Why mid-market telcos keep buying enterprise CCM platforms they’ll never fully use
Twice in the last month, I’ve had the same conversation with telecom ops leads. Different companies, different provinces, almost word for word the same story. They bought a big-name customer communications platform a few years back. It cost a fortune. And they figure they use maybe a third of what they’re paying for.
That’s not a knock on the platforms. The big enterprise CCM systems, Quadient Inspire and OpenText Exstream, are genuinely good at what they do. Quadient Inspire is the market leader, around 11% of the global CCM market by IDC’s count, and it’s the default for banks and insurers that need deep governance and audit trails. OpenText Exstream is built for the kind of organization that processes hundreds of millions of pages a year. These are serious tools for serious scale.
The problem is who they’re built for
Here’s the catch. That scale is the whole design. Large enterprises make up about 58% of the CCM market’s revenue, and the leading platforms are shaped around the things the biggest players need: global customer bases and governance across a stack of jurisdictions. When a 300-person regional carrier or a mid-market credit union buys the same platform, they inherit all of that weight. Every single touchpoint in their Customer Journeybecomes tangled in enterprise-grade complexity they simply don’t need.
And the cost of all that capability is real. Quertum, a firm that advises on these migrations, puts full enterprise CCM implementations at $1 million and up once you add professional services and migration, with rollouts running 6 to 18 months. Even Quadient’s more modular path tends to start around $500,000 a year. For a mid-market operator, that’s a lot of money and a year and a half of effort to light up a platform you’ll mostly leave switched off.
This is where the shelfware numbers get uncomfortable. Across enterprise software generally, the waste is well documented. Zylo’s 2025 SaaS Management Index found companies use only 47% of the SaaS seats they pay for. Gartner estimates that 30% of SaaS spend is, in its word, toxic, going to licenses and features nobody uses. Flexera puts wasted IT budget at 25 to 30%. One analysis found that in 21% of enterprise software contracts, not a single user ever logged in. Over-buying capability is a software-wide habit, and CCM is one of the easiest places to ruin a perfectly good Customer Journey with unnecessary features.
Buy for what you’ll actually use
Match the tool to the job. For a mid-market telco or bank, the real requirement is small and sharp: make the bill and the statement work hard. You need to map out a clear, accurate, personalized communication line, turning your most predictable transactional point into a proactive milestone for the Customer Journey. That’s what hiperCCM is built for. It turns the bill into a channel that markets and retains, without the enterprise tax on top.
And the capability earns its keep once it’s in use. Banco Carrefour, a bank we work with, sends about 5 million personalized messages a month straight through its billing platform. That’s the bill doing work a marketing team usually claims, delivering a tailored Customer Journey at a volume and level of personalization a mid-market operator can realistically put to use.
So before you renew that enterprise contract, or sign a new one, it’s worth asking a plain question. Of everything that platform can do, how much are you actually using? And what would it look like to pay for the part you need and skip the rest?
At Fast Movn, a Canadian software company based in BC, hiperCCM is built for exactly that: the mid-market operator who wants to optimize their Customer Journey using the bill as a channel, without paying for an enterprise platform they’ll half use. If that sounds like your situation, Request a Demo (https://fastmovn.com/en/home/#request-a-demo).