Switching to a new Customer Communication Management (CCM) platform? This is great! Next step is to tackle what often feels like the real challenge â CCM data migration.
Moving off a legacy system typically feels like untangling a web of old templates, clunky approvals, forgotten dependencies and compliance rules. It can be tempting to just recreate the same structure in the new system and hope for smoother results. That rarely works. You end up dragging yesterdayâs problems into a tool that was supposed to solve them.
Whether you’re moving to Quadient Inspire or another modern solution, CCM data migration is more than a technical switch, but your chance to leave behind outdated processes and build faster, smarter, compliant communications.
Hereâs how to make that happen. Without turning it into a year-long headache.
Legacy CCM systems store thousands of outdated templates. Our advice: donât transfer all of them.
Instead, treat data migration like a spring-clean. Start by reviewing whatâs still being used, whatâs outdated and whatâs just taking up space.
Ask yourself straightforward: does this template support our customer experience today?
Focus on What Still Matters for customer communication management workflow and take fair actions:
Identify what makes your business move
Remove duplicates
Eliminate broken or non-compliant workflows.
This is your moment to leave behind patchy messaging, mismatched formats and manual workarounds. Moving only what matters helps reduce complexity and significantly speeds up your migration from obsolete systems.
2. Map Dependencies Before They Break Something
CCM communications rarely exist in isolation. They pull data from other systems like CRMs, follow approval flows and feed into archiving or delivery tools. If these connections arenât mapped early, they tend to create delays, errors, or compliance issues that surface when itâs too late to fix them easily.
Our advice: Speak to the people who work with the content daily â from business users and legal teams to compliance officers. Theyâre the ones who understand the practical dependencies, the informal workflows and the nuances that might otherwise be overlooked.
Take the time to map where data comes from, who owns what, how sign-offs happen and how outputs are delivered.
If you ignore these connections, your migration from legacy platforms can break essential flows.
A well-structured migration plan starts with a shared, cross-functional view of these interdependencies. Without it, even the best-designed system can stall at the first approval gate.
To sum up this step, proactive migration from legacy system should include:
â Interviewing legal, compliance and customer service teams â Documenting data sources, approval chains and delivery paths â Looking beyond technical diagrams (they rarely show the full picture)
3. Rebuild Templates â But Rethink Them First
One of the biggest missed opportunities in CCM migration is treating templates like fixed artifacts. Instead of redesigning them for the new system, many teams just copy what they had before â including the inefficiencies.
Copying old templates into your new system mean copying old mistakes. Use this moment to redesign templates for performance.
Donât stop at static design. Modern CCM platforms like Quadient Inspire offer far more than just layout control. They support:
Reusable content blocks for reducing duplication and simplified updates
Dynamic fields, which personalise at scale with data-driven logic
Personalisation rules to tailor messaging by customer type, region, or behaviour
Shared elements like disclaimers or headers to centralise headers, footers, disclaimers and legal text for consistency
With laws like the European Accessibility Act (EAA) coming into effect and GDPR continuing to guide how organisations handle personal data, itâs important to build compliance and accessibility into the early stages of migration â not treat them as late-stage checks. Our advice: think about accessibility from the early stage of migration, especially now with EAA went life on June 28, 2025. Otherwise, you put the company into a risk to pay twice.
From the start of your CCM data migration, consider:
Accessible formats (PDF/UA, HTML)
Built-in legal reviews
Trackable approvals and audit logs
The best time to embed accessibility and compliance is before anything goes live. Doing it early is faster, cheaper, and far less disruptive than applying fixes under pressure later.
5. Migrate in Phases â Not All at Once
Trying to migrate everything at once often leads to stress, confusion and avoidable mistakes. A phased rollout is more practical and far less risky.
Our advice: Start small, choose channel, team, or type of communication, for example, onboarding emails or monthly invoices. Use that first rollout to test templates, workflows, integrations, and output quality in a real-world setting. The feedback you gather will shape how you scale, helping you avoid errors before they reach a wider audience.Â
Running the legacy and new systems in parallel for a short period also builds confidence. It allows teams to compare outputs, validate compliance and flag edge cases before anything is switched off for good.
