Customers and prospects are watching you. How do you know if your house is in order? Are you prepared to court new business? Let’s start with the basics.

1) Phone systems and plain ‘ol etiquette

Think of your customer’s experience when calling you. Today I called a customer and got “Hello”. That was it! I asked if I had the right place because it didn’t sound like the $5 million business I’ve learned to know and love. I made the mistake of googling their company in a rush and found their phone number on the top of search listing. It was their manufacturing plant phone number. Darn iPhone app! I got the supervisor who was nice, but not a good first impression, and not the number that should be on top of your SEO goals! You may want to ask yourself the following questions and check the following.

• How does my phone tree navigation work when prompting callers?
• Do I have my people trained on how to answer the phone properly?
• Is it easy to get to someone when they call us?
• How many incoming phone lines do I have and are they all operating properly?

Call and check out your competitor’s first impression. The best example of phone etiquette for a y large business is Cox (www.cox.com ). This Fortune 500 company is amazing. Whenever I call for service they make it easy for me to business with them and show they care. I am sure others have had horrible experiences with them and posted to www.yelp.com, but for 20 years now they have treated me right. I think it is amazing how well they make me feel unique and special with such a large customer base and diverse product line. Just last week I had a problem with my home phone going dead and they stuck with, sent someone out, fix it, followed up, and went above and beyond. Pretty cool and they “wowed” me again.

2) Website presence

After receiving a call from a company this week I mentioned that they looked like a nice size operation of 25 to 30 people. The president came back almost offended saying they had 150 employees. I should never have assumed, but I explained that in their company picture on the website had 25 to 30 people standing in front of his front door. It looked like a company portrait. Also, the website did not look like one for a 150 employee operation. Earlier in the week I was looking at a company’s home page and it had a picture of the front of their building. It looked like condemned property in the low rent district in the city. “Not good” as Chevy Chase said in Caddy Shack. Highlight the positives on your website. Things to consider.

• Portray your image, culture, personality.
• Be informative and show you are on the move. Keep web content fresh.
• Pick a platform for quick and easy content management.

Check out your competitors. Good examples for let’s say the printing industry are www.thinkpatented.com or www.sorrentomesa.com. They approach it differently, but you see a progressive, thoughtful approach that is inviting for a prospective buyer or customer.

3) E-mail footers

This may sound basic, but you have an opportunity beyond the basic email message. Thoughtful footers keep customers up to date, invite them to your social media groups, and share news. Don’t go crazy adding another email to the email with a lengthy footer, but a thoughtful email footer can help e-mail recipients. Think like the customer. Things to consider.

• Twitter, facebook, linked in, YouTube icons nicely lined up
• Include your website URL or your logo with a hyperlink to your website. Fancy!
• Your title, phone, email address
• Maybe a picture of yourself. This is a tough one and the jury is still out if this tacky

4) Building appearance
Recently I was reviewing survey comments for a property management firm who surveyed tenants. One comment was “dog poop on front steps for two weeks now.” We both laughed at first wondering why the tenant didn’t just scoop it up, but we both understood they were making a point. It is the property management company’s job. Another comment was “weeds were taller than the shrubs until last week when they were cut”. How does your building look? Don’t let your hair down too much.

• How is your landscaping company doing?
• Are you putting your best foot forward when people come into your lobby?
• What areas may customers see? Any dirty laundry hanging around?
• How do the floors and bathrooms look? Clean high traffic areas often.
• Does your place look like it is run by someone organized, disciplined, predictable, and reliable? That is the kind of printer everyone wants.

5) Packages and delivery

How well trained are your delivery people? Do you know how well they are treating customers? Do you know how your packages look when delivered? Is the appearance of every package predictable? A small, but best in class, business puts most products for delivery in branded boxes, have a tag line “We care”, and has a survey URL very visible on the box to show they are open to hearing feedback. Delivery people can make or break you. Delivery people are customer service people no matter how you slice it. They need to greet, be respectful, and represent your business. Last year an owner shared with me that they almost lost a major customer because their driver kept delivering to the wrong address even after the customer asked numerous times to bring it to the right address. Grumpy delivery people or chronic complainers don’t help much either. Pick happy, enjoyable to be around, people who can roll with the punches and are “customer centered”. Make sure their appearance is sharp for a positive first impression. You may want to invest in embroidered shirts for two reasons; to show you can embroider for them and, to build your brand.

So here is the homework for the week! Do a few tests and investigate how well your first impressions are. I’m sure I got weak links and skeletons in my closet. Time for all of us to get cracking. Inspect what you expect.

