Document Strategy Forum (DSF) is No More: What its Demise Reveals About the Future of Customer Communications November 19, 2024

The Demise of DSF

Last week, we learned that the organisers of Document Strategy Forum (DSF), a long-standing conference dedicated to the Customer Communications Management (CCM) industry, have decided to throw in the towel. While I find this sad news, having always enjoyed the conference, I believe its demise is the inevitable result of an industry transforming into something else – what I often describe as a subset of the Customer Experience Management (CXM) industry. DSF ultimately couldn’t adapt to this evolution or find its place in this new world. To understand DSF’s diminishing relevance, we must examine the key macrotrends driving CCM’s metamorphosis.

While there are several trends going on, including declines in trade show attendance, digital transformation is the most significant one to highlight. Digital transformation has had a tremendous effect on critical communication production. The key challenge it presents – and the opportunity it offers – is that the transformation of compliance communications converts them from the static end-point of a customer’s journey into digital, dynamic mid-points. Managing these additional digital interactions presents a complex problem. For industry outsiders, this might not sound significant, but shifting to real-time engagement in a world based on asynchronous and highly structured communication has far-reaching ramifications. Simply put, while posting a digital version of a transactional document on a secure portal is straightforward, driving customers to that portal is anything but.

In most markets and industries, you first need opt-in permission, and this requires you to leverage digital engagement technology (typically found in the MarTech stack). Next comes the ongoing challenge of driving customers to the portal, which demands both the proper technology and a savvy communication strategy. What message should you send? To whom? When? Through which channel? Most importantly, how can you engage customers without frustrating them or increasing friction? These concerns typically fall outside the scope (or interest) of IT, which is why CCM management has been shifting to line-of-business, marketing, or CX departments. These teams work more closely with customers, so they are in a better position to understand their evolving needs, and they have a more naturally vested interest in creating the kind of meaningful personalised engagement that drives business growth.

Managing digital customer communications by marketing and LOB

The trend to LOB/marketing raises two major questions for enterprises. What technology should you use to manage these digital interactions, and how can you manage them in a way that has the best chance fuel your organisation’s success?

From a technical perspective, traditional CCM offerings weren’t designed to manage digital interactions. Even today, they struggle to match proper MarTech systems. Conversely, while MarTech/CX engagement systems excel at fostering digital engagement, they often dramatically fail when they’re used to generate compliance communications, particularly in highly regulated environments with complex omni-channel distribution needs. (And yes, we’ve witnessed examples!) Content management, approval, and tracking requirements differ significantly between transactional and promotional communications.

While MarTech and CCM remain in separate worlds (from an enterprise IT perspective), modern communications management is clearly shifting organisational functions closer to the customer. This often involves marketing, but not in the traditional sense. Traditional marketers focus on acquisition and retention. What we’re seeing is marketing transformation, or more broadly, ‘digital change agents’ tasked with fostering greater agility, faster time-to-revenue, and citizen development capabilities within their organisations. In cases like this, CCM becomes just one component, typically alongside core system modernisation or CRM implementations.

We’re also increasingly see demand for communication strategies to be tailored to specific business processes – Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti Money Laundering (AML), account opening, quotation, or onboarding/enrolment. In all these cases, MarTech and CCM technologies must work in concert to achieve optimal transformation. With transactional communications becoming digital mid-points firmly positioned within business processes, there’s a growing need to better capture customer information through omni-channel touchpoints. At Aspire, we’re observing a shift away from traditional IT-developed forms in favor of smarter, more customer-friendly engagement methods that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) as well as additional mobile channels and that are supported by cloud-native, API-based architectures. We have defined this market segment as Interaction Experience Management (IXM), and recently published our first Leaderboard to track and access the vendors and service providers serving it.

Recent real-world examples of evolved businesses

Consider this real-world example: last week at the DNOW! Conference in Greece, I met representatives from a company that has evolved from a transactional print service provider into a CCM-CXM solutions provider. It recently won a contract with a neobank to build their account opening application. For neobanks, rapid account opening is critical – it must happen within minutes to prevent customer drop-off. By leveraging a mix of low-code/no-code, IXM, and CCM capabilities, this service provider created a seamless onboarding experience, and more importantly, it built enough credibility to win the neobank’s digital account contract. This is quite remarkable in an industry where most service providers still primarily focus on print production.

