Medicaid to Medicare to ACA-compliant to group plans.

In this post, we look at ways health payers can streamline health insurance policy renewals, saving substantial time and money in the process.

Complying with Rules and Regulations

Some elements of the renewal process are dictated by federal and state governments. For example, in the U.S., Congress, CMS and HHS have a lot of influence on Medicare and ACA-compliant individual plans and supporting materials. And each state puts its own seal, so to speak, on Medicaid offerings. Payers can expend a lot of effort and spend a lot of money each year updating thousands of Medicare and Medicaid templates due to regulatory changes.

Regardless of market or plan type, health insurers need solutions for building and maintaining policy documents and plan communications that:

Enable business users to create and update templates without relying on IT
Leverage reusable content across plan types wherever possible to minimize overhead
Use conditional logic and variables to drive the inclusion of words, paragraphs or sections
Separate brand and style elements from content to make managing multiple brands easier
Include review, commenting and approval capabilities to accelerate workflows
Can evaluate content and recommend changes based on readability, tone and more
Include regression testing to ensure all possible iterations are generated
Provide delivery channel (digital and print) flexibility in the design process
Can orchestrate delivery across channels, including providing fail-over capabilities
Can be deployed entirely in the cloud or in a hybrid model

Speed and agility are essential to health insurers. Getting new plans through regulatory reviews and out to market quickly means processing more renewals, keeping more customers, maintaining underwriting margins and meeting mandated enrollment deadlines. This is especially important for Medicaid and Medicare Advantage plans which have seen enrollments surge in recent years.

In order to operationalize this speed and agility, it’s imperative for insurers to understand their content and where it lives. A visual relationship map of their content can help to accomplish this as well as manage risk. The relationship map helps template administrators understand the shared content objects that make up their templates. When a shared object needs to be updated (e.g., a logo, a signature, a disclaimer, a snippet of text), the changes are automatically applied to all templates that use that object. Using a visual relationship map, template administrators will know in advance which templates will need to be reviewed and approved.

Payers also want to minimize the risks inherent in the renewal process. Missed delivery dates can result in fines and penalties. Errors that creep into the documents can increase print and postage expenses. And enough bad experiences for members can and do translate into lower STAR ratings.

Solutions Trusted by Leading Health Insurers

Our solutions, professional services and partners have already helped dozens of health insurers simplify the task of creating and maintaining the full array of policy renewal assets, including:

Annual Notice of Change (ANOC)
Evidence of Coverage (EOC)
Pre-Enrollment Checklist (PECL)
Notices (e.g., Notice of Privacy Practices, Disenrollment Notices, Non-Renewal Notices)
Provider and Pharmacy Directories
Summary of Benefits and Coverage (SB and SBC)
Summary Plan Description (SPD)

These materials are often based on model documents for each plan type. Insurers need a solution that can import model documents in Microsoft Word or PDF to use as a starting point.

Insurers often need to support multiple brands. Modern customer communications management (CCM) solutions employ a layered model that separates content from styling and branding and maximizes the use of reusable objects. This allows the same content to be created once then used across multiple plan documents. This also simplifies translation efforts and minimizes the effort to comply with accessibility standards.

Plan documents frequently need to go through multiple levels of internal and external reviews. Modern CCM solutions incorporate workflow functionality that can bring internal and external stakeholders together to review, comment on and quickly revise plan documents to get them to market quickly.

Streamline Health Insurance Policy Renewals

Smart Communications has helped to streamline health insurance policy renewals for leading insurers that rely on its ISO-certified and HIPAA-compliant Conversation Cloud platform. We have helped to increase their efficiency as much as 80% and lower the cost to produce renewal-related materials by 50% on average.

Investing in Empathy: 4 Ways Financial Services Firms Are Improving Customer Experience

Posted on March 29, 2022October 19, 2026 by Smart Communications Team

By: Marc DeCastro, Research Director, Consumer Banking, IDC, Guest Blogger

If you ask most financial services executives if being empathetic is part of their collective DNA, most will surely tell you that is the case. And no doubt they are sincere. However, asking an executive if they run an empathetic organization is akin to asking someone if they are a nice person. Most people feel they are nice but may not fully understand what it really means to be nice.