Raising Prices? Think your customers will notice? Businesses can learn a ton from the recent Netflix price increase.

You think your industry is changing! The old, crusty movie rental industry is changing even faster. First there was brick and mortar, then mail order, kiosks, on-demand and now iPhone downloads. Netflix has instituted its second major price increase—a 60 percent increase—in less than a year and customers are complaining big time across the Internet.

Netflix is taking a gamble with a bunch of loyal, but less profitable, customers. No one knows how many will walk. No one knows if this is the catalyst for a mass exodus to Redbox or piracy sites, but my guess is that Netflix knows what it is doing. Netflix sent a message to its loss-leading customers, but will there be a backlash? Only time will tell. The company is blending price increases with more value-added service options to approach this challenge.

Raising prices is a fact of life for any business, and how you handle it could make or break you.

A few years ago, a business conducted an annual customer survey noticed several customer complaints about it raising prices. Many said they were buying somewhere else now, and others noted they were shopping around. The owner went on to explain to me that he raised prices about 20 percent over six months because of an ugly lease situation that was putting pressure on his business. He felt he could slowly raise prices unnoticed. Ooops!

It just so happened that sales were slipping as well. The owner immediately went into damage control to explain his situation to key customers in hopes they would understand. He felt he had to delicately explain what was going on in hopes many of his larger customers would stick with him. The better thing would have been to be proactive before or during the time when the increases were happening.

Netflix will be very interesting to follow in the months to come as we learn what happens with drastic price hikes. Blockbuster took out the local movie rental guys with lower prices, Netflix took out Blockbuster by changing the game and lowering prices, and now Redbox is trying to do it again with kiosks and iPhone downloads. Netflix has 22.8 million customers in the United States, but Redbox is growing like a weed—it currently has 27,000 kiosks, an established iPhone application download strategy with over 1 million downloads already, and recently rented its billionth movie.

While I don’t pretend to be a movie expert since it’s been 25 years since I stepped foot in a movie theater, this dynamic is going to be interesting to watch from a pricing viewpoint. Whether cleaning carpets, making cabinetry, printing or renting movies, pricing strategies change, and you need to be prepared. Call me weird for not appreciating movies, but I think everyone else is weird for not fishing for hours on end. My wife and friends just don’t get it!

Five things to consider when raising prices.

1) Have a roll-out strategy that gives customers options. Analyze the worst case scenario and prepare for it.

It appears that Netflix knows it will lose customers with its most recent price change. The business mentioned earlier underestimated the impact of a quiet price increase. Setup some pricing models, look at each larger customer individually, and decide if you will lose the business. Decide and don’t look back, but also watch what happens in the market, take a pulse maybe with shorter surveys after jobs go out to understand customers’ impression of the experience, watch your win/loss ratio on bids, and have an adjustment plan ready if needed.

2) Go overboard preparing and managing the communications strategy with your most profitable, loyal and largest-revenue customers.

Let’s look at each of these three scenarios separately:

a) Your most profitable customers may not be the biggest, but they are buying the services and products that make you the most money. It seems that Netflix looked at this and raised prices accordingly—so as not to tick off profitable customers, but instead tick off its lower end customers. At least it appears that’s what the company is doing out of the gate.

b) Have a plan for the top 20 percent of your customer base that generates 80 percent of your revenue. My guess is that Netflix looked into this and priced its lower end services knowing it would lose those customers.

c) Be careful not to tick off your loyal customers. Word of mouth and social networking sites can make or break you. In my opinion, Netflix has the biggest issue here. It had a very loyal customer base within the 22.8 million subscribers. Customers who have been with the service since day one feel betrayed; they feel the company is jacking up profits and no longer cares about the customer. These customers are magnifying their dissatisfaction across the Internet. I believe Netflix could have explained its reasons for the pricing strategy change better, but what do I know. I’m not a movie guy!

3) Don’t underestimate word of mouth.

Customers will share with others. Have a strategy for communicating to everyone and letting them know what is going on. It may not be a popular decision, but by showing the value-add and how you are justifying the higher prices, customers hopefully will understand. Have a public relations plan in place whether you are a small, $1 million shop or multimillion shop.

Netflix is being hammered right now across Facebook and Twitter, and hoping it can weather this storm. Assume that customers will notice the price increase and be proactive explaining the reason for them. Be visible with a consistent message.

4) Have integrity.

