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

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

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

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

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

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

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,...

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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? &

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...

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

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

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