6. Make Data Migration a Team Effort, Not Just IT Department
Customer communication touches nearly every part of the business:
Marketing (tone of voice, branding)
Operational (document workflows, SLAs, and service delivery timelines)
Cross-functional planning ensures that your migration from legacy CCM aligns with your customer journey and brand.
Your CCM Migration Should Work for You â Not Against You
With the right focus, it becomes a chance to simplify, modernise and build a stronger foundation for how your organisation communicates â inside and out. Planned well and done wisely, CCM data migration is more than a technical upgrade. Itâs a real opportunity to streamline operations, reduce risk and deliver communications that make sense for legal, operational CX teams and valued by your customers.
In our previous blog we discussedhow legacy systems are slowing down modern business managers and here you are: realised the price for sticking to outdated systems and now it’s time to choose an efficient and clear CCM system. In this top CCM systems comparison, weâll help you understand how to confidently choose the right modern communication platform that actually fits your business, without falling into the same traps that legacy systems create.
When youâre ready to migrate away from a legacy Customer Communication Management (CCM) platform, one thing becomes clear fast: thereâs no shortage of options. From cloud-native innovators like Quadient or Smart Communications to heavyweight platforms like OpenText and Papyrus, each solution promises to improve efficiency, compliance and customer experience.
But picking the right CCM platform doesnât merely include ticking off technical features. Itâs also a strategic decision that shapes your agility, customer satisfaction and compliance readiness. This all factors will dictate you success for internal and external communications.
Hereâs how to make that decision confidently.
Why Migrate at All – Fast Break Through
Just to refresh the information from the previous blog post, here is a brief review.
Legacy CCM systems are holding many businesses back. Theyâre often rigid, expensive to maintain, risky for long-play company development and difficult to adapt to new accessibility or data privacy laws. They also limit customer experience improvements â something todayâs buyers increasingly expect.
Legacy systems can increase the cost and complexity of complying with new regulations like the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and GDPR.
Modern CCM platforms offer cloud-based scalability, real-time communication and API-first architectures designed to grow with your business.
What to Look for in a Modern CCM Platform
When evaluating platforms, it helps to go beyond the product brochure and ask: What will this look like in action â in our business, with our processes and compliance requirements?
đ§ Our tip: Look for native support for print, web, SMS and mobileâplus responsive preview tools to test each format before sending.
Ease of integration with existing systems
Your CCM solution doesnât operate in a vacuum. It needs to connect with your CRMs, ERPs, archiving systems and sometimes even bespoke internal tools. Seamless integrations speed up implementation, reduce human error and help futureproof your stack.
đ§ Our tip: Prioritise platforms with pre-built connectors and open APIs, especially if youâre working in a multi-vendor IT environment.
đ§ Our tip: Ask vendors whether their platform supports:
Accessible document templates
Real-time audit trails
Role-based controls
Automated compliance checks
User experience for both your teams and end customers
Itâs not enough for a platform to be powerful. It must also be usable by your content creators, legal reviewers, CX managers and other business stakeholders. A modern CCM tool should empower cross-functional teams, not bottleneck them behind IT.
đ§ Our tip: Look for role-based interfaces, drag-and-drop templates and approval workflows that allow collaboration without code.
Vendor partnership & long-term fit
Technology is only a part of the equation. Migration support, training, roadmap transparency and service responsiveness all play a role in the success of your new CCM platform.
đ§ Our tip: Ask about post-sale support, local partner networks and how each vendor supports clients as business and compliance needs evolve.
Choosing the Best CCM System for Regulated Industries
Disclaimer: This top CCM systems comparison highlights that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Thereâs no universally âbestâ CCM platform. Only the most suitable combination of tools, tactics, and collaboration conditions tailored to your organisationâs needs.
Quadient offers a strong balance between user-friendliness and enterprise-grade power. For leadership teams, Quadient Inspire often signals a high-performing, long-term investment in communication architecture. Itâs modular, highly customisable and integrates with a wide variety of systems.
