SmarshConnect and Disrupted Communications: Embracing Transformation

I’m very excited to be working with our team for the upcoming, annual SmarshCONNECT gathering of clients and partners in New York City on June 6. As one might guess, the focus for the event follows closely the themes that we frequently cover on the blog, namely:

  • Embracing Transformation: As firms come to grips with the disruption in their communications and collaborative patterns.
  • Mitigating Risk: As they explore new approaches to supervisory review and embracing of surveillance technology.
  • Enabling Productivity: As they attempt to balance new collaborative tools with their on-going responsibilities to manage risk.

Within the next three blog posts, I’ll be touching on each of themes – starting with Embracing Transformation.

The transformative element that we’ll touch on focuses on the change in demographics that all organizations are experiencing, and the unique preferences that each generation of clients and employees bring to the workplace. As one might guess, the ways that Millennials and GenZers prefer to work and engage clients looks very different from the preferences shared by Generation X and Baby Boomers for email, voicemail, and face-to-face meetings. In fact, their preferences for chat and text messaging reflects not only a need for more immediacy in communications, but it’s also a function of the tools they’ve grown up with and become accustomed to. The immediacy, familiarity, and productivity data is, in fact, overwhelming.

Consider the following:

  • The average person spends 55 minutes per day texting
  • Text messages have a 98% open rate, compared to a paltry 20% for email
  • The average response time for a text message is 90 seconds, far faster than the 90 minutes it takes for an email reply

As a result, it should not be surprising that you may never see a reply to an email that you sent to your 21-year-old son. And, it will likely not surprise you that the same person can fire off a text message every two seconds. As these individuals gifted with incredible thumb dexterity enter the workforce, they bring their own tools and preferences – not just as new employees, but as the next generation of clients. A phrase we often hear from financial services firms is “if you don’t support a new way of communicating with your clients, perhaps your competitors do,” indicating that this is not just about managing risk, it’s also about your customer relationships and competitive positioning.  Firms that embrace the transformation in the way that their organization interacts with clients – and collaborates internally with new tools – are proactively addressing the disrupted state of today’s communications technologies.

At the SmarshConnect event, we will be exploring this theme of transformation throughout the day. Highlights will include:

  • General Session Kick-Off: Led by CEO Brian Cramer and Chief Product Officer Greg Vesper, this session will see the duo discuss market dynamics and how the rapidly-evolving world of digital communications is opening up new opportunities for business agility and customer intimacy.
  • Guest speaker Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, formerly of CNBC, will be reviewing the intersection of economics, policy, and politics and discussing how global firms are leveraging these dynamics to improve their ability to compete.
  • Our break-out session dubbed, “Mobility First,” will provide a roundtable discussion on how today’s communications and collaborative applications are designed for mobile-first usage, and how firms are embracing this change by redesigning policies, updating user training, and deploying modern mobile-friendly technologies to ensure that their organization is in control of its compliance and discovery obligations.

Embracing transformation is just the beginning. In the posts to follow, we plan to cover the topics of risk mitigation and productivity. In the meantime, we look forward to the opportunity to share ideas and best practices with our customers, partners, guest speakers, and panelists in what should be a very exciting, interactive set of discussions.

We can’t wait to see you in New York City!

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Robert Cruz

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