Overcoming Common Challenges in CCM

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This blog originally posted by MacroSoft and can be found here

Overcoming Common Challenges in CCM

By Pavithra Joy

In today’s business landscape, effective communication with customers is essential for success. As organizations strive to improve their customer experience, many are turning to Customer Communication Management (CCM) solutions. These solutions streamline and automate customer communication processes, resulting in personalized, consistent, and engaging interactions across various channels. However, implementing a CCM solution can present challenges that need to be overcome for a successful deployment. In this blog, we will explore some common challenges in implementing a CCM solution and provide strategies to overcome them.

Defining Clear Objectives and Requirements:

Challenge: One of the initial hurdles is defining clear objectives and requirements for the CCM solution. Without a clear understanding of what you want to achieve, it becomes challenging to select the right solution and design an effective implementation plan.

Solution: Start by evaluating your current communication processes and identifying pain points or areas for improvement. Engage stakeholders from different departments to gather their requirements and expectations. Define measurable objectives, such as reducing turnaround time or improving customer satisfaction. This clarity will guide your decision-making process and ensure alignment throughout the implementation.

Additional challenges addressed in the Full Blog hosted by MacroSoft

  • Data Integration and Accessibility

  • Designing and Personalizing Templates

  • Change Management and User Adoption

  • Compliance and Security

  • Conclusion

 

Manage Supply Chain Disruption in Printing through Automation

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By Swati Sahai, V.P. Of Marketing at Sefas Innovation

The printing industry continues to face severe supply chain challenges. While sales are expected to grow, most printers do not expect it to translate into profitability due to rising costs and substantial shortages.

These problems are expected to continue into 2023 with the greatest concerns (reflected by large majority of printers) being paper shortage, labor shortage, transportation difficulties, ink and production supplies shortage, and the rising costs of each of these – in short Supply Chain Disruption.

More than 2.5 million metric tons of North American printing and writing paper capacity has been offline since the start of 2020. Today, global supplies of certain paper products are so tight that many printers can’t get the stock that they need “at any price”.

In addition, there is rising postage cost which has severely impacted the print mail business.

The need of the hour is clear ― reevaluate processes to reduce dependencies, improve efficiency and productivity, and recover rising costs. Automation can help meet all these needs. This is especially true in the CCM and CXM space that operate large print to mail facilities requiring a lot of labor and raw materials to produce physical communications.

Workflow automation can help lower the cost of printing per piece and make big gains in productivity.

According to a study by Printing Industries of America, high-profit commercial printers spend almost double the investment in hardware and software per employee (automation) than their peers. The result is 30 percent fewer employees per million dollars of sales.

An Evolution Not a Revolution!

In our experience, the approach that works best for automation is evolution, not revolution. This means to start where you are, with the legacy applications that you have been using, instead of trying to uproot all your systems.

For years, large businesses have been trying to move from physical to digital communications, but they have not had much success, particularly in highly regulated industries. There are many reasons for this but the biggest is the existence of silos in the communications technology infrastructure.

Therefore, a workflow automation layer is needed that can interface with all your systems and extract information even from legacy applications. Implementing this workflow automation layer is much simpler, cost-effective, and less risky than completely modernizing and changing your entire communication generation and delivery infrastructure.

The Elements of Workflow Automation

Job consolidation, site consolidation, householding, print suppression, digital presorting are all elements of workflow automation that individually and in combination, help produce more with less infrastructure and labor.

In this blog, we will describe householding and how it helps manage supply chain disruption.

Householding

Householding is putting two or more documents in the same envelope that would have otherwise gone in different envelopes. Householding results in savings in postage and envelopes, increases profitability, and helps companies manage the current shortage of envelopes.

How does householding work?

Householding works by normalizing all input (making it in same format), extracting the metadata, and optimizing the output. As part of optimization, the output is grouped, split, and sorted.

While sorting, we can identify the documents that are candidates for householding based on individual preference. For example, two individuals living in the same household may want to keep some communication in separate mail while for other types of communications, they may prefer to have them put in the same envelope, defined as one mail piece.

Preference management

The challenge of householding lies in determining which two documents can be put together as one mail piece. A unique identifier is required for this determination so that we can form mail pieces without violating any privacy or other regulations. This can be done through a preference and consent management application which makes it easy to get a unique profile identifier as well as preference and consent data.

