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Smartsourcing Your Customer Documents: Taking Control and Adding Value
By: David MacWhorter
Each day seems to bring with it a new industry buzzword, but here’s one that’s actually worth paying attention to: Smartsourcing.
It’s the subject of a bestseller by Thomas M. Koulopoulos and Tom Roloff. It’s a topic at countless seminars across the country. And it’s a wise strategy to consider in the area of customer communications.
In essence, smartsourcing is a more strategic approach to outsourcing. While lowering cost is still the goal, smartsourcing finds a way to do so without sacrificing control and innovation. Best of all, smartsourcing eliminates the “all or nothing” choice between in-house processing and outsourcing—
which is often a dilemma when producing customer documents such as bills, statements, and policies.
Most companies either handle all aspects of their customer documents in-house—which involves hiring their own design team, managing their own software, buying their own printers, etc.—or they outsource the entire process. At times, outsourcing has been perceived as the preferable option, due to the time, money and resources involved. But by outsourcing everything, companies have put their brand identity into the hands of third parties—which is the last thing you want to do from a marketing perspective!
The best of both worlds is to maintain control of your brand by keeping document design and production in-house, while outsourcing your print and mail operations to cut cost. So why not do just that? One inhibitor has been the complexity of document composition software, which can be very technical in nature. But with FIS’s CSF® Designer solution, the development of customer communications is an easy, intuitive, collaborative process.
This approach not only gives you more control of your bill content, it gives you more control period. For example, you’ll have greater leverage when negotiating pricing with your print and mail outsourcer. If your printer maintains or owns your document design, good luck at contract renewal time! The printer holds all the cards, because they know that moving the bill design process to another vendor is a massive undertaking. But when you handle the design and production of your customer documents with a solution like CSF Designer, you’re empowered to find a print vendor that can meet your cost and distribution needs, now and in the future.
One company that’s benefiting from this strategy is EPCOR Energy Alberta Inc., headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. According to Tom Long, IT manager of billing applications at EPCOR, “By smartsourcing our process, EPCOR is back in control of our entire customer communication strategy.”
“We had set a major initiative to smartsource our document creation efforts—to carefully examine the most cost-effective and efficient combination of software tools and service providers to achieve premium service at the lowest cost,” said Long. In the end, EPCOR chose to outsource its print and mail operations, while bringing bill design and production in-house with help from FIS’s CSF® Designer solution.
Before CSF Designer, formatting bills and changing bill images took EPCOR months to implement. Now, the development of customer communications is an easy, intuitive, collaborative process for the company. “CSF Designer helped EPCOR revolutionize our entire bill creation process,” said Long. “Our billing application is now hosted onsite, and the application is supported in-house. We make all changes to the bill images and implement them as needed. We’re much more prepared to support our customers’ needs with the new process.”
CSF Designer can be used along with the CSF FasTest® tool, which makes it easy to test documents prior to production. “With CSF FasTest, our testing process is simplified,” said Long. “In terms of dollar savings, all of the improvements we’ve made to the process have saved EPCOR about $3 million annually.”
While a $3 million annual savings is exciting, so is the ability to control your own customer communications. Consider the challenges EPCOR had to deal with before smartsourcing: “The biggest limitation we faced was the lack of control over the entire process,” said Long. “Without control over each step in the process, we were missing valuable opportunities to effectively communicate with our customers. With CSF Designer, we’ve improved customer communications and gained additional control over bill design and messaging.”
Is smartsourcing the best business decision for your organization? It depends on what your objectives are for the bill creation process. Do you simply want to cut cost—or do so while maintaining control of your brand and improving your customer communications? If the latter is the case, keep in mind that FIS has cost-effective, accessible technology to make smartsourcing a reality.
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David has spent the last 36 years in leadership roles at many of the top Image technology firms, he is currently General Manager at FIS Image Solutions and has been since August 2005. Before Treev was acquired by Metavante, David was President & CEO at TREEV for 4 years.
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