The same is true with empathy in financial services. Delivering an empathetic financial experience involves keeping the customer at the center while engaging the customer using both available data and technology on their channel of choice. Data is really the key here when trying to deliver empathy in financial services, as data provides the insight required before, during, and even after the engagement has happened.

As consumers shift to digital-first interactions, and in some cases digital-only engagement, with their financial institutions, this empathetic experience must be able to be delivered seamlessly across both digital and physical channels. If your customers find that they have a better experience when dealing with a bank employee on a particular issue or question, they will likely continue to use that channel while avoiding digital options. This is probably not what most institutions want; they want to be able to deliver the best experience possible on the channel of preference and deliver this at scale.

An example of this might be a customer who asks a question about a new product or feature using SMS text messaging. Engaging with that customer across SMS might make sense up to a certain point. However, the customer may eventually need to be directed to a website, mobile app, or bank employee if the conversation becomes too complex.

Delivering this empathetic experience boils down to two main themes. First, provide predictable communications that are personalized and are contextually aware of current and previous engagements. Communication is at the foundation of every interaction and engagement during all steps of the customer’s financial journey. Allow customers the flexibility of choosing their channel, then provide a continual flow of conversations without the need for customers to repeat information. These communications need to be capable of producing results in real time, both during customer acquisition and account servicing.

The second theme is about loyalty and building lifetime value. Achieving this requires the financial institution to focus less on pushing a transaction through from point A to point B and focus more on providing more personalized experiences and advice using contextual guidance provided by the customer and obtained through existing data points. Loyalty is something that is built over time as the institution shows not only that they care about the financial needs of their customer, but that they are able to guide them to either a different service or a resolution to an issue that makes sense and provides real-time actionable advice, like “Click here to accept” or “Select a time for one of our employees to reach out to you.”

Where to Invest in Customer Experience

Improving customer experience is a top priority for financial services executives. In fact, IDC surveyed 116 financial service executives in Feb 2021 and the top three priorities were revenue growth, improving customer experience and satisfaction, and improving operational efficiencies. There are four areas of focus that should drive investment in technology solutions to help improve customer experience. They are:

Customer Intelligence. Investments here need to be able to capture as many points of data as possible, both data generated within the institution as well as third-party data sources. In order to build or provide solutions that can personalize experiences based on the context of the engagement, there must be a foundational layer of intelligence to draw from, otherwise personalization becomes difficult, if not impossible. With the right amount of customer intelligence, it leads itself nicely into the next strategic initiative, product innovation.
Product Innovation. Innovation on traditional bank products and services can often be more about policy, and less about technology. Instant access to deposited checks as opposed to putting legal, but inconvenient holds for customers is simply a decision in policy based on risk of fraud. However, other innovation can leverage modern technology that provides some level of innovation. For example, a small but growing number of institutions have provided their deposit account customers with access to their direct deposit payroll a few days prior to the funds being deposited into the account. Seeing repetitive deposits of a certain amount and cadence can provide a level of comfort that the funds will be there on a specific day, thus minimizing the risk to the institution. The innovation here is in the analytics that identifies the customers that would benefit from such a product and determines when and where this makes sense.
Orchestrating Customer Intelligence and Product Innovation. Now that customer intelligence and data collection have been prioritized and innovation solutions are being developed, it will be important to combine the two into tangible customer improvements. Solutions like virtual agents, next-generation chatbots, and true omnichannel engagement can result from successful implementations of new products built on top of modern architecture. Having an agile environment in place will continue to foster innovation and improve overall efficiencies.
Growing Role of AI. AI solutions in financial services have begun to evolve way beyond robotic process automation and have reached the level of providing true value back to the customer and the financial institution’s employees. AI can be used to monitor text, voice, sentiment, and emotion in a way that can deliver that empathetic experience many individuals are looking for from their institution. AI solutions will not only engage with the customer directly but can identify and reimagine legacy workflows and create improved processes.

Providing a truly hyper-personalized and empathetic banking experience will require that we truly put the customer in the center of everything and view products and services not through the lens of the financial institution, but rather through the lens of the customer. To build trust, we need to think less about providing financial transactions and more about helping customers achieve their financial goals. We also need to provide employees with the same level of modernized solutions and interfaces that we provide to customers, which will create that common and fulfilling experiences.

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Interested in learning more about empathy in financial services? Download this insightful, custom POV to understand how to adjust your technology strategy to meet the changing digital-first expectations of your customers. Or, check out this infographic that explores 4 Keys to Delivering Empathy in Financial Services.