Managing supply chain problems

Householding helps manage supply chain problems by reducing the requirement of envelopes. As companies are facing a shortage of envelopes today, even 10% householding of a job can relieve enormous pressure from the supply chain.

By reducing postal cost, householding helps improve profitability in these challenging times.

In the next post on this series, I will talk about print suppression and how it helps relieve pressure from the supply chain.

 

To learn how Sefas can help you manage supply chain problems through householding and workflow automation, contact us.

An Interview with Roger P. Gimbel, EDP, President and CEO of Gimbel & Associates

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By: Skip Henk, President/CEO of Xplor International

I recently had a chance to catch up with a longtime Xplor supporter and our newest Elite sponsor, Roger Gimbel of Gimbel & Associates.

Roger has been involved with Xplor for almost 25 years as a frequent speaker at Xplor events. He received his Electronic Document Professional (EDP), certification 21 years ago. He recently decided to participate in the Xplor Elite Sponsor program so I wanted get to know a little bit more of what Gimbel & Associates does, a bit of history and Roger’s views on the direction of the industry.

Skip:  Roger, I would like to thank you for both personally and on behalf of Xplor International for your support over the years and now as a Platinum Elite associates sponsor and Diamond Conference Sponsor.

Roger:  Roger:  I am happy to have the opportunity this year to enhance our relationship with Xplor as the association has been a valuable resource of information for personal and business growth. Gimbel & Associates joined Xplor in 1996 making this our 25th year in membership and support for the EDP (Electronic Document Professional) program, a valuable certification for all print professionals.

Skip:  For our readers who are not familiar with Gimbel & Associates, give us your 15-second elevator pitch about the company.

Roger:  Gimbel & Associates is a print industry international consulting firm that works with both print service providers and enterprise corporations to help them with strategy planning and implementation of business development projects.  The G&A team consists of SME’s that each have 25+ years’ experience with hands on participation and knowledge of the industry.

Skip:  The Gimbel family has been part of the printing industry for a long time.  If I am correct, starting in 1942.  Tell us a little bit about the company itself, a bit of history.

Roger:  The Gimbels in Print family has been in the printing business with over 80 years as of 2021.  The company evolved from manufacturing print products to helping develop new applications and technology products which has expanded into our current international consulting group. We use all the experience we have learned over the years to help others in printing and related industries succeed.  This ultimately saves them time, costs and promoted ROI.  There’s a newly published eBook on our site titled “Gimbels in Print” which goes into greater detail.  You can download this eBook and other publications at www.rogergimbel.com/.

Skip:  Your new book, “A Printer’s Perspective & Guide to Digital Printing and Variable Data,” along with the “Guide to Better Business,” provide insights in how to succeed in a changing industry.  Looking 2-4 years from now, what do you think our industry will look like?

Roger:  I believe that printing will be an industry of service providers that will be providing very specialized services, less commodity print and will incorporate targeted, analytic marketing. Multichannel delivery of information will be in the forefront of advertising and social communications. 

Skip:  What emerging technologies do you believe with further change the industry?

Roger:  Inkjet technology will continue to evolve and be the foundation and benchmark of all quality print.

Skip:  For our closing question, are print centers going to disappear?

Roger:  Print centers will not disappear, they will become hybrid locations where a print center in enterprise corporations will be producing immediate, required, same-day projects and more complex projects will be outsourced to print and service providers.

Skip:  Roger, thank you for your time.  Do you have any closing thoughts?

Roger:  I thoroughly believe that it is extremely important to be assessing your current operations to set up a strategy and plan that is managed by an internal champion with the backing of corporate commitment to create the “new” norm of the future.

Skip: Roger, once again, thank your thoughts and support. If anyone would like to more information Roger can be reached at: Roger P. Gimbel, EDP, roger@rogergimbel.com, Office 646-472-1932, cell 917-415-3125 or in case they can’t reach Roger; Gail Gimbel, Executive Director, gail@rogergimbel.com , Office 646-472-1950, cell 516-521-9522

Until next interview! Take care.

skip_Henk_Photo_2011

 

Skip Henk, EDP
President/CEO
Xplor International

Speed of Change 3 – A Whole New Pandora’s Box

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Submitted by Harry Stephens, President/CEO of DATAMATX
April 26, 2018

It’s been over a decade since I wrote a column titled “The Speed of Change.” In it, I discussed how technology was completely changing our relationship with time, which in turn, was changing our business processes dramatically.  In 2007, the technologies we were figuring out how to integrate were the Internet, PDAs and the new iPhone. Fast forward four years to 2011, when I wrote a column called The Speed of Change 2.  In 2011, it was a whole new set of tools, like mobile applications and media tablets, social networking and cloud services, that were demanding our attention.  Within a short time, these tools, and more, were all part of our daily lives, setting a completely new standard.

