Give the people what they want – how and when
you want them to have it!
How well do you know your customers? In an age of greater choice
and declining brand loyalty, customer knowledge is rightly seen as
fundamental to business success. Understanding what your
customers want is the keystone of good customer service.
However, new research1 by First Data Merchant Solutions (FDMS)
suggests that more than half of Britain's small and medium-sized
businesses (SMEs) have sketchy knowledge of their customers, with
42% basing decisions on gut feeling rather than hard facts.
The perils of this approach are highlighted in a parallel survey of
consumers conducted by FDMS, in which 66% of shoppers said that
being targeted with offers that don't reflect their interests and
needs is off-putting.
Clearly, improving customer knowledge should be a priority. Yet,
gathering, noting and recording customer preferences is just the
start. The next stage is to act on that knowledge and here, too,
British businesses are falling short.
At Neopost, we see this all the time in the area of customer
communications. How an organisation connects with its customers
is just as important as message content. Some people will always
prefer to receive statements, invoices, offers and promotions in
digital form; others like the touch and feel of paper. Most favour
different channels for different messages.
Finding out about the preferences of customers is the easy part.
What's more difficult is consistently interacting with them in their
preferred format, without error, duplication or delay. Some smaller
businesses develop complex manual processes to achieve this,
printing everything and then sorting output into separate piles for
mailing or scanning and email.
Such work-arounds are limited, time-consuming, wasteful of paper
and toner and completely impractical for organisations with many
100s or 1,000s of customers. They are also unnecessary.
Our award-winning output management solutions can automate the
whole process so that messages are automatically sent in the
format preferred by each customer. The range includes on-premise
and cloud-based solutions to meet the needs of businesses of all
sizes, at every stage of digital transformation.
A particularly powerful solution for SMEs like those surveyed by
FDMS is Neopost’s OMS-500 output management software solution,
recently awarded an Editor's Choice award by Business Info, the
workplace magazine for small and medium-sized businesses.
This web-based tool lets you send letters, invoices, statements and
other transactional material, as well as marketing communications,
via paper-based or digital channels as part of a single workflow,
with archiving of all messages and a scheduler for campaign
management.
In fact, automated distribution is just one element of what is a
complete communications solution. The OMS-500 output
management software solution can also be used to:

personalise customer communications – another priority for
businesses today – by adding text or varying
inserts/attachments for each recipient;

reduce costs by automatically processing mail to take
maximum advantage of Royal Mail discounts for pre-sorted
mail;

batch print, sort and merge documents to maximise savings,
for example by collating documents to the same recipient
from multiple departments in the same envelope; and
centralise the production of hard copy and digital
communications right across an organisation including remote
offices.

Business Info praised the OMS-500 output management software
solution for its ability to maximise the impact of customer
communications and add control, efficiency and flexibility to the
mailing process. Crucially, by recording and respecting customer
preferences, it also allows organisations to base their
communication choices on hard facts and not gut feeling.
www.neopost.co.uk/data-software/output-management
1. First Data Merchant Solutions. YouGov Business
Survey/Consumer Survey, April 2015.