Omnichannel vs. Multichannel Experiences: Who is at the Center of Your Universe?

Posted on March 1, 2022October 19, 2026 by Chris Murphy

By: Chris Murphy, VP Product Marketing at Smart Communications

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published a crazy theory he had been working on for over 30 years. He proposed that the Sun was the center of the universe. Why was this considered crazy? Because the prevailing wisdom of the day was that it was the Earth, not the Sun, that everything revolved around. And while that difference may not seem massive to us today, at the time, the “Copernican Revolution” propelled scientific thinking forward, influencing thinkers from Galileo to Isaac Newton.

At this point, it’s fair to ask – what does this have to do with omnichannel vs. multichannel customer experiences? As the title of this post suggests, it’s really all about deciding at a strategic level: who is at the center of your universe? You, or your customer?

This post will examine the key differences between omnichannel and multichannel customer conversations, revealing the best strategy for leading enterprises going forward. And if you find this discussion interesting, you’ll want to review our ebook, The Omnichannel Advantage, which provides even more insights.

Because every customer interaction is an opportunity to shape their overall experience, there is more pressure on enterprises than ever to orchestrate interactive, two-way conversations. As we review omnichannel vs. multichannel experiences below, you will uncover the benefits of omnichannel conversations and why this approach delivers more engaging, personalized customer interactions.

Multichannel Approach: Your Business at the Center

Just as with thinking that everything revolved around the Earth, a multichannel customer communications strategy starts with a somewhat business-first (opposed to customer-first) approach. In most instances, a business has something it wants or needs to communicate out to customers, whether that’s marketing messages, transactional notifications or responses to individual customer queries.

It’s pretty simple and straightforward. Messages are distributed out by the company, and customers separately reach out with questions. Unfortunately, both are one-way streets and the customer is caught watching from the sidelines. This approach also assumes that customers fall neatly into a single channel – whether that’s “email customers” or “print customers.” Unfortunately, that’s not the reality we live in. Today’s customer moves between channels throughout their journey with a company and expects interactions to carry over seamlessly from one channel to the next.

In a multichannel approach, there are disadvantages that affect some of the most important aspects of the customer experience. When the business is at the center, communications often are missing personalization, mostly because the business may lack the data and technology infrastructure needed to execute on individualized interactions.

Ultimately – and perhaps most importantly – a multichannel communications strategy severely limits how and where a customer can interact with a business. This approach makes it very difficult for customers to initiate conversations from their preferred channels because the business is at the center.

Omnichannel Approach: The Customer is the Center

An omnichannel customer communications strategy represents a paradigm shift as big as the one Copernicus set forth. While every business claims the customer is the center of all they do, the ones who organize their entire communications processes and infrastructure around the customer prove that they mean it.

With an omnichannel approach, every touchpoint leads to a carefully curated experience. Every interaction has the potential to be a two-way conversation, and each touchpoint builds off the previous one. Omnichannel conversations provide the right information at the right time in ways that are easy to understand and act upon.

And while there are still many channels in an omnichannel approach, they’re all connected, scalable and centrally managed – and customers can move effortlessly from one channel to another. In a word, communications are orchestrated across all these channels.

In a multichannel approach, the goal is often to simply add more channels. In reality, however, it’s much more important to deliver a quality and connected experience across channels. So, it’s about how well the channels work together, not necessarily how many there are. With a powerful customer conversations platform, enterprises ensure consistent, compliant communications across brands and geographies on whichever channel the customer prefers.

And when it comes to personalization, omnichannel communications outshine multichannel here yet again. Because the customer is in the center, everything is designed around them. With the right technology partner, it’s easy to collect information from the customer in an engaging way that can then be used to shape the rest of their communications experience. When they express a channel preference for specific communication types, it’s easy to put that into practice. If it changes, it’s easy to update. Omnichannel conversations offer the possibility for truly personalized interactions that are contextually based on every other step they’ve taken – across channels and devices.

It’s important to keep in mind that as a customer moves from channel to channel, context is key. Understanding the context of specific interactions is important and further emphasizes the importance of personalization. Getting context right lends itself to ensuring a company is choosing the right content – the right tone, the right language, the right sentiment – to deliver an amazing customer experience.