Of course, since 2011, the speed of change hasn’t stopped. In fact, it’s accelerated. And while things have become easier in many ways because of these advances, things have also become scarier. In fact, what I am calling The Speed of Change 3 has opened a whole new Pandora’s box.  While technological advances have provided our businesses with the potential to create more efficient systems, they have also opened new avenues for data protection threats.

We all read about these data breaches daily. Recently, I just read that the average data security breach takes less time to pull off than it does to prepare a cup of coffee, with 93 percent occurring in less than one minute. Conversely, it can take a business a very long time to recover from one. In the business we are in, where sensitive data is part of our daily work, a data breach would spell disaster. Therefore, every company, no matter what size, needs to have a security program in place. While there is no one security product or control that can prevent data breaches, it is critical that in our type of business we do what it takes to maintain the highest level of security possible with processes and procedures that eliminate vulnerabilities in a timely manner.

At DATAMATX, we have always dedicated extensive resources and implemented additional processes to ensure our clients continue to have the highest level of confidence in the managing and processing of their data. This has included successfully meeting rigorous compliance requirements year after year with third-party audits to continue to achieve FISMA, PCI DSS 3.2 and SOC 2 + HITRUST CSF certifications as well as investing heavily in cyber liability insurance.

It also includes making continued extensive upgrades to our comprehensive information security policies and procedures, establishing a continuous monitoring program and developing a risk based approach to protect the data and physical security of our three facilities. Additionally, for many years now, we have had a disaster recovery plan in place, with three comprehensive, fully redundant facilities and now have a more defined business continuity plan to ensure we meet the ever increasing client SLAs and audit requirements. To be sure, all of this took an investment on our part in time, effort and money.  But what is the potential cost of a data breach in terms of time, effort and money—and a company’s reputation? I shudder to think. In a recent meeting at our facility, a cyber insurance expert we invited to speak presented a data breach case study of 50,000 PII records being exposed with a final cost of $29 million dollars with crisis management, customer notification, lawsuits and regulatory fines being paid.

Technology is constantly changing and with those changes come security and privacy threats every organization faces. At DATAMATX, we focus a great deal of our attention on ensuring data security compliance standards. And, yes, it requires an investment from a business standpoint that affects the bottom line.

However, if you want to play the game today in the service provider industry—and not be viewed as simply the low-cost provider—you must think about whether your company is doing enough to protect your clients’ data. Because it is their expectations that security is an integral part of your business model that has set the bar. So, let me leave you with this thought:  If you want to be successful in the transactional and direct mail business, then it is important to understand that security and compliance are now in the driver’s seat—and the real bottom line.

Until next time – Harry

Harry Stephens

Harry Stephens is President/CEO, and founder of DATAMATX, one of the nation’s largest privately held, full-service providers of printed and electronic billing solutions. As an advocate for business mailers across the country, Stephens is actively involved in several postal trade associations.  He serves on the Executive Board of the Greater Atlanta Postal Customer Council, Board Member of the National Postal Policy Council (NPPC), Member of Major Mailers Association(MMA), and member of the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service.  He is also immediate past president of the Imaging Network Group (INg), an association for Print/Mail Service Bureaus.  As an expert on high-volume print and mail, he has frequently been asked to speak to various USPS groups, including the Board of Governors, about postal reform and other issues affecting business mailers.  Find more information about DATAMATX at www.datamatx.com. 

Harry’s Corner – Here We Go Again – “6-2-5” is Back

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Submitted by Harry Stephens, President/CEO of DATAMATX
June 19, 2017

In my experience, few things are more true than the fact that knowing you need to do something—and then actually doing it—are two very different things. There is perhaps no better example of this than the longstanding (and ongoing) conversation about the financial difficulties of the U.S. Postal Service and what to do about them.