Prices will continue to go up. Bread is no longer a nickel, a gallon of gas is no longer $.35, and you can no longer buy a house for $3,000. Still, you must have integrity, a logical reason for raising prices and appreciate how the customer will react.

I will never forget my first customer service job. Our new, “turnaround expert” VP of sales came to me explaining that sales were way off and that I needed to double the price on a custom product we made for one of my customers. As a green-behind-the-ears 23-year-old, I said, “Okey Dokey Boss! I’ll do my best to be nice as I drop the bomb.”

I called the customer back with a $180,000 price instead of the normal $90,000. It went over like a lead balloon. The company had no other choice but to accept the price because we were the single source. Its buyer did say she would get even, felt betrayed and would proactively look for a second source. My employer was short sighted, I lost confidence in my employer, and I left within a year.

5) Try gradual price increases over time whenever possible.

The key is to have discipline in raising prices slowly whenever possible, or at least having a method to your madness. Also, be ready to explain the reasons for the price increases if you are asked.

Netflix has had two significant price increases in a year and customers noticed. I don’t fully understand why it couldn’t increase prices in small increments over time. I’m not a movie guy. Maybe the company doesn’t have the luxury just like the business I referenced above, but whenever possible you should try to keep your pricing up with inflation and rising costs, instead of waking up one day and noticing that you’re way out of whack and now need to get back in line with a singe huge adjustment.

The bottom line is to have integrity, be prepared with a plan, and be ready with a solid answer for customers. For small pricing changes, you may not need to broadcast them like Netflix, but be ready with an answer when asked. Train your sales people to be able to handle objections or attack it head on if you believe the increase will be noticed.

I hope this helps, and good luck with your price adjustment strategies.

After getting my fifth useless e-blast from a vendor partner this week, I started opting out of everything I received from my vendor partners because of pure frustration. I buy from them, but they hit me too hard with thoughtless messages. Sorry, partners, but too much of a good thing poisoned this communication channel with me.

I get the feeling these vendors care more about campaign success than me. They don’t get in the ball park of my needs. I feel someone is behind their e-blast software, saying, “More is better. Grab more e-mails, send more messages. Send more and something will stick. Throw any e-mail we find on a business card in the rubbish or parking lot, or scraped from the Internet! Throw it into that massive pool of ever-growing e-mails mixing customers with prospects.”

This “blast, blast, blast” mentality is sending a message to me that campaigns are more important than customer relationships, cost saving is king, covering everything the company does in one e-mail is efficient, and it is not important to know who the customer is. They don’t know who the customer is and don’t care, because they just want to sell more stuff.

Seriously, we have all made mistakes with e-blasts like the best of them, so I should not throw stones while living in my glass house. But we all need to learn and adjust. It’s challenging, but I believe it is critical to categorize customers when conducting e-blasts and direct mail. Begin with a defined process, a discipline, and the right customer relationship management (CRM) software. Then get to know your customers and segment appropriately. Don’t forget to train sales reps on the importance of this information and how information will be used. Don’t go nuts categorizing customers into three or four categories or you will lose your mind managing who got what e-blast and when.

Simplify based on customer information that will help you send messages that build relationships rather than destroy them. Send information to them that they will probably be interested in. You might want to break your list by region, industry vertical, networking group, relationship or self-selected interests. Segmenting your customer list is just as important as segmenting prospect lists. Be careful not to over communicate with e-blasts. They might not opt out because they know you and like you, but instead they will hit “delete” because they are numb and disinterested. Get feedback from customers on what they like. Customer opt outs can be misleading because customers want to be nice to you.

Top 5 “Good” practices

1. Take time to map your customer base and how you should segment.

2. Do not segment your list too much, so you can manage frequency of e-blasts at the individual level.

3. Create a process for segmenting as new customers come online.

4. Invest in a good CRM to support your current and future needs.

5. Train your staff, explain the benefits and monitor the process.

Top 5 “Bad” practices

1. Hacking something together that is not sustainable and falls out of tune quickly.

2. Not knowing who you blasted to and when, so you have no controls and you over-blast.

3. Poor staff training, so no one knows what is going on and the segmentation is not working.

4. No measurements. Getting some results from e-blasting can lead you to think, incorrectly, that you are doing a good job.