CTOs and CIOs tend to appreciate its scalability and robust architecture, especially for organisations undergoing transformation or with plans to consolidate multi-channel communication systems. Itâs particularly well-suited for marketing-driven organisations thanks to its intuitive omnichannel composition tools, real-time previews and role-based interface that empowers business users without relying heavily on IT. It supports cloud-native and hybrid deployments, integrates seamlessly with CRMs like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.
However, that power comes with a trade-off. The platform rewards those willing to develop or partner with skilled Quadient experts, turning what seems like complexity into a long-term differentiator. In this way, the early investment becomes a launchpad for sustained independence and strategic agility, which could serve for decades.
From a compliance perspective, Quadient Inspire is a solid bet. It offers granular control over messaging logic, audit trails and versioning, making it suitable for regulated industries such as banking and insurance. Legal teams often find comfort in its ability to document every step of a communication journey. Accessibility and auditability are built into its cloud capabilities, making it a right choice for organisations looking to futureproof compliance and UX.
The end user (i.e., your customer) usually never sees the complexity under the hood. What they do see, if Inspire is well implemented, is a hyper-personalised, consistent and timely communication experience across print, digital and mobile. Thatâs a major competitive advantage.
OpenText
OpenText is often the default choice for institutions already embedded in the OpenText enterprise ecosystem which was widely adopted in the early 2000s to mid-2010s. It’s a heavyweight in the enterprise CCM space.
It appeals to leadership with its legacy of trust and stability, especially in large document-centric environments. CFOs often like the idea of extending existing OpenText investments rather than introducing a new vendor. Known for its robustness and deep legacy system support, itâs often the platform of choice for large organisations operating in highly regulated industries like insurance, utilities, or public sector. Its support for on-prem and hybrid deployments makes it appealing to businesses with strict infrastructure requirements.
Operationally, however, OpenText can be more rigid. Teams working within Exstream environments often report that configuration and development are IT-heavy, with limited room for rapid iteration by business teams. This creates a bottleneck when it comes to deploying and testing new communication strategies. Developers and analysts accustomed to agile, cloud-native environments may find OpenText slower and less flexible.
From a compliance perspective, OpenText holds up well, having been used across government and heavily regulated sectors for decades. Its DMS-centric infrastructure supports document retention, permissions and role-based controls in ways that appeal to risk-conscious legal and compliance departments.
The downside, especially from a user-experience and customer communications standpoint, is that modernisation can lag. End customers may experience templated, static, or overly formal communications unless effort is made to layer on modern UX flows.
ISIS Papyrus
Papyrus is built for control and customisation – they are unique in this approach. Itâs a long-standing favorite in financial services, thanks to its strong governance features and configurable rule engines. The platform offers both on-prem and hybrid options, making it viable for compliance-focused environments. Itâs less plug-and-play than others, typically requiring stronger in-house IT capabilities or external consultancy â but for organisations that value full control, the payoff can be substantial.
Papyrus offers a vertically integrated platform that combines process automation, document management, case handling and communications. For leadership and enterprise architects, this is attractive because it minimises the number of vendors and integration points. Everything stays under one roof.
But this âall-in-oneâ strength is also a limitation. Unlike modular platforms, Papyrus expects the organisation to adapt to its internal logic. This can create friction for teams used to flexibility or those wanting to plug in best-in-class solutions for analytics, templates, or content authoring.
Operational teams often find the Papyrus environment powerful but dense. Its steep learning curve and limited global user community make training and onboarding slower, especially for non-technical users. Developers will need to invest time to gain fluency in the system and business analysts will likely rely heavily on IT for changes. But would this learning time contribution worth ROI?
For compliance, Papyrus is a strong contender. Its end-to-end control of the communication lifecycle makes it well-suited for organisations with strict governance and risk standards. The ability to track and automate decisions across workflows is appealing to both legal and audit stakeholders.
Where it may fall short is in user experience. Communications generated through Papyrus can feel procedural and rigid. Without deliberate effort to improve design and personalisation, end users might find interactions cold or bureaucraticâappropriate for some sectors but problematic for customer-centric brands.