I read two articles on the subject in the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal this past month, reporting that the latest entrant into this often controversial conversation is President Trump, by way of his 2018 budget plan. The plan leaves the door open for reducing the current six-day mail delivery “where there is a business case for doing so.”  You can expect that if this proposal materializes it will be met with upset, just as it did when then Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe attempted to unilaterally end Saturday mail delivery in 2013. That attempt stirred up strong resistance from members of Congress and the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association, among others, and ultimately failed. Since then, proposals to address the Postal Service’s financial woes have not included reducing delivery.

Back in 2008, I floated the idea in this column of eliminating Wednesday delivery, recognizing that direct mailers prize Saturday delivery, when most of us are at home and have more time to look at our mail. Then in 2009, I wrote another column urging the need to take a hard look at eliminating Saturday delivery, and to step forward and propose other cost-cutting ideas if you have them.  Mail is important to all of us for many different reasons, so I am sure reducing mail delivery is still a difficult pill for many to swallow. However, I continue to maintain it may be a necessary step to help end the financial struggles of the USPS, which have been a problem for more than a decade now. We need to accept that we are going to have to reach a compromise somewhere. Corporate enterprises as well as postal customers, especially rural America, may have to give up something to keep postage rates affordable.

We all know that having a difficult problem to solve can be overwhelming and even paralyzing. But even taking small steps can make a difference. It reminds me of a story I like about a little boy on a beach littered with washed-up starfish. As the boy was throwing them back in the water one by one, a man came up to him and said, “Son, what are you doing? There are thousands of starfish on this beach. You can’t possibly make a difference.” The boy picked up a starfish and threw it in the water and replied, “It made a difference to that one!”

Of course, eliminating one day of mail delivery—whether that day is Wednesday or Saturday or another option—won’t solve all the financial concerns of the USPS. But when you consider that it will take carriers off the road for one day a week, and the savings that will be realized in terms of labor costs, gas and truck maintenance, it will certainly make a difference. And for that reason alone, I think it is worth talking about again.

My fundamental point has been and still is this: The financial viability of the USPS isn’t just the USPS’ issue to solve. It is an issue for everyone who relies on the mail, whether for business or personally. It is our issue, and I think the one thing we can agree on is that something needs to be done to address it. The problem is that actually doing something, as we all know, is a very different thing.

Until next time – Harry

Harry Stephens

Harry Stephens is President/CEO, and founder of DATAMATX, one of the nation’s largest privately held, full-service providers of printed and electronic billing solutions. As an advocate for business mailers across the country, Stephens is actively involved in several postal trade associations.  He serves on the Executive Board of the Greater Atlanta Postal Customer Council, Board Member of the National Postal Policy Council (NPPC), Member of Major Mailers Association(MMA), and member of the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service.  He is also immediate past president of the Imaging Network Group (INg), an association for Print/Mail Service Bureaus.  As an expert on high-volume print and mail, he has frequently been asked to speak to various USPS groups, including the Board of Governors, about postal reform and other issues affecting business mailers.  Find more information about DATAMATX at www.datamatx.com. 

OpenText Exstream, Digital Transformation and Customer Communications Management

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An Interview with OpenText Exstream, Senior Manager of Product Strategy
By: Skip Henk, EDP – CEO of Xplor International

Last year Open Text Corp. acquired certain customer-communications management assets from HP Inc., an acquisition that certainly expanded and complemented the OpenText portfolio of software offerings.

Now that the dust has settled a bit, I wanted to catch up with Avi Greenfield, EDP – Senior Manager of Product Strategy, to discuss his views about digital transformation and Customer Communications from an OpenText Exstream point of view.

Avi, a 20 year industry veteran, is focused on technology solutions that build business value, focusing on customer communications and content management strategy. As I mentioned he is a Senior Manager of Product Strategy for OpenText Exstream, responsible for understanding the needs of customers for managing business-critical communications in complex and demanding environments, and driving the direction of the Exstream portfolio to meet those needs.

Avi received his Electronic Document Professional (EDP) certification in 2012.

Skip: Avi, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts today.

Avi: You are welcome; we appreciate Xplor allowing us the opportunity.

Skip: For our readers who are not familiar with OpenText Exstream, can you give us your 15 second   elevator pitch?

Avi: OpenText Exstream offers the fastest, most reliable communications production engine to enable

digital transformation for companies. Exstream helps companies in a range of industries and sizes optimize customer engagement through the design and delivery of personalized, consistent, compliant, anytime, anywhere communications for better customer experiences across all channels. The latest version includes capabilities that enable users to create responsive, mobile-ready content; generate robust, interactive charts; perform controlled in-context editing; and better handle PDFs.

