I want to get back to talking design issues, but the last three weeks have been a fabulous adventure that I want to share.

A couple of weeks back I trekked to Australia to spend a week traveling with Australia Post. Why the Post? Because they have made a decision to become the thought leader in their market. While we have some fabulous customers who have broken ground and proven the value of statement-based marketing  and integrated customer communication, Australia Post is looking to spread the word of how it works, why it works, and  how to do it, and to offer the option to pilot! This is similar to the project Canada Post carried on with this past summer as they took the Great Statement tour across Canada.  

Australia Post invited the owners of the mail. In Australia transaction mail is called essential mail, and Australia Post made appoint of inviting the people who are responsible for bills, statements and regulatory mail to participate in half day seminars designed to share research on the current local market, provide insight into how the brand agencies and creative community see customer communication, and explain statement-based customer communication options.

For my part, I brought examples from successful transaction-based communication programs, some TransPromo but many pulling from TransInfo and TransEd techniques. I discussed trends we see in perception of ebilling, versus epayment, and the on-going requirements of brand owners to control all channels of customer communication in a consistent manner. That means including that essential mail in the same customer communication strategy as the direct marketing campaigns, web pages, and mass advertising.  

From Australia, the next stop was London for the combination of the Xplor Master Classes, part of the Kodak-sponsored Xplor Document University, and the Total Print Exhibition. Total Print was the follow on to the Digital Print World exhibition of the past few years, and focuses mainly on the short run print market.  As part of Total Print I participated in debates staged on the exhibit floor both days, one day focusing on the green aspects of print while the other focused on the nature of short run printing in offset and digital contexts. As we found last year, the debates attracted a large crowd that participated with lively interaction and some challenging questions.

The Xplor Master Classes focused on green topics as well as the value proposition of statement-based communication. The classes associated with this exhibition always attract an interested group of people who take copious notes and ask good questions. As part of the Kodak Global Sponsorship of Xplor Document University, we hope to see more customers and future customers at these events!

Don't forget to come say hello on Twitter! Or, here! Add a comment!

Last time we started the conversation about the wonderful bills and statements that grace our post box six days a week. As I said last time, most of them are not very well designed, easy to read or easy to understand. And yet, we get the message and we pay the bill.

There are many things that could make them better, and many of us can name them without difficulty:

1. Make them easier to read.
2. Make it easier to find how to contact a real person if there is a problem.
3. Make it easier to get a picture of the current nature of the business relationship.
4. Tell me if there is a better type of account or better plan for me based on what you know about me.

There are others, but these are the basics. And then there is one more thing: give me a bit of control over how you present information to me.

If you look at the history of transaction statements and bills the vast majority were assembled using forms design tools. These tools used to be command driven (products like Xerox Forms Design Language and Host Forms Design Language, or IBM's Overlay Generation Language) and were best used to recreate what used to be preprinted forms with the company logo and a bunch of lines and boxes to contain information dumped directly on to the form by the billing application. It let us add shading to boxes and do a few other things, but basically we created a fixed template and tried to jam everything we needed to tell the customer into it.

Templates gave some control over the presentation, and for companies that used them to eliminate a warehouse of preprinted forms, they were great. But they are, after all, templates. It means that we try to fit the information to the form and not necessarily present the information in the best way for the recipient of the data.

Enter the modern age of incredibly flexible document composition tools like GMC Printnet-T, Pitney Bowes Group1 Doc1, EMC Document Sciences Espresso, Extream Dialog and their cousins in variable data like Kodak Darwin, Adobe InDesign, Quark Xpress. Now we can create documents that are more flexible, expanding and contracting around information and formatting for the needs of the recipient instead of forcing the recipient to figure out the template.

Why would you even want to add this level of complexity? How about making it easier for the recipient?

I use the example of my Mom. She is in her 80s. If you can offer her a billing statement that is in a larger format, makes it easy for her to figure out where to send the check (she won't be paying online) and let her know with a big graphic where she stands, she'd love you. If you send her bills with 6 point fine print, bury the information on where to send the check, and make her struggle, she is not a happy person. And yet, most of the bills and statements she receives are almost impossible for her to read.

Why not be aware that she is a senior citizen, not part of the wired world, and wants just the information she needs?

