BAPC Leader Spring 2021

BAPC LEADER — SPRING 2021 3 This way they will come back again and again, and you will be on the road to building trust in your online brand presence. But you have to do everything you say you can do, turn around the job and get it delivered to a high standard, it is a fact that people will pay more for convenience. What is key to understand here is that by investing in suitable technology, you can secure a customer’s business longer term and be paid in up to four working days –– with no invoice reconciliation and consequently a large reduction in admin hours. Web-to-print horizons What is important to take away from this is that web-to- print technology has offered a staging post on this journey, but never has it been in such high demand as the need to transit business online has become critical. The biggest shift taking place is that both B2B and B2C consumers have very significantly increased their expectations of the procurement process and now expect to have a solution that can be reached from anywhere, upon any device, at the user’s immediate convenience. We must stop thinking ourselves as being central in this selling process and see ourselves as being a vehicle in which people can be make the buying of print easier – the customer is ultimately what ultimately must be kept front and centre. Web-to-print is not the out of the box solution that many providers will let you believe, it needs to be understood in parallel of the understanding of your customers.What a good solution does do very well is provide those common needs freely without additional expense or costly development, this is the most common reason why a well-priced feature rich systemwill always succeed over a cheaper solutionmost often from a less advanced market. Those features reduce the need for “hidden costs” which you will have to bear in order to make your online proposition work. A good web-to-print solution will get you going and engaging with customers, but the people behind that solution should support you in growing and developing both you and your teams understanding of how it can work for you longer term. This is so you can increasingly be more automated and thus more profitable by reducing unnecessary manual tasks and focus your team on real value delivery to your customers. Alas, we don’t know the outcome of 2021, but some factors are very clear and well documented: we need to get online in order to service our customers, we need to provide a solution that can evolve and work around their needs in their environment and it must be something that is convenient. More than that, what embracing this type of change does is fundamentally make your adaptable, and that is what will ensure your business success across 2021. The value you provide to your customers is creativity, technical know-how and translating ideas into print. Giving them the ability to specify and procure that value online is critical