Smart Communications
Smart Communications has carved its space by offering a cloud-native, API-first platform built with business users in mind. For leadership teams focused on agility, customer centricity and fast deployment, Smart delivers a compelling message. It removes much of the technical debt associated with traditional CCM implementations and is favored by organisations undergoing digital transformation.
From an operations and executive point of view, Smart is empowering. Business teams can create, test and deploy communications with minimal IT involvement. Analysts appreciate the real-time feedback loops and experimentation capabilities baked into the platform. Developers can focus on integrating backend logic while marketing and CX teams optimise messaging on the front lines.
Compliance teams will appreciate Smartâs modern cloud certifications, GDPR-ready architecture and policy-driven controls. While it may not have the on-premise legacy compliance layers of OpenText or ISYS Papyrus, its transparency and structured governance capabilities align well with evolving digital-first regulatory frameworks.
Most importantly, Smart Communications shines at the end-user level. It delivers clean, mobile-first and channel-consistent interactions that meet customers where they areâemail, apps, chat, or print. Its omnichannel consistency, combined with tools for A/B testing and personalisation, helps companies communicate more like agile digital-native brands and less like legacy enterprises.
However, this cloud agility comes with a trade-off: Smart isnât built for deep backend complexity or legacy system entanglement. The platform may struggle with highly customised document logic, real-time transaction processing at enterprise scale, or legacy data dependencies. The consequence of this limitation can cascade throughout the organisation. Strategically, leadership may find that while Smart accelerates time-to-value for customer touchpoints, it may not scale easily across all business-critical communication domains, especially those tied to regulated documents or high-volume transactional outputs. This can lead to fragmented ecosystems, where Smart handles digital comms while legacy systems still shoulder core workloads, undermining efforts to consolidate platforms and reduce complexity.
Prefer a quick side-by-side view?
Hereâs a snapshot of the four platforms compared on deployment model, core strengths and business fit, to help you zoom in on the one that aligns with your goals.
Slower modernisation pace; heavy IT dependency; limited agility for digital-first use cases
Large, complex organisations with legacy-heavy infrastructure
Papyrus
On-premises and hybrid
Customisable, strong governance, used in finance
Steep learning curve; rigid architecture; low flexibility with third-party tools
Regulated industries with strong IT capacity and need for full control
Smart Communications (SmartCOMM)
Cloud-native
Agile, accessible, API-first
Limited backend depth; challenges with legacy system replacement; potential governance fragmentation at scale
Fast-growing companies prioritising flexibility, speed and CX innovation
The 3 Questions to Ask Before You Decide
Before you lock into a platform, ask yourself and team:
What do we want our CCM to enable in 2â3 years? Think about growth, new markets, digital transformation and CX goals.
How much IT capacity do we really have for customisation and ongoing ownership? Some platforms require significant internal resources; others are built to be self-service.
What regulatory, industry-specific, or accessibility requirements must we meet? Make sure the platform is prepared to support you before it becomes an issue.
Your CCM Should Grow With You
Modernising your CCM platform isnât merely an infrastructure upgrade, itâs also a competitive strategy. Whether your focus is regulatory readiness, customer experience, or operational efficiency, the right platform should meet todayâs needs while setting you up for tomorrowâs growth.
At Quertum, we work with organisations navigating these exact decisions. If you’re planning a CCM migration or exploring your options, weâre here to help guide the process, strategically and practically. The right platform wonât just solve todayâs pain points, it should be a growth enabler, not a future constraint.
Explore our migration services or get in touch â weâd love to help solve your communication challenges.
But if theyâre still stuck working with legacy systems? That job becomes 10x harder than it needs to be and workload is quick as never before with facilitated day-to-day processes.
Old Tools, New Problems
Weâve seen it time and again: systems once labelled as âfuture-proofâ now block the workday. Perhaps itâs a slow ERP accessible only to the finance team, or a reporting tool that hasnât been updated in years. In many cases, companies juggle five platforms that donât communicate properly with each other.
As a result, more time is spent chasing data than using it. Reports are delayed, workflows are made manual and prone to error. When leadership requests insights for Monday, teams often piece spreadsheets together over the weekend.
This situation frustrates teams and creates unsustainable maintenance.
