MHC INTERVIEW
From Cobble to Cohesion: Modernizing the Customer Communications Operating Model
MHC Host
Sharon Jones Malloch, Head of Content Marketing at MHC
Guests
Kemal Carr, President, Madison Advisors
Rich Huff, Senior Analyst, Madison Advisors
August 22nd, 2025
Most organizations didn’t design their customer communications environment all at once. It evolved. New channels were added. Legacy systems were extended. Outsourcing decisions were layered on top. Over time, what emerges is often a patchwork—functional, but fragmented.
As digital expectations rise and AI capabilities accelerate, that “cobbled together” model is hard to sustain. Customer preferences shift. Security concerns increase. Regulatory requirements tighten. And suddenly, communication infrastructure becomes a strategic issue—not just an operational one.
In this Expert Insights session, Kemal Carr, President of Madison Advisors, and Senior Analyst Rich Huff share insights drawn from decades of experience advising enterprises, print service providers, and technology firms. They explain why modernizing communications isn’t just about adopting new tools—it’s about rethinking the operating model behind them.
From in-house vs. outsourced strategies to AI-augmented CCM platforms, the discussion focuses on how leaders can move from fragmented systems to a cohesive, future-ready communications framework.
In this video, you’ll learn:
- Why many communication environments become “cobbled together” over time
- How to evaluate in-house vs. outsourced output strategies
- Where AI is meaningfully improving customer communications
- Why customer preference data is critical—but often underdeveloped
- How to build a target operating model that supports long-term agility
Key Takeaways
- Communication infrastructure often evolves reactively rather than strategically.
- Optimizing one process without reviewing the full workflow can create new bottlenecks.
- AI can improve personalization and efficiency—but only with the right data foundation.
- Security and business continuity concerns are reshaping outsourcing decisions.
- A clear target operating model helps align technology, workflow, and customer experience goals.
Meet the Host and Guests
HOST
Sharon Jones Malloch
MHC Head of Content Marketing
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Sharon leads content marketing at MHC, overseeing strategies that fuel sales and demand generation. With more than a decade of experience in customer communications, Sharon brings deep insight into customer pain points, industry trends, and the critical role of solutions in managing regulatory communications. Before joining MHC, she honed her marketing expertise at Doxim, Messagepoint, and OpenText.
GUEST
Kemal Carr
President, Madison Advisors
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Under Kemal Carr’s direction, Madison Advisors has established a market niche as an independent analyst & market research firm that addresses the needs of the electronic and print customer communications Management (CCM) marketplace.
In 2010 Carr received the Xplorer of the Year award from Xplor International at its Global Conference. The award was in recognition of Carr’s “volunteer service to the Association, dedication to the Xplor mission and promotion of the interests of the electronic document systems industry at large.”
GUEST
Rich Huff
Senior Analyst, Madison Advisors
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Richard Huff provides extensive experience in managing market and product research to offer strategic advice on best practices and technology recommendations for printing/mailing operations. His experience includes assisting clients with enterprise document strategies, product selection and market initiatives.
An established industry expert, Rich has authored articles for publications that include Document Strategy, Digital Publishing Solutions and Xplor publications.
Want to Read Instead of Watching the Video?
Below is the complete transcript from this Expert Insights session. Use the accordion sections to expand and explore the discussion in detail.
Introduction
Sharon: Welcome to another episode of Expert Insights, where experts in customer communications share their thoughts about industry trends and where things are going.
Today, I’m joined by Kemal Carr, the President of Madison Advisors. And Richard Huff, Madison’s Senior Analyst, and they have insights drawn from a rich history in the CCM space, rooted in print, but of course evolving to help clients navigate today’s rapidly changing digitizing environment. So welcome to you both.
Rich: Thank you. Good morning.
Kemal: Good morning.
Q1: Can you tell us about Madison Advisors and the clients you serve today?
Sharon: I’m keen to hear your perspective, because I know that you’ve been in this space for quite some time. Kemal, why don’t you start by giving us some context about your company’s journey, how it started, grew and and then who you served.
Kemal: Thanks, Sharon. We started 25 years ago this September and really our focus was helping firms with their customer communications— from the receipt of data and down through.
When we started, the only channel available was print. Now we spend a lot more time on e-delivery and electronic channels.
Today, we look at our customer segments in three specific areas.
- One is enterprise folks, the big firms that have a lot of customers, so large banks, large insurance firms, financial services, healthcare.
- There’s service firms we work with to help them with output strategies.
- There’s the folks that decide to outsource that work (to) print service providers (that’s) another segment of ours. So we help to marry them to those print service providers.
Rich spends a lot of time researching those technologies to understand what’s a good fit for the client requirements, which I think is a key differentiator in what we do.
Q2: How do you help organizations evaluate and plan their customer communications strategy?
Sharon: I know you have a unique way of understanding your client’s business and helping them map out those requirements. Maybe you can tell us about your approach.
Kemal: Sure. We have a unique process, standardized over our 25 years, for capturing requirements. We capture requirements from the line of business, what (are) the communication needs. We use that same process to evaluate the print server providers.
We’re looking at those operations through the same lens, capturing the same data and then scoring that data. So we have a very good way of comparing in house versus out of house. Using the requirements and the assessments we’ve done, we can quickly map good fits for the enterprise folks who want to move this work out of house. We can help them develop a target operating model, the partner selection for outsourcing, or it might be that they need technology. Might be workflow, might be composition, might be print management because of Rich’s research, the research we do into those technologies, we have a deep understanding of those services or those technologies. We can quickly map those requirements to those (client) capabilities.