Skip: There is a lot in the media now about “digital transformation” and “digital business/digital economy” – what does that mean to OpenText and why is it important? 

Avi:  With 50% of the workforce expected to be made up of those who were “born digital” by 2020, digital communications are becoming more and more important and many companies are looking to move to a digital business model. A recent Gartner report states that 89% of companies will compete on customer experience and 90% of CEOs place CX as one of their top three priorities, so companies will need to be able to provide exceptional customer experiences across multiple channels to stay competitive in the future.

The Millennial generation is now larger than the Baby Boomers and they have more than one trillion dollars in purchasing power. Companies need to adapt their customer communications to appeal to this highly digital and technologically advanced group. Digital transformation of your business will be critical and is much more than being able to send email or PDFs because these consumers want much more engaging experiences and access to their brands 24/7. They have the highest adoption and usage of mobile devices of any generation, and they navigate seamlessly between devices and channels, which means they expect relevant and consistent content, experiences and branding across all channels.

Skip: What is the impact of digital transformation on CCM?

Avi:  We see it driving a lot of demand for modern CCM capabilities. Digital transformation means rethinking business processes to meet consumer demand for frictionless multichannel interactions. This frequently means updating or replacing core systems of record and systems and engagement like CRM, billing, customer care, and claims for example. Most organizations already have multiple systems that are used to produce and deliver traditional and digital communications. So when they update those core systems, it’s a great time to consider whether their current CCM tools and processes are able to serve all of their enterprise needs for engaging customers in a way puts them at the center and gives them the freedom to engage using the channels and devices of their choice. We see this leading to increased investment in enterprise-grade CCM tools and also increased focus and organizational resources dedicated to producing and delivering timely, relevant, compliant communications.

Skip: Given these changes, and a shift to digital documents and communications, what steps can people take right now to take advantage of this?

Avi: In the digital age, it is critical for your company to move from traditional paper-based documents to engaging conversations across all channels. By delivering communications in the channels preferred by your customers and designing with digital in mind, you can turn your communications into a differentiator.

Your communications should use clear and concise language and be compliant, accurate, and controlled. All this requires synchronizing the right data with CCM software and the business processes that intersect with customer touchpoints.

Communications—whether traditional or digital—are the primary customer touchpoint for most organizations. The quality, timeliness, and accuracy of those communications have a huge impact on the consumer’s perception of your company. And the quality of a customer’s experience is the single greatest predictor of whether they will return and promote your company or defect to a competitor and malign it.

The design of any communication is important and can either drive desired behaviors, additional revenue or loyalty if done well. If not, it can undermine customer experience and create expensive call center inquiries. As far as best practices, five key things to consider when designing any communication are:

  1. Design for understanding – What do you want recipients to understand?
  2. Design to drive action – What do you want recipients to do or not do?
  3. Design for digital first, but don’t neglect traditional channels – Do recipients have a seamless cross-channel experience?
  4. Design to align business user profile with the business process – How do you involve business users? Do they own content and messages? Can they help personalize communications for the front office?
  5. Design customer-centric communications from the outside-in – What do you do to modernize your processes and systems of interaction to deliver on consumer expectations for seamless cross-channel interactions?

Skip: Those are five great points. Do you believe the investment in CCM worth it?

Avi: Not only is it worth it, but it is essential to positive business outcomes. Providing a better customer experience is shown to increase loyalty and lifetime customer value and can be a key source of competitive differentiation. Delivering interactions that are clear, timely, and easy to understand leads to higher customer satisfaction.

So there are many pressures and expectations on customer communications. Companies must respond quickly to changing markets and circumstances, while providing consistent, high-quality communications in the recipient’s language and preferred delivery channel.

There is also a critical need to maintain compliance and control over communications for legal and regulatory reasons. At the same time, business users are demanding more control over the content and faster time to market. And of course operational requirements demand timely, optimized output at the lowest possible cost. So having an enterprise CCM platform with the right organizational commitment and resources dedicated to it is essential to increasing profitability, improving customer experience, and mitigating risk.

Skip: Avi, I once again thank you for taking the time to speak with me today and sharing your insights. Anyone who would like more information can contact OpenText here.

