Mike Porter

President, Print/Mail Consultants
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April 2 2018
Stephen Covey always advised to "begin with the end in mind." As I look at the way many organizations approach customer communications, they seem to have lost track of true business goals. They base
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March 13 2018
Experts predict that by 2020, customer experience will outweigh price and product as the key differentiator among competitors. Print and mail service providers can prepare for this transition by chang
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Feb. 6 2018
Document operations departments handle lots of data. Sometimes the information is in ready-to-print form. Other times, data arrives in raw format, awaiting processing by document composition software
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Jan. 30 2018
Does your company have a content marketing plan for this year? Many organizations have identified the value of published content to achieve brand awareness or nurture leads, but initiate thei
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Jan. 25 2018
One thing I learned working with large corporations is the official mail center wasn’t the only mail-generation place in the company. I sometimes stumbled over rogue postal operations hidden a
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Dec. 12 2017
Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, fires, and other natural phenomena can put a document center out of operation, at least temporarily. But self-inflicted mishaps can ruin any print and mail job. Data i
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Dec. 4 2017
Automated document factories (ADFs) used to be of interest primarily to high-volume transactional document producers. Today, companies of any size, mailing just about any type of documents, c
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Nov. 9 2017
Transactional documents generated by client-purchased software packages are necessarily generic. Businesses have few design or layout options, leaving them dissatisfied with the appearance or function
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Oct. 10 2017
If you are in the transactional document print and mail business, your clients are probably talking with you about lowering their costs. Most transactional document producers continue to focus o
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Oct. 5 2017
Going to trade shows or getting calls from mailing equipment salespeople can lead mailing operations managers to conclude the answer to all their problems is new equipment. Sometimes that’s true,...
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Sept. 15 2017
This is the season most business people start thinking about next year. Forecasts, plans, and budgets are activities essential for success. One thing that can get overlooked in the crush to pred
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Sept. 5 2017
I vividly remember attending a conference in 1999 where presenters addressed electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) in nearly every session. You couldn’t have a conversation with anyon
Aug. 31 2017
I am dedicating these snippets of real news stories to all the hardworking people who churn out millions of personalized messages a month. Reading about these mishaps may make you sad, or elicit
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July 19 2017
Document operations centers originally installed Automated Document Factories (ADFs) to streamline paper document production and improve quality. The concept has evolved with the times to add mu
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June 22 2017
Think you've squeezed every penny of cost savings out of your document operations workflow? You're probably wrong. I've been visiting document centers for decades and have yet to encounter on
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June 5 2017
Print and mail service providers are doing business in a “data first” marketplace. Their customers have invested in data analytics to improve the customer experience. If print and mail vendors...
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May 10 2017
We read about privacy breaches a lot. Stories about hackers are in the news every day now, thanks to intrusions affecting government institutions and high-profile politicians. Security violation
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May 5 2017
Selling print and mail services used to be straightforward. Mostly, a salesperson had to convince a prospect the outsource provider could produce quality documents less expensively than the pros
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April 12 2017
For many mailers, envelopes are often little more than an afterthought. As long as they flow through the inserting equipment without jamming and the windows are in the right place, who cares? &
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March 6 2017
The old saying is that “the customer is always right.” That has never been true, but the phrase is a caution against challenging customers about their demands. The theory is, as long as a...

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