5. Not investing in a good CRM with a mapped out process, resulting in a poor foundation.

Top 5 “Ugly” practices

1. Not e-blasting because you are afraid of over e-blasting.

2. Thinking e-blasting is a fad.

3. Saying you will get a handle on your customer e-mails next year.

4. Sending out dead links or ugly content.

5. Having your customer e-mail list decentralized in multiple computers, laptops and personal accounts.

It’s not easy, but planning, setting up and managing your customer e-blast process will help cultivate better relationships. It all starts with knowing your customer at the individual level, respecting his or her appetite for your information, and sending content of specific interest. Good luck and I hope this helps us as we move forward into this continuously evolving e-blast world.

The build versus buy dilemma is alive and well as printers wade into new waters and print margins erode. Last week I had the pleasure of spending a few days with several printer owners successfully diversifying beyond print. The interesting thing was they were small and lacking resources to build marketing teams in-house. The whole idea of becoming a market service provider with in-house talent is daunting for an 8 to 10 person operation. The challenge is becoming experts in the ever growing list of emerging technologies and marketing services without taking their eye off their current print revenue stream? For years we’ve been hearing about the marketing services provider model, but this group is doing it. Below is just a short list of some competencies necessary to broaden your marketing services offering.

• Knowing how and when to use QR codes
• Building and managing mobile websites
• Designing and managing corporate websites
• Using PURLs the right way
• Managing social media marketing
• Designing and managing e-mail strategies
• Marketing promotional products
• Creating show exhibits
• Managing digital content

Can make your head spin huh. This printer group knows their core is printing and accepts the fact they lack the resources of larger printers to build the broad, cross media team. They came at the opportunity by leveraging a whole new breed of what I call “Behind the Scenes” suppliers, or BTS Suppliers, who are filling the void. Okay, maybe we don’t need a fancy name for these guys, but they are different. These suppliers understand their role in life and built services to remain hidden from end user even answering email and phone calls as if they were part of the printer’s staff. The printer closes the deal and collects the money, and the vendor does the rest. And, the margins beat that earned on print.

These printer owners are aggressively reinventing themselves into brokers. For three days this group watched sales pitches and educational presentations to figure out how to sell these services without getting their hands dirty while also protecting the relationship with each customer. These owners were focusing on understanding how to sell beyond print and position themselves as the go-to person to manage complete campaigns and cross media efforts. They leaned on their partners to deliver the final service or product, many times without their customer even knowing. These printers were thrilled with the profitability, and here are a few examples of services, vendors, and results shared.

Net Solutions, Inc.(www.netsolutionsna.com) offers a seamless solution for printers interested in offering web design services. They train the printer on how to sell the service, but then they do most of the work, right down to answering the phone as if they are on staff for the printer. Pretty cool. While having dinner with one printer they shared how they sold a $70,000 website and his expense was about $10,000. He said he felt guilty, but quickly laughed saying he will lose it somewhere on a print job. He did confess this was an anomaly for him and doesn’t expect a ton of deals like this, but it helped him sell other stuff and be truly on one stop solution and he knows another service beyond print for the future tool chest.

What about translation services? Inline Inc.(www.inlinela.com) is a printer vendor partner who helps printers with language translation. One printer sold $16,000 in translation services for a customer, and they did none of the work in-house. Think about how many customers you have who need solid, certified translation services when printing up such things as manuals. You may not sell a ton of translation services, but they are out there and why not have that available. Again, they are just a dealer of the service and not actually doing the work.

All Viso (www.allviso.com) set up a process for printers to sell mobile websites for their customers and be done within an hour by leveraging QR Codes. The tools were very intuitive, the entry fee was $500 for their first mobile site and then the printer receives 100% margin on anything they sell to their customers.

Many are familiar with ASI (www.adspecialities.com) for promotional products. One printer explained how easy it was to have the website setup so customers could just go and buy their pens, mugs, whatever. He explained some customers thought he was doing the printing. He sold tens of thousands of pens a year. One medical services organization gives them out to visitors buying online. He said it was easy money, customers order online, and after three years he knows which products to guide customers to with very little effort. The margins he said were incredible. He sold $90,000 last year which was very profitable.

4Over (www.4over4.com) is another name that just continues to come up when speaking with printers open to outsourcing to ride the tide. Less smaller printers are printing business cards in house. They take the order, have 4Over produce for some crazy low price like $20, and mark it up from there. Margins are insane.

I’ll never forget visiting MCI, the large telecommunications giant in the 1990s before they were bought out. They did not build a thing. They became experts in outsourcing and picking the right partners to put the right pieces together for the end customer. Is this a model we may see more printers evolve into as they expand beyond print or certain printing becomes a commodity? The choices are to build a team and infrastructure or just buy it. My vote would be the latter. Will more printers become brokers for services beyond print? Will there be more brokering in the future for commodities such as business cards and promotional products? This group of printers sees an opportunity to grasp this new, exciting opportunity to grow revenues, get closer to their customers, and have fun learning new ways to add value.

