Customer Communication Management: Solving an Ongoing Challenge

Pick any decade, century, or era: in every location, at every point in history, communication has always been crucial. It’s essential for any kind of progress, forward movement, and cooperation toward shared outcomes.

This reality exists in your print business, too: clear communication is one key to success, and it shows up everywhere, from job onboarding to job completion. With clear communication, jobs run through the process smoothly and accurately. Without it, they rarely do.

Communication matters outside the lifecycle of a print job, as well. Communication with end customers—before, during, and even after the print job—is key to ongoing success, especially in today’s shifting landscape.

A Shifting Landscape

Today’s print service providers understand how important communication is, even as the landscape of the commercial print industry continues to shift. In the past printers could focus mainly on the communication surrounding a job: have we gotten the proper details, are we managing that information properly, and so on.

But not anymore.

Print service providers are evolving into something more. It’s exciting to see commercial print service providers embracing new technology, which empowers them to take on new roles. Today, printers are implementing and running marketing campaigns, serving as ongoing advisors with repeat customers, and much more.

These expanded service offerings are an attractive opportunity: they provide a way to scale your business and grow your profits beyond what you can achieve as a print-only business.

As your service offerings expand, so does your need for better, more consistent customer communication. That’s where RICOH’s customer communication management tools come in, helping your team nurture and develop deeper ongoing customer relationships that go beyond the printed page—and bring in more recurring work for your business.

Customer Communication Management

As your print business’s communication with end customers becomes a more integral part of an ongoing business-generating relationship, it’s a smart move to get more strategic with that communication.

That’s what customer communication management is all about: putting in place systems that lower the costs of business processes by strengthening and organizing communication from end to end.

At RICOH, we help print customers overcome the barriers to customer communication management, both in terms of marketing outreach and the communications that happen during every job.

We have experts in nearly every vertical that can work with you to define the business challenges preventing optimal customer communication management. Then we help you solve those business challenges, eliminating the bottlenecks and roadblocks currently tripping you up.

We’ve put together an eBook series that highlights the pain points and common issues in each stage of the commercial printer’s ecosystem. Check out the eBooks now for both in-plant and print service providers.

Product Spotlight: FusionPro

Many products can and do go into customer communication management, and we’ll highlight just one of them here: FusionPro VDP Solutions.

FusionPro VDP Solutions is a powerful tool in the client communication arsenal. It empowers printers to offer a new level of personalized or variable data printing. FusionPro allows printers to pull in customer data from their end client and populate it into pre-defined templates.

From there, printers can produce dynamic, highly personalized print and digital marketing assets for their clients — automating at a scale and level of detail unlike anything you’ve seen before.

FusionPro can provide workflow assistance and automation in other ways as well, such as producing data-rich business documents that automatically pull in variable data.

We’re proud to offer FusionPro in a variety of configurations, from desktop use to a high-performance API.

Explore what FusionPro VDP solutions has to offer, or reach out directly if you have questions about this impressively powerful software.

Get a Free Workflow Assessment

Is your in-plant or commercial printing workflow working as well as it could? More importantly, will it support your transition into running campaigns or serving as an advisor to your customers?

We can move you from where you are to where you need to be to make that transition. Ready to get started? Get a free workflow assessment.