TreelinePress Manifesto
Who Controls the Default in Customer Communications?
Customer Communications Management (CCM) is no longer defined by output. It is defined by control.
For decades, CCM revolved around documents. Composition engines, batch files, archive systems, print streams, inserters, postal optimization. The economic model was linear. Pages in. Pages out. Revenue tied to throughput.
That model still exists. But it is no longer the center of gravity.
The structural shift underway in customer communications is not about channel preference. It is about who controls the default experience, how economic incentives are aligned, and how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping both.
When AI reduces the friction of digital delivery, the rationale for paper as a default weakens. When AI enables upstream orchestration, suppression, personalization, and predictive engagement, the power center moves further away from physical output.
The providers and enterprises that understand where AI alters incentive structures will shape the next phase of customer communications. Those who treat AI as a feature add-on to legacy production workflows will remain downstream of the real decisions.
The Collapse of the Document-Centric Model
Legacy CCM is document-centered. Architecture reflected production logic. Compliance was embedded in templates. Measurement focused on volume and SLA performance.
Today, communications sit inside a broader enterprise architecture that includes digital journey orchestration, consent management, embedded finance, AI-generated summaries, fraud mitigation, and regulatory automation.
The strategic conversation has moved upstream, and customer communications are no longer a downstream manufacturing function. It is a strategic control point for cost, risk, data, and customer experience.
Providers that continue to frame the market primarily around output channels are describing yesterday’s architecture.
The Omni-Channel Claim
TreelinePress will directly challenge a narrative that persists across the print service provider (PSP) community.
If a provider generates 80–90% of its revenue from print and mail, it is not operating an omni-channel business model.
It may possess digital capabilities. It may have acquired software. It may support email, SMS, portals, or mobile notifications. But revenue mix reveals economic alignment.
Omni-channel is not defined by the number of channels a provider can technically support. It is defined by where revenue is generated, where margin is protected, where growth is occurring and where capital is deployed.
A business does not become omni-channel because it offers email, SMS, portals, and print. It becomes omni-channel when its economic model reflects balanced contribution across those channels and when strategic investment aligns with that mix.
Very few actually operate on this model.
What Is the Default?
The more consequential question is not whether print remains viable. It does.
The question is this: What is the true default in customer communications?
Is print still the primary experience, with digital layered on top? Or is digital already the behavioral default, with print functioning as a regulated exception?
In financial services, insurance, utilities, and healthcare, customers already interact digitally at high frequency. Account access, balance checks, claims status, payment activity, and alerts are overwhelmingly digital behaviors.
Paper persists because of inertia, regulation, risk aversion, and legacy architecture. Default customer behavior and default enterprise architecture are rarely aligned.
The Upstream Decision Makers
The most consequential decisions about the future of customer communications are no longer being made by print providers. They are being made upstream, inside digital experience teams redesigning journeys, data governance, compliance and risk leaders determining exposure, CFOs scrutinizing cost structures, and private equity firms evaluating platform defensibility.
These stakeholders are not debating page volumes and postal rates. Their mandate is to reduce friction, compress expense, and increase control across the enterprise.
The incentives guiding these decisions are materially different from those of a print service provider, or the US Post Office whose revenue model relies on sustained mail volume. This divergence is structural, rooted in economics and accountability frameworks, not ideology.
Print and mail sit at the end of the CCM funnel. The transformation of CCM is occurring much further upstream than many production-centric, channel preference discussions acknowledge.
How Is Business?
If you ask a collected group of PSP executives how business is performing, many will point to stability or even modest growth. In certain verticals or customer segments, this may be true.
At the same time, aggregate U.S. mail volumes have been declining for years, well before the most recent series of postal rate increases. So, how can both statements be true?
Because decline of volumes is not evenly distributed. It is not synchronized across categories. It does not move in a straight line. Volume erosion tends to be segmented and sporadic. One enterprise migrates a statement category to digital. Another consolidates notices. A regulator permits electronic delivery under revised consent rules. A platform modernization project eliminates redundant mailings. These changes occur in pockets, often triggered by regulatory reform, cost inflection, digital enablement, or enterprise system replacement.
Meanwhile, remaining categories can temporarily expand. Consolidation among PSPs or the outsourcing of former in-plant operations can also mask macro decline. If fewer providers are servicing a shrinking pool, individual firms may report growth even as the overall market contracts.
The more relevant question is not whether volumes are declining in a given quarter. It is whether enterprise investment patterns, regulatory frameworks, AI-driven automation, and capital markets are pointing toward a different long-term equilibrium.
The indicators increasingly suggest they are.
Capital, AI, and Repricing
Private equity capital is not neutral. It accelerates repositioning. It rewards scalable digital platforms. It pressures portfolio companies to articulate defensible, software-centric narratives.
At the same time, AI is compressing feature differentiation across software categories. Generative tools make content creation easier. Template migration becomes faster and less resource-intensive. Summarization reduces document length. Automation reduces manual intervention across compliance, routing, and delivery workflows.
In that environment, sameness becomes easier to achieve. Durable advantage shifts toward data control, regulatory credibility, integration depth, and orchestration capability, not operational capacity.
The repricing of enterprise software in the AI era is not theoretical. It is observable in transactions, leadership changes, and strategic pivots across the CCM landscape.
What TreelinePress Will Do
TreelinePress will continue to examine whether service providers, vendors and enterprises are building around how customers actually behave, or preserving processes designed for a different era.
TreelinePress will collaborate with other analyst firms and seek perspective from subject matter experts around the world to bring depth and expand the lens through which this market is examined.
TreelinePress will challenge narratives that equate the presence of digital capability with actual transformation. It will examine whether claims of omni-channel execution and improved customer experience are reflected in revenue composition and capital allocation. It will study preference management to determine whether it meaningfully shifts default behavior or simply records consent, and whether digital-first messaging is supported by tangible investment decisions.
It will also continue to ask a more direct question: who truly controls the default in regulated customer communications?
TreelinePress 2026 Market Focus
In the coming months, we will begin disclosing the projects, engagements, and global market studies that inform this perspective. The intent is transparency. The analysis published here is grounded in active work across regulated industries, platform vendors, service providers, and capital stakeholders operating in the U.S., Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
Where appropriate, TreelinePress will outline the scope of those studies, the questions being tested, and the structural signals emerging from them.
The goal is to connect public narrative with measurable market data and to make transparent how conclusions are being formed, not simply asserted in an industry where the narrative has already begun to shift and the default in customer communications is moving elsewhere.
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Well stated Andrew, those who still believe that their old processes are still relevant, will get left in the dust. Everything is changing with batch now moving to real time. business hours to 24x7 and a desire for visibility (along with the ability to act / respond) on every step of the customer journey.