Are you ready when your Dan does this? Here is Print Buyer Dan’s post today to his 30,000 peers who are on a listserv with me. Pretty scary stuff if you only offer print and mailing services. I did not add or subtract one word from this post. Take it for what it is worth.
________________________________________

May 19, 2011 post:
We’re looking to save about $30,000 annually by drastically cutting back on the number of printed mailings that we do for our 11 chapters. They collectively run 50+ seminars annually, but we believe that we can maintain or increase attendance using electronic communication almost exclusively. One of our chapters voluntarily agreed to suspend print mailings this past year and saw no decrease in attendance.

I’m presenting my proposal to all the chapters in about one month. So, my questions are, has anyone gone down this road before and what were the results and does anyone have a template for this type of proposal?

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you.
________________________________________

Darn it Dan! Why can’t you just quietly cut volumes and not educate your peers and push print volumes down faster? Seriously, posts like this are a daily occurrence today. We all better get our heads out of the sand and diversify or aggressively take from competitors.

The writing is on the wall. Print volumes will continue to drop and Dan is not helping with his promotion and suggestions to cut print! Only printers who embrace change will succeed. If you are reading this, you are probably not near retirement and still in the game and want to stay in business.

How is Dan’s printer going to digest a loss of $30,000 in revenue unless it is taking print from its competitors at a faster rate, buying out weaker printers, or diversifying to help this association client with an overall marketing plan to drive attendance as a strategic marketing partner? Pick your strategy and position yourself to ride the wave of change.

I hope this helps those out there wondering why print volumes have dropped so drastically. Volumes will not return to pre-recession revenues. Get motivated to change and act now. Selling more print is not going to get easier.

CPrint® International has invited Survey Advantage, a leading provider of print buyer loyalty and market research services, to share best practice loyalty and lead generation practices. The presentation by Michael Casey, President of Survey Advantage, is part of CPrint’s Sales Summit to be held June 8 to 11, 2011 in Schaumburg, IL.

“The CPrint® Sales Summit is the one time per year where CPrint® Affiliates meet to learn the advanced selling techniques that will propel their business for the next twelve months. Due to CPrint®’s unique relationship with its vendors, technology and training are often released here first, before the rest of the industry ever knows it exists. And, with the velocity of change today, even six months is a tremendous head start.” said Todd Nuckols, President of CPrint® International.

The presentation “Easy ways to generate leads and preserves recurring revenues.” will offer advice on how to leverage Printer’s Plan™, EFI Printsmith™, printLEADER™, and Printer’s Plus™ software to enhance and automate revenue preservation and lead generation strategies.

Michael Casey, President of Survey Advantage adds “Many family run printers benefit from CPrint’s hands on approach during these challenging times. We are happy to be able to educate their affiliates on how to leverage their existing technology to keep the pulse of every customer, know when loyalty is slipping, and generate leads.”

About CPrint® International
CPrint® International offers onsite consulting, mentored board meetings and professional training conferences and courses in print shop production and sales have been successful in helping family-based businesses become profitable and prosper. CPrint® helps our affiliates reach a higher level of competitiveness in their individual markets. Visit www.cprint.org for details.

About Survey Advantage
Survey Advantage is the leading provider of customer research, customer retention, and lead generation programs for the graphic communications industry. CustomerPulse™ and MarketPulse™ were designed in partnership with the industry to improve productivity by helping operations manage their customer relations and overall operational effectiveness. Additional information may be obtained by visiting www.surveyadvantage.com/printers.

Survey Advantage has joined the Member Advantage Program of the National Association for Printing Leadership (NAPL), enabling NAPL members to access special pricing on customer loyalty measurement services designed to preserve revenues, drive referrals, and generate sales leads.

Survey Advantage works with a variety of businesses, associations, franchises, and non-profits in various industries designing and implementing industry-specific customer feedback processes and reporting. It will provide NAPL members a choice of options for improving and leveraging customer loyalty, including its CustomerPulse™ continuous customer feedback process and its MarketPulse™ research for measuring competitiveness, customer awareness, and potential growth areas.

As a special introductory offer, during the month of May all NAPL members may test drive one of its fully managed services at no charge.