And then we help them develop a road map getting them from where they are today to where they want to be in that target operating model.
Q3: Could you tell us about how you've helped clients respond to breaches in terms of "not having all their eggs in one basket?"
Sharon: We talked earlier You were commenting about how it’s really not going away. Things are changing, but it’s around for the long haul.
You were also talking about, how there’s been some breaches and how you’ve helped clients respond to those breaches in terms of not having “all their eggs in one basket”. Maybe you could comment on that as well.
Kemal: Certainly. When we started, print was the only channel. We started capturing and researching what we called print suppression at the time in 2008, when people started to really move away from paper to electronic.
That’s really when things started to take off. Now it’s leveled off over time. The push now is for digital channels and there’s a digital-first perspective when people build out their strategies. But the challenge can be: if you move to a digital world without the right strategy, you end up bolting on bad solutions on a system that doesn’t support it.
That what we’ve seen (around) some of the recent cyber breaches in the market, there’s an anxiety over moving work out of house. So we’ve seen a lot of firms wanting to maintain composition and systems-work in house.
And then (they) just send print ready files to a service provider such that if that service provider is is breached, or has an event, they can redirect those files to to another provider.
Sharon: OK. That’s a model that you’re seeing quite a bit.
Kemal: I would say in the last year we’ve had several inquiries around firms having two print service providers, (as a backup) for the cyber scenario. We’ve seen this in the market over the last year or so. There’s a lot of anxiety over that.
Q4: What is the biggest priority organizations should focus on today?
Sharon: Richard, I know in terms of the technology, its application, and where it’s going, you’ve got a deep knowledge of that. Maybe you could build on this conversation in terms of, if you had to say to clients ‘here’s the one thing you really need to focus on today” what would that be?
Rich: Absolutely. Thank you. The today’s market, I think what businesses need to focus on is their customers experience. Now more than ever it’s so easy to move away from a provider that you’ve been with (even in banking and insurance). It’s quick to find someone new and just switch. But the cost of getting a new customer is so high compared to the cost of maintaining a customer you already have. So, you need to make sure that the customer experience is as seamless as possible.
Rich: And right now, the driver for that is AI. We see artificial intelligence being used in software systems all across the board and especially with customer communications.
AI helps make the communications much more readable. It can put it into the language that the customer wants. It can direct it to the output channel the customer wants. It it does this very quickly and with all the capabilities that AI provides, it’s vital that organizations take the opportunity now to reevaluate and improve the customer experience.
Q5: How are AI and emerging technologies changing customer communications?
Sharon: In terms of next steps regarding AI, I know you published an excellent research report recently on AI-augmented CCM.
Rich: Yes, earlier this year, we conducted research. We typically reach out to the vendors in a particular technology segment and invite them to participate.
Rich: So we collected a lot of data from a number of vendors whose next generation CCM platforms incorporate AI and leverage that technology to allow their customers to create highly personalized customer communications. So our report which is “AI-augmented CCM solutions” was published earlier this year and it’s available. You can check it out on our website.
Q6: What advice would you give to leaders regarding AI-augmented CCM?
Sharon: I know MHC is highlighted in that “AI-Augmented CCM” report. It’s got some really great insights on where things are going. Some of the answers to this question is (found) in that report, but maybe you can summarize for us what advice would you give to leaders regarding AI-augmented CCM?
Rich: Business leaders need to take a good look at both their internal processes as well as their customer communications processes and find ways to streamline those. And wherever possible, take advantage of the AI technology to do so.
Q7: Any final comments to listeners about priroty next steps?
Kemal: Yes, we still see many cobbled-together solutions, particularly where organizations rely on legacy administrative systems such as old insurance or claims processing platforms. In many cases, companies try to bolt an e-delivery solution onto the back end, but that approach rarely works well.
Our role is to step back and take a broader view—understanding their goals and defining their desired future state. From there, we assess their existing technology alongside what’s currently available in the market and develop a best-fit plan. Sometimes that means making significant changes to their systems, which is often the most challenging part.
I was recently speaking with another market analyst about how “customer preference” has become a major buzzword—especially when paired with AI to enhance the customer experience. However, many firms pursuing this strategy lack reliable customer preference data or don’t have systems in place to manage it effectively.
Taking a holistic view of their objectives and infrastructure ultimately creates a real advantage. It allows organizations to implement solutions that truly align with their needs and long-term requirements.
Sharon: So it’s not just modernizing their data and their workflows, it’s looking at how they can modernize and then get AI ready, would you say?
Kemal: Yes, I think a good example we use is the physical manufacturing process. You can’t optimize any one process in that workflow because you could optimize printing but then you suboptimize the entire process. This happends because you’ve got all the print done, but then it sits and waits for an inserter in the physical world. So you’re going to have to look at the whole process together if you’re going to look at optimization the whole.
Closing
Sharon: Thank you both, Kemal and Richard, for your expert insights today. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you.
I want to encourage listeners to reach out to any one of us on LinkedIn. So you can continue this conversation with us about having a plan. Making your communication workflows and data AI ready and future ready. So, thank you both again and I wish you all a great day.
Kemal: Thank you for having us.
Rich: Thank you. Same to you.