An omnichannel approach also helps strike the balance between managing customer support across time zones and allowing for self-service options. As chatbots and other interactive technologies become more sophisticated, a strong technology foundation will be more important than ever to ensure customer needs and expectations are met.

Dive Deeper

It’s clear that omnichannel conversations are the path forward for leading companies, but getting it right requires the proper technology. For a more in-depth look at omnichannel vs. multichannel experiences, strategies and information on how Smart Communications can help, we invite you to download our ebook, The Omnichannel Advantage.

For Life Insurers, A Scalable Approach to New Business

Posted on February 8, 2022October 19, 2026 by Smart Communications Team

By: Ruth Fisk, VP Insurance Marketing at Smart Communications

The life insurance industry as a whole has been slow to adopt new technologies, but recently has had to place more of a focus – and investment – on digital-first customer experiences. The global pandemic forced many life insurers to condense multiyear digital transformation strategies into a short timeframe. The industry is now at an inflection point where they should refine and tweak the processes that were implemented quickly to ensure they are secure and built to scale, as well as identify new ways to innovate for the future.

Today, many customers not only expect a more fluid experience, but also the ability to purchase multiple products at once, including life insurance, long-term care coverage and/or disability coverage, for example. With innovative products emerging to reflect shifting customer behaviors, there is no better time for life insurers to rethink processes surrounding new business.

The siloed technology stacks of the past lead to internal inefficiencies, compliance risks and an inconsistent, disjointed customer experience. However, every interaction an insurer has with a customer is an opportunity to shape the overall experience – and the multiple touchpoints throughout acquisition, onboarding and policy issuance must be automated and optimized.

In the infographic below, we provide life insurers with one view of all of the unique interactions that span across the entire new business process. We also highlight how a modern customer communications platform like the Smart Communications Conversation Cloud^TM enables life insurers to seamlessly work throughout the new business process.

What Is ESG and Why It May Be the Next Big Thing in Financial Client Reporting

Posted on February 1, 2022October 19, 2026 by Smart Communications Team

Historically, most investment strategies involve choosing assets and asset classes based on a finely tuned balance of expected net return and risk tolerance. And while that might still be true for many, a rapidly growing segment of investors are selecting investments with a different lens: Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors.

How significant is this trend? According to Bloomberg, ESG assets “are on track to exceed $50 trillion by 2025, representing more than a third of the projected $140.5 trillion in total global assets under management.”

With such a massive amount of assets at stake, leading wealth management and private banking firms are racing to not only offer more ESG investment options but also to improve how ESG data is included in client reporting and other customer communications. In this post, we’ll explore what ESG is, why it’s growing in popularity and how to adapt reporting to give clients the ESG investment reporting information they crave.

What is ESG?

Environmental, Social and (Corporate) Governance (ESG) is the standard to which a corporation holds itself to sensitive topics, such as:

Responding to climate change
How the company (and its suppliers) treat employees
The racial and gender diversity of a company’s leadership
Data privacy and cybersecurity

And while that may sound subjective, ESG is all about data and measurement. Though not every area of ESG investment reporting is equally mature and data-driven, ESG is fundamentally about accountability and achieving concrete goals. This is now viewed by many in contrast with the traditional concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), which has been more focused on optics (what can a company do to appear like a good corporate citizen) versus what its actual impacts are, backed by quantifiable metrics.

ESG is not a new trend but has certainly risen in popularity in the past decade. In 2019, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) revealed that 93% of the world’s largest companies by revenue already report on their ESG performance.

Adeline Diab, the Head of ESG and Thematic Investing EMEA & APAC at Bloomberg Intelligence, summarizes why ESG is so important in today’s business environment: “The pandemic and the global race to net-zero carbon emissions have put ESG criteria into orbit – from niche to mainstream to mandatory. ESG is fundamentally reshaping the financial industry, becoming part of financial reporting. This is in part due to mounting scrutiny from regulators, markets being more sensitive to ESG-related news and asset owners appointing managers on the basis of ESG across asset classes.

“ESG is fundamentally reshaping the financial industry, becoming part of financial reporting.”

What is ESG Investing?

As we highlight in our recent ebook, “5 Trends Shaping the Next Generation of Client Reporting,” investors globally are increasingly likely to invest according to their values. This style of investing has been known as Socially Responsible Investing (SRI). Especially prevalent among younger generations who will become the beneficiaries of the $68 trillion global wealth transfer over the next 25 years, investors want to “put their money where their ‘heart’ is.”