About OpenText Exstream
Exstream is a multichannel customer communication management (CCM) solution that is proven to improve the customer experience and make customer interactions more profitable. It allows business users to create the communications for connected customer journeys using the delivery formats and channels customers prefer – including email, web and mobile.

This software solution powers the transformation of all of your data—whatever file sources, formats, and systems you use—into relevant and insightful customer communications. With on-premise and cloud deployment options, Exstream is scalable to fit the needs of any department or complex enterprise environment. Design and deliver consistent, personalized, compliant, anytime, anywhere communications with Exstream.

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Skip Henk, EDP
President/CEO
Xplor International

Harry’s Corner – 47-47-6 Unintended Consequences

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Submitted by Harry Stephens, President/CEO of DATAMATX
November 21, 2016

We held our annual INg meeting at Orlando in conjunction with this year’s Graph Expo in September. One of the speakers at our meeting was a labor attorney and among the many things he spoke to us about was the upcoming Overtime Rule. For those of you that may not know specific details on this new rule, starting on December 1 2016, the salary threshold to avoid paying overtime will move to $913 per week (an annual salary of $47,476) from the current $455 per week.  Right now, hourly workers, lower-wage earners and non-managerial workers must be paid 1.5 times their hourly wage when they work more than 40 hours in a week. Under the new rule, an estimated 4.2 million workers, including those on salary, will be eligible for overtime.

On November 10th, at the Fall Board of Director’s meeting for the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, where I am on the board, the issue came up again. The Georgia Chamber of Commerce represents the unified voice of Georgia’s business community with the motto “What’s good for business is good for Georgia” driving its policy and legislative direction to ensure the future of economic mobility for all Georgians. So it makes sense that business and job creation are always a focus. I brought up this impending Overtime Rule at the meeting, encouraging both the local and national Chamber of Commerce to vocally oppose this type of job creation loss initiative as it will certainly have unintended consequences, hurting the people it intended to help.

For example, in lower-paid jobs where the minimum wage is also increasing, employers are put in the difficult situation of having middle managers making considerably less per working hour than new hires. Think of the restaurant industry where wages may be lower, hours are long and profit margins very thin. While this rule is meant to increase take-home pay, these changes may limit employment and advancement opportunities in this industry and others like it. Another good example—college graduates looking for their first job.  An employer will certainly have to think twice about hiring an inexperienced worker who needs time to “learn on the job” for an annual salary of $47,476.00 or unbudgeted overtime. Jobs are hard enough to get when you don’t have the right experience. This rule will make it even more difficult. Unintended consequences. Hurting the people it intended to help.

For every business, this rule causes a number of consequences as well, particularly when it comes to payroll. We essentially have two choices. If the increased salary threshold creates newly non-exempt employees to stay compliant, we need to either pay employees higher salaries, or pay overtime wages.

In preparation, classifying employees correctly as to whether they are exempt or non-exempt will be extremely important, particularly if you are in a business that has peaks in productivity at times that require employees to work longer hours, like month end or holidays. Because of this, I recommend checking out the Department of Labor or your state’s wage enforcement agency to get the exact requirements. The last thing a business needs is unexpected financial or legal consequences for not clearly stating an employee’s classification, entitlement to overtime and tracking of such.

It will also be important to have clear communication with employees about record keeping. For some who have been proud of being a “white collar worker” now required to keep track of time, this can be difficult. Explaining the rule and how it will affect them and your business will ease any misconceptions they may have about any changes in job description or pay.

Oh, and another piece of “good news.”  The minimum salary threshold will automatically increase every three years based on wage growth. The first automatic increase will happen on Jan. 1, 2020, which means more employees will become exempt as the threshold rises. Now, if you think you are in the clear because you are a small business, I have more “good news.” The Department of Labor FAQ fact sheet does say that “the proposed rule [applies] to employees of enterprises that have an annual gross volume of sales made or business done of $500,000 or more, and certain other businesses.” Ok. If your business makes less than $500,000 of annual revenue, is it exempt? It appears the answer is still no. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), individual employees may still be “covered in any workweek when they are individually engaged in interstate commerce, the production of goods for interstate commerce, or an activity that is closely related and directly essential to the production of such goods.”  Like I said earlier – research the information on the Department of Labor’s website or your state’s wage enforcement agency to get the exact requirements of the ruling.

