Sydney, Australia – May 4, 2023 – Smart CommunicationsTM, a leading technology company focused on helping businesses engage in more meaningful customer conversations, today announced the winners of the 2023 SCALE Awards from this year’s conference, INNOVATE APAC 2023, which was held in Sydney, Australia on March 22nd, 2023. This in-person event featured in-depth lessons and insights from Smart Communications customers, executives, industry partners, and more. The SCALE Awards honor customer excellence in digital transformation to make customer conversations smarter.
Companies from all over the world leverage Smart Communications industry-leading customer communications management solution, SmartCOMMTM and digital forms automation solution, SmartIQTM to reimagine the customer experience and improve internal efficiencies that impact a company’s bottom line. Together, the solutions are integrated with The Smart Communications’ Conversation Cloud platform – the only cloud platform delivering personalized omnichannel conversations across the entire customer experience.
“We are highly inspired by the great achievements of these breakout companies who particularly embodied our conference theme of Conversations without Limits by reimaging customer conversations to be faster, smarter, and more interactive,” said James Brown, CEO of Smart Communications. “These customers are showing innovation, resilience and growth, and we celebrate their achievements.”
The three APAC companies to receive 2023 SCALE Awards were:
Best Customer Experience: This award honors how Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation has transitioned to a cloud-first strategy, incrementally providing an optimized customer experience at touchpoints across the value chain while keeping up with regulatory changes. Looking to consolidate 30 different legacy tools to just a few, Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation is standardizing and streamlining the customer journey as well as revamping business processes to create efficiencies. Utilizing best-of-breed solutions, SmartCOMM, Mulesoft, and Salesforce, helped them create the best possible customer experience.
Pacesetter Award: This award recognizes one of the top four banks serving Australia and New Zealand for going above and beyond in its digital-innovation efforts while delivering high performance. As the company built its strategy to compete for digital-first customers, it needed a scalable, cloud-native solution for customer communications to support high growth. By implementing SmartCOMM, the team was able to support use cases across the bank and reduce the cost of multiple legacy on-premise CCM solutions. Non-technical users in the lines of businesses can now self-serve and update templates without relying on IT teams to make changes. The team also chose SmartIQ to digitize and automate forms-based data collection, such as tax self-certification forms. With this innovative use of SmartIQ, the bank enabled customers to provide requested tax information via preferred channels while also reducing the cost of obtaining the required information. They credit cloud-native solutions as a key enabler for their agile delivery model.
Lifetime Achievement (AMP): This award spotlights an early adopter of digital transformation and a true industry leader when it comes to leveraging technology to provide innovative customer experiences. After deciding to retire legacy document-generation systems, AMP envisioned an enterprise-wide communications platform managed by a central business team rather than IT. SmartCOMM has provided AMP multi-channel capabilities, greater use of shared content, and established common business rules across all documents.
AMP’s centralized team was able to reduce the number of templates by 60% and create the agility required to launch new products or react to external events in a matter of days rather than weeks. Digital delivery of communications has gone from 0% to 70%, and physical print and postage costs have significantly reduced, with volumes now low enough only to require twice weekly printing. AMP reduced the amount of paper needed by 8.2m pages, which is three times the size of the Sydney Westfield Tower, with an effective 36 million ton reduction in carbon omissions.
Lifetime Achievement (Bendigo Bank): This award recognizes Bendigo Bank, which was one of the first customers to embrace the digital transformation of their documents. Initially replacing its mainframe-based automated lettering system with a hybrid platform, the bank has now adopted the pure cloud SmartCOMM solution and replaced additional legacy systems. This has created organizational efficiencies and agility all while delivering an incredible customer experience. Bendigo Bank is also using SmartIQ across the enterprise to digitize processes like loan origination and client onboarding.
“INNOVATE 2023 has demonstrated a business shift from focusing on purely transactional communications to evaluating the entire customer lifecycle so as to create more personalized and timely customer conversations,” continued Brown. “It was inspiring to hear how our customers and partners are leveraging our cloud-native applications to embark on digital transformation projects that are delivering agility and real ROI value to their business and employees alike while creating more rewarding customer experiences and profitable customer relationships.“