Mike Porter

President, Print/Mail Consultants
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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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Feb. 13 2017
Big Data can be a scary proposition for seasoned professionals in the customer communications business. It sounds like something that requires a PhD to figure out. What analysts refer to as Big
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Feb. 6 2017
Big data gets a lot of press, as it should. How organizations acquire and use data affects how they manage customer communications across all channels. Most of the articles about Big Data, howev
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Jan. 24 2017
The reasons for unsatisfactory throughput numbers are as varied as the document operations experiencing them. Every shop is different and so are the remedies, but they aren’t always easy to
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Jan. 9 2017
Nearly all organizations create informational content. Content marketing experts define informational content as material that has value on its own. No one has to buy a product or sign up for an
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Dec. 2 2016
A change included in the next year’s US Postal Service rates extends the “2nd Ounce Free” program to all Commercial First-Class Mail Presort letters weighing up to 3.5 ounces. Once the...
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Nov. 28 2016
There are a variety of reasons you may be having productivity issues. Here is how to fix them
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Nov. 3 2016
In pursuit of improved customer experience, companies must personalize customer interactions to cultivate individual relationships and retain their business. Correspondence, marketing material
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Oct. 26 2016
Here’s a tip about complying with rules regarding customer documents: Read the regulations. Below are real-life cases where companies were surprised to find they’d been wasting mone

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