There is no way around the fact that this ruling is bad for business—especially small to medium businesses that have a hard enough time growing their businesses as it is. We need dedicated employees who consider themselves professionals and want to work the long hours often needed to get ahead and grow in their profession. Employers will now have a hard time giving them that choice. Instead of benefiting workers, the rule takes away flexible schedules and maybe even certain career pursuits. For businesses, it places yet another financial burden to manage. Perfect examples of unintended consequences hurting the people it intended to help.

Until next time – Harry

Harry Stephens

Harry Stephens is President/CEO, and founder of DATAMATX, one of the nation’s largest privately held, full-service providers of printed and electronic billing solutions. He has been active in the Atlanta business community for over 40 years in various professional and trade organizations, most recently as a board member of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce.  As an advocate for business mailers across the country, Stephens is actively involved in several postal trade associations.  He serves on the Executive Board of the Greater Atlanta Postal Customer Council,  Board Member of the National Postal Policy Council (NPPC), Member of Major Mailers Association(MMA), and member of the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service.  He is also immediate past president of the Imaging Network Group (INg), an association for Print/Mail Service Bureaus.  As an expert on high-volume print and mail, he has frequently been asked to speak to various USPS groups, including the Board of Governors, about postal reform and other issues affecting business mailers.  Find DATAMATX at www.datamatx.com

 

The importance of the customer experience when it comes to your proof of delivery process

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Submitted by Alexandra Truchot, Content Creation Specialist for Objectif Lune.
October 12, 2016

Building your customer base involves a lot of money and effort. Once you’ve attracted new customers, it’s wise to do everything you can to keep them happy and committed over the long term so that your investment was worthwhile.

If you focus your efforts mainly on getting new customers and neglect to give your current ones a special experience, you’re actually working for your competitor, who is providing a more exclusive customer experience and doing everything possible to win their loyalty.

That said, you have a golden opportunity when delivering products to interact with your customers and make the experience positive for them. The goal is to make them want to continue buying your products, and even to recommend you to others in their network. In fact, this is one of the only chances you’ll get to meet them in person and interact directly. Why not take the opportunity to wow them?

Provide quality service to maintain customers
By providing your delivery persons with a tablet to manage delivery notes, you can impress your customers by asking them not only to sign the delivery note directly on the mobile device (rather than signing a piece of paper), but by allowing them to change the quantities they received in real time. They can even add visual proof of a damaged package, and the delivery person can specify the location information to confirm that the product was delivered to the place the customer had indicated. Then it just takes a click to send the proof of delivery to the office and to email it to the customer.

Be proactive in earning customer loyalty
Since the delivery note gets to the office faster, your staff can be proactive in addressing problems. If a parcel is damaged, the office clerk will immediately receive the proof of damage and can quickly contact the customer to apologize and offer an alternative. When paper is used, it can take 24 to 48 hours, or longer, before the customer gets any news about the damaged product. But in the former case, the customer hardly has any time to get upset. With an automated digital process, customers can’t help but notice how proactive you are in dealing with such incidents.

In addition, since data entry is no longer done by hand, the data is more reliable and the billing can be done seamlessly. Not only will your customers pay faster, since nothing needs to be changed on the invoice, but there’ll be less risk of receiving complaints.

Get closer to reaching your productivity, operational efficiency and customer experience objectives one step at a time!

AlexandraTruchot ThumbnailAlexandra Truchot – Content creation specialist with Objectif Lune. Writer and compulsive reader. Eager for unknown destinations and exciting encounters. Anything is possible, you just have to believe it. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Objectif Lune has 20 years of experience developing Customer Communications Management solutions. Our solutions bridge the gap between systems and automate more personalized, relevant, multichannel customer communications. Learn more at: www.objectiflune.com.

Automating the steps in a standard purchasing process to improve customer experience

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Submitted by Alexandra Truchot, Content Creation Specialist for Objectif Lune.
September 29, 2016

Purchasing one of your products or services is only one of the steps in a more complex customer journey. By the time your customers get to the payment stage, they will have gone through many other crucial stages during which they also interacted with your company. Furthermore, following a purchase, the journey continues because if you want to build customer loyalty or have customers make another purchase, you have to keep in touch with them.  So the journey begins with the discovery of your brand and continues with the order, payment and delivery, not to mention the after-sales service, if required.

All of these steps are just as important in order to build customer loyalty and turn your customers into ambassadors of your products and services.