Here’s another example: earlier this week at a seminar hosted in Utrecht by Dialog Group and Precisely, I met a strategic marketer from one of the Netherlands’ largest banks. This marketer has been tasked with developing better digital engagement for his bank’s KYC process, potentially combining interactive video, chatbot technology, analytics, and CCM. Similar trends are emerging across the world, including the U.S., where marketing leaders are transforming customer engagement, including operations and compliance communications.

These two examples indicate that CCM is no longer about composition alone, which brings us back to DSF – for these marketers (or LOB executives, CX leaders, or Chief Technology Officers), DSF’s proposition just wasn’t relevant enough. Despite the organisers’ efforts, the show’s document-centric focus made it challenging to attract MarTech vendors. Moreover, marketers don’t need education on technological capabilities – they’re already familiar with the CX capabilities the CCM industry now embraces. Most have never heard of CCM, or they see omni-channel communications purely as cross-device interactions. DSF’s struggle to attract MarTech vendor sponsors make perfect sense when you consider the fact that marketers don’t perceive a need to integrate page-based media into their channel mix and their software vendors see no market opportunity.

Implications of DSF’s demise

So where does this leave us? We at Aspire see three major trends going forward for our clients:

1. Many service providers are actively incorporating CX technologies into their CCM stack, building Communications Experience Platforms (CXPs) that combine communication composition with campaign management, dashboards, data analytics, digital delivery, e-signatures, and more. Their goal is to modernise mission-critical processes by improving communications and interaction experiences through tech-enabled services, often within the context of a specific vertical industry. Aspire CCS actively supports service providers with this transformation, and we’ve analysed and accessed the market’s leading providers on our Communications Outsourcing, System Implementation and CXP Leaderboards.

2. Almost every CCM software vendor has shifted to SaaS, positioning themselves as critical components in the digital CX ecosystem. They increasingly align with core admin systems (in banking, insurance, or healthcare) as well as ERP or CRM systems because they understand core system modernisation invariably affects customer engagement. Some vendors are evolving into service providers by acquiring service companies or internally shifting to CXPs and vertical SaaS offerings. Aspire CCS works with many software vendors, and we’ve analysed and accessed the market’s leading providers on our Leaderboards for AnyPrem CCM, SaaS CCM, and IXM.

3. Large enterprises are re-evaluating their operating models for customer communications and digital experiences. They recognise the need to unite management of all customer communications (promotional, service, product, transactional) and seek guidance on better organisational structures. In the wake of enterprise-wide digital transformation, companies need modern models like federated Centers of Excellence (CoE) that balance business delegation with appropriate control and governance. At Aspire CCS, we have helped enterprises digitally transform and modernise their operating models. In addition, in 2025 we will be launching an online Report Store (and eventually a Content Subscription), offering reports and materials exclusively created and collected for an enterprise audience.

Based on our experience and the work we do with our clients, I can confidently say that DSF’s demise doesn’t signal CCM’s death. However, it confirms to me that digital transactional communications serve a different purpose than print-based communications. Digital engagement requires different management approaches, and it can be highly profitable when done well. Unfortunately, DSF couldn’t sufficiently transform to succeed in this new world. Despite its downfall, we shouldn’t fear change, but instead embrace the evolution of CCM and its absorption into the broader CXM landscape. As Socrates once wrote, the secret of change is not to fight for the old but to focus all your energy on build the new!

by Kaspar Roos

Founder & CEO at Aspire CCS

Kaspar has analysed and written about the changing CCM industry for nearly twenty years. Ten years ago, he founded Aspire CCS, an industry analyst and strategic consulting firm dedicated to helping clients successfully navigate the market’s transformation from outbound CCM to bi-directional CXM. In this piece, Kaspar shares his perspective on the demise of the Document Strategy Forum (DSF) tradeshow and what it means to the evolving CCM-CXM industry.