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April 2008
Greetings!
A Discussion about Variable Data Printing (continued)
Last month we covered the availability of tools that
enable variable data printing (VDP), and wondered
why all printed documents sent to customers were not
personalized to the point of individual messaging. So
we also looked at a few of the barriers that keep an
organization from adopting a VDP document strategy.
This month, we'll continue the VDP discussion.
Please note that there is more information on this topic than is appropriate for the newsletter format. We've provided a link below to one of our web pages that contains additional content. Included in the obstacles that we identified were: concern over a possible requirement for capital investment, entrenchment in a workflow built to support homogeneous documents, unavailability of comprehensive data, and the difficulty of thinking of transactional or marketing documents as investments instead of just costs.
Document professionals can get VDP started
As we all know, successfully and efficiently producing
high volumes of documents requires the cooperation
and communication of many different groups;
marketing/creative, vendors, IT, document operations,
etc. This aspect of close communication and
cooperative development is even more critical when it
comes to VDP documents. A single erroneous or
missing piece of data, or one that is incorrectly
interpreted, can easily turn a highly-effective
individualized mail piece into one that has a negative
effect upon the customer relationship.In most organizations, the information that could be used to create an individualized profile of each customer resides in databases that are compiled and maintained by separate divisions of the company without any regard to the others. Critical customer information may be gathered by sales, billing, accounts receivable, customer service, account management, and other disparate vertical organizations within the same company. Some of these functions may have even been outsourced. Document professionals are in an excellent position to get the different parties together and talking about creating higher-value documents. They also have a rather unique distinction of handling a lot of the variable data that is already appearing on separate customer documents. Document production people might be able to get a good start on creating customer profiles by mining data that is included in existing documents - or at least identifying where the data might be stored. Service bureaus can approach their customers in much the same way. Starting a conversation about creating VDP documents is an opportunity to add value to your services and to help to secure your relationship with your customers.
But they can't do it alone
It is likely that a document production organization that
wants to start a VDP document strategy will not have
all the expertise in house to do the entire project.
Bringing in some outside experts will allow the
operations people to concentrate on changes that they
need to make in their own departments to support the
new customer communications strategy. This is an
entirely new concept for many document
professionals. Having some help from people who
can guide the organization at the beginning will keep
the initiative on track.Some organizations may need to look seriously at data quality. As we've mentioned, bad data can make even the best-designed documents lose 100% of their intended influence. Make sure that someone can look at separately-compiled data to validate its accuracy. Remove duplicates, resolve discrepancies, etc. If you need convincing of this need, just take a look at addresses that are associated with the same customers. In many organizations, there is no central repository for even this most basic information, so old addresses, misspellings, or missing apartment numbers abound in various databases. If your IT organization has the skills and bandwidth to analyze all the data, use them. If not, consider bringing in a data quality analysis firm. Multi-media messaging is an area where extra help may be advisable. Especially if your strategy includes personalized URL's or automatically triggered follow- up communications that encompass web, email, telephone, and postal mail. Fortunately, there are a number of companies that can provide all the help you need in this area. In many cases these firms have offerings that can be matched to how much you want to do internally and how much you want to outsource. Partnering with such an organization can take a lot of pressure off the internal resources. Service bureaus especially will need some help in the area of pricing and selling VDP to their customers. As we mentioned, the strategy of determining return on investment is a lot different from simply selling pages of print at a commodity price. Partnering with a firm that views VDP as a key to growing their own business as well as yours is the way to really leverage the technology to its full potential. ADDITIONAL TIPS AND SUGGESTIONS ABOUT SUCCESSFULLY IMPLEMENTING AND MAINTAINING AN OPERATION THAT SUPPORTS VARIABLE DATA PRINTING CAN BE FOUND ON THE PRINT/MAIL CONSULTANTS WEB SITE. CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THIS ADDITIONAL CONTENT AVAILABLE ONLY TO NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIBERS.
NEW! Sincerely,  Mike Porter
Print/Mail Consultants
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