Social issues such as climate change and racial justice are causing investors to think critically about the kind of companies they want to have in their portfolios. According to Accenture, “Generation Z and Millennial investors were more than twice as likely as Baby Boomers to have asked their advisor about ESG investments (80% and 63%, respectively, versus 27%).

And this trend isn’t just about rosy altruism. Increasingly, investors believe that companies who score highly in ESG criteria perform better in the market, especially over the long term. As investors weigh possible options for investing, they’re asking tough, ESG-related questions like:

Enterprises have sensitive data stored around the world and with third parties. How well can they defend against cyber-attacks, and what might the financial fallout be if they aren’t well prepared?
Many utilities and industrial companies need plentiful water at adequate temperatures to operate. How robust are their plans to confront possible water scarcity?
Many consumer-facing organizations have suppliers in countries with weak labor laws. Can they prevent human rights violations and maintain a stable workforce that meets consumer demands?
Most large enterprises serve diverse markets. Do senior leadership and the board of directors have the diverse backgrounds and skills to understand and meet the needs of their customers?

The Challenge: ESG Data Is in a State of Flux

So, if more people want to invest in firms with good ESG ratings, and more companies are sharing their ESG data, it should be easy for wealth managers to advise their clients on where they should invest, right? Wrong, for one big reason: as of today, there is no single, universally agreed-upon standard for ESG ratings. In fact, research from ERM Group suggests that there are “600+ ESG ratings and rankings existing globally as of 2018,” a number that has only increased since then.

While many of the largest global enterprises have chosen GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) as their reporting standards, there’s not 100% agreement, and until that time, it’s important to have flexibility in which data sources you pull from.

How to Incorporate ESG Data in Client Reporting

Despite the complexities around ESG ratings, with the right solution, it can be relatively simple to give clients the ESG insights they increasingly desire. And while this may seem to be a “nice to have” today, it soon will be table stakes for every investment performance report. Here’s what to look for in a client reporting solution that will meet your ESG reporting needs both now and in the future.

Leverage open APIs to pull in the best ESG data sets as the category evolves. As mentioned previously, the ESG data landscape is rapidly evolving. That’s why it’s important to choose a client reporting solution that can pull in a variety of data sets via open APIs. This way, you can give clients whichever ESG data set is considered “best” or “optimal” at a given moment in time – and easily switch or offer multiple options. Leveraging API calls also ensures that the ESG data a client sees in their report is as up to date as possible, as it can be refreshed whenever the client logs in or reloads their reports. Save yourself massive headaches down the road by building in flexibility from the start. Your future self will thank you!

Infinitely customizable ESG reporting based on client preferences. Even within ESG ratings themselves, there are so many ways to slice and dice the data depending on what the client cares about most. Are they interested in a company’s overall ESG impact? Or just their environmental score? Or diversity and inclusion? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to sort and filter ESG data in this way? Choose a client reporting solution that allows clients to build customizable reports that show the exact view of data they’re most interested in. Bonus points go to solutions that have unlimited dashboards, pre-built modules and the ability for advisors to build reports on behalf of their clients in minutes. Because every client will have different wants and needs, the ability to infinitely customize his or her overall report, including ESG elements, will go a long way toward improving client satisfaction and loyalty (and save advisors the pain of manually producing bespoke reports).

Think holistically and view ESG reporting as part of a scalable communication platform. While it may be tempting to buy a one-off ESG ratings solution, it’s a good idea to take a step back and think strategically. As our work with all of the G15 has revealed to us, having a scalable customer conversations management platform in place first provides a sturdy foundation for client reporting solutions to build upon and integrate into your tech stack. This way, you can pull any ESG reporting elements you (or the client) have created and insert them into dynamic communication templates. For example, with very little effort on your part, you can send each customer a personalized ESG newsletter showing the same views they created in their custom reporting.

Want to learn more about how next-generation financial reporting solutions can transform your business? First, check out our digital-first solution for Client Reporting, which enables wealth management and private banking firms to eliminate time-consuming processes around creating bespoke reports. Or, contact us if you’d like to see how Smart Communications can support your ESG reporting strategy.