“Hundreds of printers turn to Survey Advantage to improve performance and customer care,” says Survey Advantage President Michael Casey. “Our services provide a way for printers to connect with print buyers and leverage relationships for additional sales. It starts with our reliable process, robust reporting, and methodologies that are customized to meet graphic communications industry needs.” To view case studies and learn more about printer programs, visit www.surveyadvantage.com/printers.

Beware of thinking it is very profitable to have a few big customers who you get to know extremely well, who are easy to do business with, who give you most of the work, and are like family. Long term you lose. Today I decided to call a business owner I started speaking with back in 2007. This business was in Huntington Beach California. That is right, was a business at least until September, 2010 which was the last time we connected.

Back in 2007 I met the owner after speaking at a conference. They mentioned they liked the idea of surveying customers, but they really only have one big customer who represents about 80% of his business. My first reaction was “You’re nuts! Isn’t that scary?” With a smile he said yes to some degree, but his business is very profitable and the customer is like family, they get all the business, he know the executives, and they are easy to work with. He just wished all the other smaller customers were that way. He said the business was easy to manage this way.

Fast forward to September, 2010. I noticed he signed up to attend a webinar I was giving, but never showed. I thought maybe he was busy, but for the past six months I wondered how he was doing over the last three years. Did he still have that one big customer? Had he diversified, found other customers, was he doing well after this horrible recession?

Today, April 28, 2011 I decided to pick up the phone to see how he was doing. When I called I got the disconnected phone message. At first I thought I dialed it wrong so I dialed again. Same result. I went to his website and got the “no website found message”. Then went to Google and found a nice Google map with the little flag sitting there with his business name nicely indexed with the exact phone number I just tried twice. A business is dead, but still registers as a viable business on the web. Feels kinda creepy. No one is home or alive for that matter. My last thought was that maybe another business bought them, but I doubt it because that business would be smart enough to redirect the phone number and website. Also, no one in the right mind would buy a printer who only had one big customer who probably went south in the recession or had something else bad happen to them. They are gone. Another business bites the dust.

No management team can afford sit still, get complacent, milk the cash cow, and get comfortable. It is a tough world out there. Beware of someone moving faster than you in your industry. Refine and reinvent. I hope this example helps those businesses out there change their thinking if riding on only a few large customers to make revenue targets, and instead think about how they can diversify the business to have a healthier foundation. It doesn’t happen overnight, but with discipline and perseverance you can build a balanced base of business to stay healthy over time.

Top performing printers (top third) achieved over 86% loyalty, average performers 77% to 85, and poor performers under 77%. Loyalty scores increased more than two percentage points over last quarter. Results were calculated from over 8,500 print buyers evaluating recent performance of the printers who serve them. Congratulations to AlphaGraphics-Strongsville, OH for achieving the best overall loyalty rating. 96% of their customers stated they were “Very Likely” to recommend them to colleagues and friends based on their first quarter performance. Below are the winners fore each franchise and the commercial printer category.

Independent Commercial
Goodcopy Printing & Digital Graphics-New Haven, CT
Owner: Louis Goldberg

Allegra Network
Allegra Print & Imaging-Battle Creek, MI
Owner: Jeffrey McConville

Franchise Services Network
Sir Speedy-Cranston, RI
Owner: Patrick Welch

AlphaGraphics Network
AlphaGraphics-Strongsville, OH
Owner:Rob Kammer

About the Print Buyer Satisfaction Index (PBSI™)
Each quarter thousands of print buyer opinions are gathered to measure their satisfaction with recent performance of printers who serve them. The benchmark is a compilation of all feedback gathered for printers participating in CustomerPulse™, a customer feedback service offered through Survey Advantage. The feedback is published to help participating printers benchmark performance and react quickly to customer feedback. Results are segmented by brand, size, and other classifications. The PBSI™ is the most comprehensive measure of customer loyalty and performance available in the industry.

About Survey Advantage
Survey Advantage partnered with fourteen printing industry associations, three printer franchises, and nine print management & estimation software providers to develop the PBSI™. In addition to industry benchmarks, the process helps printers preserve recurring revenue and expand sales with existing customers. The early warning system alerts management when a customer’s loyalty is slipping, and dashboards identify and trend customer dissatisfiers. The process is designed to help any size printer with prices starting at $49/month. The vision of the PBSI™ is to improve industry performance through reliable real-time buyer satisfaction benchmarking. Visit www.surveyadvantage.com/printers for more information.

Recorded interview reveals best practice techniques on how to keep the pulse of customers, drive loyalty, increase retention, and generate more selling opportunities. This interview outlines best practice survey techniques and case studies. Recorded video