Understanding an Upcoming Strategic Risk: Outdated Systems are Not Just ITâs Problem
Too frequently, operational and business teams treat CCM systems as back-office concerns, left for IT to âeventuallyâ sort out. Yet, business leaders feel their limitations daily by across functions. Decision-making slows down when teams canât access performance data in real time â sales teams build forecasts on outdated figures, and managers guess inventory levels instead of knowing them. Processes follow system limits rather than team needs. For example, adjusting prices across regions typically requires manual approvals and Excel workarounds to bypass system limits. As companies scale, these inefficiencies multiply, and what worked in one market becomes a burden across five.
Meanwhile, missed opportunities pile up. One team spends hours consolidating quarterly reports while a competitor pivots strategy on live market data. As you wait for procurement data from three systems, teams may already make unnecessary purchases. These arenât isolated casesâtheyâre the daily frustrations of business managers trying to lead with impact. Without visibility and flexibility, managers react to problems instead of steering the business forward. When systems dictate the pace of change, companies quietly lose agilityâone of the most valuable traits in todayâs environment.
Modernisation with Coffee To Go
Imagine this instead: You open one dashboard and see your key metrics, live, clean, and easy to get into. You donât have to wait for a report or chase someone in another team for an export. Your workflows are automated where they can be, and flexible where they need to be. Your systems are connected, and so is your team.
While this may sound like the ideal scenario, we at Quertum understand that you canât switch off legacy systems overnight. Thatâs why we design our approach to make change as seamless as possible. Whether you manage heavily customised platforms, fragmented infrastructure, or operations across multiple countries, we handle the complexity behind the scenes, so your teams can focus on their day-to-day. Core systems keep running while we gradually introduce modern tools with minimal disruption.
Quertum brings your data together, streamlines manual processes, and enables old and new platforms to operate side by side. No lengthy implementations, no unnecessary downtime, only smarter systems that start making everyday work easier and faster than you’d expect.
What a Better Workday Looks Like
Running a business today means balancing priorities across teams, systems, and time zones, often with limited visibility and even less time. Business managers need more than reports and tools; they need clarity, speed, and systems that support smarter decisions without adding more work.
But old systems make that mission harder than it should be.
Hereâs what a modern workday should feel like:
One clear view of the business: See revenue, stock levels, and supply chain status in real time without chasing updates from different teams.
Approvals that keep things moving: Purchase orders, expense reports, and hiring requests go forward as soon as they meet the right criteria. No more bottlenecks.
Issues flagged before they grow: Your system notifies you instantly about a delayed shipment or a spike in returns, so you can act early.
Everyone working from the same numbers: With one shared dataset across teams, thereâs no confusion, no mismatch in the reports, and no digging through version after version.
Itâs not about having more tools. Itâs about having the right ones, which make it easier to lead across functions, stay ahead of problems, and respond with confidence.
Ready to Work Smarter, Not Harder?
You donât need to rip everything out to move forward. Legacy systems might still be part of the picture, and thatâs okay. However, they shouldnât define how your teams work today and how many challenges they need to tackle before having work done.
At Quertum, we help businesses transition from rigid, outdated systems to setups that support the way teams operate today. We customise, optimise, or build systems from scratch to fit the company. That often means untangling siloed tools, streamlining manual processes, or connecting systems that never communicated before.
Our migration services minimise disruption and make change feel manageable. Whether you manage a custom ERP, local infrastructure, or global complexity, we work alongside your teams to build bridges between old and new. This way, your business runs faster and with far fewer headaches.
Todayâs business managers juggle strategy, data, and cross-functional coordination, but legacy systems make that already demanding role even harder. Outdated tools have become the biggest blocker in the workday, leading to delays, manual fixes, and unsustainable maintenance. This isnât just an IT inconvenience, but a strategic risk that leaves teams stuck and businesses reactive. However, it doesnât have to stay that way. Gradual system modernisation, done in a way that doesnât disrupt daily work, can offer a more flexible and connected way of operating. Imagine an ideal workday with real-time insights, smoother workflows, and connected teams that stay in sync and ahead of problems.Because, when systems work with you, the business moves forward â not sideways.