Financial Client Reporting Goes Digital: 5 Key Trends to Watch

Posted on January 27, 2022October 19, 2026 by Smart Communications Team

For too long, bespoke financial client reporting has been seen as a necessary burden rather than a strategic communications avenue for wealth management, private banking and other institutions working with high net worth and corporate clients. That’s because these investor client reports have been unengaging, long and static– unforgivable transgressions in the modern, digital era of visually appealing and interactive customer experiences. Moreover, processes around creating compliant custom reports is often tedious, taking firms sometimes days or weeks to produce.

But that’s all changing, and changing fast. Firms are now investing in improving their financial client reporting communications as a crucial customer engagement strategy, taking advantage of the power of new technology to deliver highly personalized, customizable, digital-first experiences at scale, while reducing manual work and accelerating turnaround time.

We take a deep dive into the key trends, challenges, and opportunities facing wealth management and private banking leaders today in our new eBook, 5 Trends Shaping the Next Generation of Client Reporting. Below is a preview of a few key highlights we found in our research into this often-overlooked area of financial services customer communications.

$68 trillion in wealth will change hands between various generations over the next 25 years, according to Accenture and other sources. Some call it the “generational shift in wealth,” others the “Great Wealth Transfer.” The GenX children of Baby Boomers – along with their children – are finding themselves responsible for estate planning and looking for different ways to manage their money, and this shift has only accelerated during the pandemic. Data shows that these younger generations of investors have higher expectations around personalization and digital self-service.Wealth management firms that have been dragging their feet on digital transformation may lose these clients to providers that offer a digital-first financial client reporting experience. Smart firms will implement better client-facing technology now to secure the loyalty of those who will receive that wealth well before they see a penny of it.

61% of very-high-net-worth investors and 80% of millennials are willing to pay more for experience-related features, according to the EY 2021 Global Wealth Research Report. In an era when many incumbent banks and wealth advisory firms face competitive pressure from digital disruptors and challenger banks, this stat is like a breath of fresh air. Though much has changed in the financial services industry, some truths have endured: if clients receive personalized services that are of value to them, they are more likely to stay loyal and even pay more for these services, rather than looking for a DIY approach with robo-advisors.The key is understanding both parts – which “experience-related features” are valuable, and to whom – to ensure the right product / market fit. Financial client reporting is a good example of a client experience that has the potential to either help clients see the value a firm provides, or leave them wondering, “what am I paying for, exactly?”

82% of wealth management businesses plan to increase spending on client-facing technologies in the next two years, and 75% plan to invest in client reporting, according to Gartner’s industry forecast. Improving digital experiences can feel like an arms race, with financial services companies pouring money into IT teams and fintechs. Which firm has the best app? Which firm has the best-looking reports? To stay competitive, wealth management and private banking firms of all sizes need to invest in technologies that improve the client experience. Because if they don’t, their competitors surely will.

70% of households with a net worth of $500,000 or more, headed by a person under 45, have an investing style that is either strongly or mostly self-directed. It’s not just who has the wealth that’s changing – it’s how they invest, too. As outlined in this report from the Wall Street Journal: “Wealthy young investors don’t see much use for the wealth management firms their parents rely on. They would rather pick their own stocks or plow their money into crypto.”That’s why Gartner says wealth firms are investing in technologies that move beyond static reports into interactive, digital experiences, allowing clients and advisors to slice and dice data to build personalized reports that meet their needs and interests.As with any other trend, this stat reveals both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is – if advisors don’t adapt and modernize key areas of their practice, like financial client reporting, the gap will continue to widen. However, if firms provide clients (and advisors) with digital tools that put them more in control of their own destiny (but within the walls of a firm), it may be possible to increase wallet share.

57% of wealth management firms would continue to use paper communications for ultra HNWI segments, Accenture reports. While this stat seems to contradict everything we’ve looked at so far, it’s actually not that surprising. And it underscores an important truth about how financial services is evolving: there is no one-size fits all approach. The key takeaway? It’s important to look at delivering consistent financial client reporting that supports every channel, instead of looking at digital and traditional batch print document output as two separate disconnected channels. It means letting the customer “choose their own adventure” in a personalized way. That’s why companies need to invest in a customer conversations management platform that is not only future-leaning, but also “backwards compatible” with paper and traditional PDFs.

Want to discover more insights on how to get ahead in wealth management and private banking? Download our new eBook today or learn more about Client Reporting from Smart Communications.

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