Output Process Challenges

The highly competitive market place, the need to exceed customer expectations, the shift from traditional revenue models to value based revenue models, shorter time-to-market ... sales has never been so challenging! But it has also never been so interesting! Organizations know that every customer contact counts. Customer communications management has become a necessity.

• Every customer is different, but it's difficult to personalize your customer communications
• Documents are difficult to understand, resulting in increased help desk calls and low customer satisfaction
• You want to reward your best customers by providing them with high quality customer communications
• Customers receive documents from different departments containing inconsistent information
• Each customer communication should be relevant, personalized and delivered using the customer's channel of preference
• The need for shorter time-to-market to promote new products and services
• Need for a communication mix using traditional media, like print or the web, and social media
• Receiving information about your customer's preferred communication channels and interests, so organizations can use make their customer communication more relevant and thus more interesting for their customers

As a marketeer, you know that the majority of communication in organizations happens through the exchange of documents like contracts, invoices, purchase orders, statements, bills, and many more. Not only through traditional media like print, web or email. With the emergence of social media and mobile, your customers expect you to use these new channels in your communication strategy as well.

• With different brands or departments to manage, there is no control over the corporate identity or brand positioning
• The time to market new products and services is too long. Your organization should be able to react instantly on new market trends
• The current systems that are used to design, produce and distribute documents is so complex that the IT department needs to be involved in all stages
• You know that providing relevant, personalized communications, instead of mass communications, would both save your organization costs, make the customer happy and result in better customer response
• Not only providing information to the customer, but also getting their feedback in order to improve future communications, is an important part of your organization's communication strategy. You need to interact with your customer
• Due to multiple systems, the information you provide is sometimes out of date or no longer relevant
• Part of your customers are no longer using print as their channel of preference. Communications delivered through the web, using social media or mobile is becoming more and more important

ICT and Operations is involved in almost every customer communications process. From data capture and document composition to production and delivery. Your internal customers expect short implementation cycles and responsiveness. While you are concerned with software maintenance, platforms and integration.

• Maintaining multiple output systems for different applications and departments is time consuming and expensive
• Lack of standardization, the need for simplification
• Business, marketing and sales departments are dependent on the ICT department to implement changes in customer communications. These changes are often done manually, so are very time consuming and costly
• Increased need for multi-channel delivery and the integration with social media
• Unclear invoices result in increased helpdesk calls and unpaid bills
• The need to use electronic signatures (digital signatures) in your customer communications to prevent fraud and guarantee authenticity. Even when your customer makes a print out of the document
• Vendor lock-in due to proprietary systems, resulting in a lot of additional programming. Lack of flexibility and freedom
• The need for automation in output processes
• No closed-loop overview of output processes, lack of control

The highly competitive market place, the shift from traditional business models to value based business models and the outcomes of the economic crisis all have a huge impact on how organizations communicate with their customers.

• No clear view on the costs of different customer communications, no accountability of different departments. No accurate measurement of return on investment (ROI)
• Invoices coming from your financial systems are not clear, customers often do not understand them, resulting in unpaid bills
• Failure to have contracts, invoices, statements and other documents comply easily with changing regulations
• No possibility for your customers to receive communications using their preferred delivery channel, to get the most effective delivery cost
• Use of electronic signatures (digital signatures) to protect electronic documents, while document authenticity is guaranteed when the document is printed by your customer
• Customer information is coming from different systems, no possibility to combine different data in one document