LONDON and NEW YORK, Feb. 09, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Smart Communications™, a leading technology company focused on helping businesses engage in more meaningful customer conversations, today announced the company’s strong performance for 2022 as more enterprises accelerate digital transformation efforts and adopt cloud strategies for smarter customer conversations.

Despite a difficult year for many tech companies and challenging global headwinds, Smart Communications achieved notable milestones in revenue, customer satisfaction, technology innovation, industry recognition plus other key growth indicators.

“2022 was another incredible year for Smart Communications as enterprises worldwide prioritized investments in cloud technologies that drive scalable value, improve the customer experience, and generate high returns in an environment riddled with cost reductions,” said James Brown, CEO of Smart Communications. “We will continue to focus on helping enterprises exceed their customers' expectations for conversations that are personal, relevant and contextual all while delivering tremendous ROI.”

To meet the growing demand, Smart Communications also announced several internal promotions:

• Leigh Segall has been named President. Having been with Smart Communications for 6 years, serving as both Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Strategy Officer, Segall will oversee all operational aspects of the business as well as continue to be a key driver in creating the company vision in this newly-created role.
• Additionally, other senior employees have been promoted including Hitesh Bhindi (Chief Customer Officer), Samantha Couzens (Chief Marketing Officer), Jo Sweet (Chief Human Resource Officer), and Martin Suter (Chief Product Officer).

James Brown explains, “One of the core values of Smart Communications is employee success. As a result, we’re highly focused on ensuring that we nurture great talent and create opportunities for career development and progression across the company. I truly believe that this is one of the reasons why Smart Communications is such a great place to work, and why we continue to deliver outstanding results as we expand and scale the business.”

Other 2022 highlights include:

• Global growth in all regions and industries: Smart Communications increased proforma revenue by 16% in 2022; adding 50 new enterprises as cloud customers and expanding our relationships with more than 100 existing customers to support new brands, regions, and enhanced functionality. Smart Communications continued to capitalize on the growing desire and trend towards mature cloud-native solutions and recorded strong growth across all key product lines. It was the best annual performance recorded for the digital forms automation solution, SmartIQ™ and a near record year for its industry leading CCM product, SmartCOMM™. All core geographies expanded, demonstrating the global nature of the technology and customer base, thus generating record numbers of opportunities in all core industry verticals. 
• New customers and existing customer expansions including:
  
  • Top 5 US based large heathcare insurer will consolidate and replace all its CCM solutions by standardizing communications on pure cloud SmartCOMM. By doing so, they expect to save millions of dollars in the first 2 years.
  • Large multinational investment bank and financial services holding company already depends on SmartDX™ and this year added SmartIQ to simplify the way clients affirm trades and digitally sign on-demand confirmations.
  • International banking customer expands current SmartCOMM use cases and adds omnichannel messaging to deliver digital messages including email, SMS and in app messaging.
  • Multinational insurance company is consolidating and replacing 14 legacy core systems managed by 3 separate IT organizations by expanding its use of SmartCOMM. By reducing the technical dept of disparate systems, one central IT organization will support the business needs.
  • Global financial institution selects SmartIQ to digitize customer facing forms to accelerate time to value for the center of excellence and empower business units to leverage the solution for 1000s of use cases.
• Strong customer advocacy: Smart Communications continues to outperform industry averages with achieving a Net Promoter Score of +68 (excellent) from customers, leading to the company’s strong 96% renewal rate.
  
• Investment in leadership and regional support: New talent was added globally across all departments; including Chief Information Officer and Sales Director in DACH region.
• Product Innovation: Across four major product releases and multiple minor releases, Smart Communications continues to push innovation and enhancements across the product suite. Key highlights include a unified Conversation Cloud platform experience, Versioned Engine, Wealth Management Client Reporting module, a re-imagined Collaboration experience and Vega Charting for SmartCOMM, and a new Workflow experience and customizable branding tool for SmartIQ. Combined with this, Smart Communications has also extended global cloud support with expanded presences in Canada & Germany.
• Partner expansions and marketing: Smart Communications added new partners and expanded programs with Duck Creek, OneSpan and Areteans in APAC. The company coproduced a research report on Key Trends in Insurance CX with Salesforce. Guidewire awarded Smart Communications and its customer, Mountain West Farm Bureau the Innovation Award at its annual Connections conference. Learn how Mountain West Farm Bureau is transforming customer conversations with Smart Communications in this case study and by watching this short Guidewire-produced video where Smart Communications is described as “a force multiplier” to save on tech, time, and money creating a “multi-million dollar savings to Mountain West.”
• Customer conferences: Held in North America and in EMEA, the annual customer conference series focused on the theme of Conversations without Limits. Customers, business partners, and industry leaders engaged in the hottest topics and discussed solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing customer experience leaders. The Scale Awards were presented to customers and partners who are making customer conversations smarter via their digital transformation efforts including American Family, John Hancock and Empower Retirement in North America and Admiral Group and Animal Friends in EMEA.
• Significant industry validation: Smart Communications was named as a Leader in 3 analyst technology evaluations including IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cloud Customer Communications Management Applications 2022, 2022 Aspire CCM-CXM Leaderboard and the Aragon Globe for Workflow and Content Automation, 2022. The company was awarded several other recognitions including the prestigious IDC Fintech Rankings, G2 Grid for CCM, Hot Customer Experience (CX) Solution Company, Xplor International Technology of the Year Award, Guidewire Innovation Award, WealthTech100 List, and InsurTech100 List.
  

About Smart Communications
Smart Communications is a leading technology company focused on helping businesses engage in more meaningful customer conversations. Its Conversation Cloud™ platform uniquely delivers personalized, omnichannel conversations across the entire customer experience, empowering companies to succeed in 50today’s digital-focused, customer-driven world while also simplifying processes and operating more efficiently. Smart Communications is headquartered in the UK and serves over 650 customers from offices located across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Smart Communications’ Conversation Cloud platform includes the enterprise-scale customer communications management (CCM) power of SmartCOMM™, forms transformation capabilities made possible by SmartIQ™ and the trade documentation expertise of SmartDX™. In 2021, the company acquired Assentis, a leading European software solutions provider specializing in customer communications management (CCM) with a focus on the financial services industry. To learn more, visit smartcommunications.com.

Roberta Patterson – Analyst and Public Relations, Smart Communications
Email: rpatterson@smartcommunications.com