In an industry where margins are tight and competition is fierce, finding smart ways to reduce printing costs is a must. As we step into 2025, print businesses must rethink their operational...
Customer Experience is becoming increasingly important in every industry.
Qualtrics found almost 90% of customers report trusting a company whose service they rate as “very good.” On the other hand, only 16% of those who give an “inferior” rating trust companies to the same degree.
A print MIS fundamentally provides a backbone for communicating effectively both internally and externally with customers. It also provides capabilities to define processes and to improve them through automation.
This article highlights how useful your print MIS could be to your improvement program. Of course, each printing company is different, and each MIS is different, but most of the ideas below should be applicable to most.
1. Self Service
Microsoft's Global State of Multichannel Customer Support found more than 90% of consumers expect brands or organizations to have an online customer self-service offering, and 60% say they have a more favorable view of a brand if that self-service offering is mobile responsive.
If you haven’t gone down the web-to-print route yet, based on this research it is a step you should consider. And you can even take this one step further. ePS MarketDirect StoreFront is a dedicated web-to-print platform that can provide a single access touch point for your customers to view and order all the products or services you offer — and crucially provides you with upsell and add-on opportunities.
2. Real-time order updates
This is almost an expected norm these days, with many online shopping companies sending updates when orders are received, out for delivery, or have been delivered. All this is achievable with a print MIS, but you could also send an email or even an SMS at other key milestones e.g. when the job is on the press, or how about a text reminder that the job is on proof?
3. Targeted communication
No one likes being bombarded with generic marketing communication, and you can use the information in your print MIS to prevent this. Using an integrated CRM, you can identify quoting or buying habits that will help you target the right customers at the right time with the right information.
For example, you can identify any customers who normally order calendars in a certain month and then auto-enroll them in a marketing campaign that your marketing team has already set up. Hey presto – your customers get sent an example pack in the post with a follow-up email, a week before they would normally have to start thinking about this project. Slick indeed.
4. Communicate effectively
Your print MIS will be used in most, if not all departments in your company, you just have to make sure everyone is using it to communicate. You can use it to send messages to each other, set each other tasks, alert teams to important milestones, and generally capture and disseminate information about your customers and specific jobs, all of which will help provide a great Customer Experience.
5. Artwork pre-flighting
From our many visits to our customers over the years, they all talk of the same problem – incorrect artwork! More often than not, the artwork that’s sent over is not what was described. This causes huge problems for your business, wasting considerable time and money, but it also affects your customer experience.
Imagine you’re a customer who asks for a quick turnaround and speaks to a CSR who promises they’re on it! The CSR does everything right, turns the estimate and order around quickly, gets it on the production schedule, gets the artwork from the customer, and attaches it to the job, all in record time.
Many hours later, at the end of the day, prepress spots the artwork in the wrong size for the job and sends it back for new artwork. The customer is then contacted, who is frustrated because the designer has gone home and feels that the CSR was not really ‘on it’ at all!
6. Customer Surveys
We see these everywhere now, even at airport security or on card payment machines in small shops. You can use your MIS to send out these surveys at different points of the customer journey to measure how well you’re doing in different areas e.g. customer service, production quality, and delivery speed. You can use tools such as LoyaltyLoop to create a set of simple surveys that can be emailed or texted out from your MIS when triggered by key milestone events.
There are plenty of other ways your MIS could help you, especially if you take a close look at your business processes and investigate ways you can streamline them. But the above list should be enough to get the creative juices flowing.