Managing them, however, can be complex and often involve many small and tedious manual tasks. By automating the most essential processes, you could save a lot of time and gain your customers’ trust by offering them a better experience when dealing with your company.

Here are a few steps in a standard customer journey which you can easily automate.

Communications with potential customers
Sales cycles are often long. Prospecting is a complex task. It takes months to strengthen ties with your network and in order to do so, you need to provide high-quality content to potential customers.

Accounts opening
The creation of new accounts is a defining moment in the customer-company relationship. But if this step is made even more complex by the excessive use of paper or tedious manual data entry by your employees, it can be frustrating for potential customers.

Order-taking
Managing purchase orders often requires scanning piles upon piles of documents every day. Employees have to manually enter numerous data to launch the subsequent phases of the process. This causes many delays and orders can sometimes take several days before being confirmed!

Deliveries
When delivering the products to your customers, you have a golden opportunity to interact with them and ensure that their experience is a good one.

Invoicing
Did you know that transactional messages are 8 times more likely to be opened than other types of communications? This is therefore a great opportunity for you to communicate with your customers.

Document management
According to the Institute of Financial Operations, 43% of organizations say that being unable to find the right data in their different customer files remains their greatest issue where after-sales services are concerned. When Customer Service wants to respond to a request, it often wastes valuable time trying to put the information together, or simply even finding the information!

Get closer to reaching your productivity, operational efficiency and customer experience objectives one step at a time!

AlexandraTruchot ThumbnailAlexandra Truchot – Content creation specialist with Objectif Lune. Writer and compulsive reader. Eager for unknown destinations and exciting encounters. Anything is possible, you just have to believe it. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Objectif Lune has 20 years of experience developing Customer Communications Management solutions. Our solutions bridge the gap between systems and automate more personalized, relevant, multichannel customer communications. Learn more at: www.objectiflune.com.

Providing a more relevant customer experience

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Submitted by Alexandra Truchot, Content Creation Specialist for Objectif Lune.
August 3, 2016

Do you dream of flexibility when communicating with your customers? Do you want to offer a better customer experience? Are your organization’s systems too inflexible, keeping you from using all the data you need to provide superior service to your customers?

More than ever, organizations are being asked to make dramatic changes to how they communicate with their end clients. There are many occasions for communicating with your customers: welcome messages, invoices, orders, confirmation of payment or invitations to evaluate the services.

Consumers have high expectations and demand personalized, relevant communications. They no longer want multi-page transactional records that do not take their uniqueness into account or highlight the relationship they have with you. Personally, I hate receiving useless paperwork. I don’t want to feel like just another number, and I will always choose a company that offers me service that looks like me.

This is a huge issue today. Organizations that do not make the effort to optimize customer communications are going to quickly lose their clientele to competitors that have been able to get onboard sooner.

So, to keep your customers, your communications have to be responsive. And to do that, you have to be able to quickly and easily modify the documents you send them, based on their purchasing history, geographic location, or marketing campaigns in progress.

In addition to wanting to satisfy your customers, you have to fulfill numerous legal requirements related to transactional records. You have to add specific phrases to comply with a new law or modify certain segments of the invoice in accordance with more stringent laws in a country where you have a subsidiary. In these cases, you have to know how to respond quickly to comply and you really have no choice.

So what to do?

Take back control of your templates by modifying them in a tool specifically intended for document design. The design tool should give you access to advanced functions for personalizing your documents and give you greater flexibility when you want to modify them.

But obviously, you don’t want to get rid of the old templates created using your ERP system and start completely from scratch.

There are now business document composition tools that go beyond mere design. Getting a tool that functions like a middleware system and regenerates the old templates into something more dynamic and modern, will give you greater flexibility. You will not lose your old templates – you’ll improve them. You’ll make them relevant, customizable and interactive.

In addition, you will be able to take advantage of them to move to multi-source communications. A good tool will enable you to easily send your documents using various means. But to smoothly make the switch to digital, you can refer to my advice in my previous note.

AlexandraTruchot ThumbnailAlexandra Truchot – Content creation specialist with Objectif Lune. Writer and compulsive reader. Eager for unknown destinations and exciting encounters. Anything is possible, you just have to believe it. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Objectif Lune has 20 years of experience developing Customer Communications Management solutions. Our solutions bridge the gap between systems and automate more personalized, relevant, multichannel customer communications. Learn more at: www.objectiflune.com.