Contrast her to me. I want the paper bill, I don't mind getting marketing offers on the bills, but I pay online as a rule. My needs are a bit different. Why not let me tell you that?

How about my son, a graphic designer, who appreciates a bit more cutting edge approach to his communication?

To meet all of our needs a template doesn't do. A flexible formatting program that uses information about us to create the best skin for our billing statement is the perfect solution.

Not sure about a "skin" for the bill? Think about the gaming websites that let you change the way the screen looks. Or, better, look at Windows or Mac environments that let you pick a theme. Why not let a customer do the same thing so that when they interact with you they have the best customer experience?

In flexibility there is strength, and this is one way to be flexible!

Don't forget to come say hello on Twitter ! Or, here! Add a comment!

When was the last time you opened an envelope that contained a bill or statement and said to yourself, "Wow! That is easy to read and well designed!"

Not lately? Not ever?

Isn't that sad? In the High Volume Document Production industry, where I've lived and worked for a quarter of a century (seriously!), we've been talking about the value of good design on statements and bills for a very long time. We've discussed the problems that poor font choices and poor design cause, including increased traffic to the call centers, mistakes in payments from customers, misunderstandings by customers, and disgruntled customers. If you are detecting a theme - unhappy customers - you've picked up on my point!

The annoyance begins if they can't find how to contact you, but increases as they discover that the legalese that is supposed to protect the billing organization is almost impossible to decipher in the tiny print. And, why tell me about the rules for Ohio if I live in Arkansas?

If you make me work hard to be a customer, I may choose to look elsewhere and become someone else's customer. A way to keep me is to take the time to design a document that keeps in mind that I am the customer and I can, in many cases, go elsewhere. And, if I can't go elsewhere because the relationship is regulated or mandated, I can certainly become the most frequent caller to your call center!

So what are the key characteristics to a well designed statement? Where can you start on your journey of understanding? Let me recommend a fabulous segment of the CanadaPost website called The Great Statement Tour . Here you can take a test that will help to position your statements against the best practices for statement design. CanadaPost took a proactive approach to helping their customers by engaging the fabulous design specialist Dr. Michael Turton, EDP and the experienced production print expert Bill Broddy, EDP to create a whitepaper to define the characteristics of good statements. You won't find this information anywhere else!

Then they took another innovative step; they created an interactive tool to let you test against the practices they define.

Pretty cool! So... go take the test and next time let's talk about things like templates versus dynamic and flexible design!

And don't forget to come say hello on Twitter ! Or, here! Add a comment!

Every one of us needs jobs that help us tell the stories to our customers that help intrigue them and help them to see the possibilities for communicating more effectively with their customers. This is true whether we are talking about transaction statements and bills, direct marketing pieces, customer textbooks, newspapers, or commercial publishing products.

The cool thing about Dear Lulu is a piece that shows off printing options, opportunities, and issues. In the part of the world I live in, populated primarily by folks who print bills, statements and sophisticated direct mail, one of our challenges is helping the advising brand agencies, advising marketing services agencies, and internal marketing departments see the possibilities of moving to full digital print for on-statement marketing and for the replacement of inserts that might be mass marketing to the bill recipients.

That means that Dear Lulu has value far beyond talking to pure Print-on-Demand practitioners and speaks to the whole range of digital practitioners on the transaction side of the fence as well.

What a cool tool!

The folks at the New York Times pushed a story about the decline in Broadband subscriptions. Another story from a couple of months ago at Parks Associates notes that one if five households has never used email and never looked for information on the internet.

For billers and statement producers this is mission critical information. Especially those who think that e-delivery of bills, statements and regulatory information is going to be their path to saving money. If you can't reach 20% of your customers, then you have a real challenge. And just because someone is web-enabled doesn't mean they want to give up their paper bills. Instead, they may be willing to looks at bills on line and even pay their bills on line, but most of the surveys indicate that even those who get bills online want that paper bill as well.  

So, why fight it? Why not embrace the opportunity that the bill or statement provides and add it into the marketing tool box?  Our goal as marketers is to communicate with our customers through every available means, while being sensitive to how our customers want to receive what we want to tell them. Adding information, education and targeted marketing information to the bill should be one of those channels, but not the only channel!

Today, if you look at your tool box you probably have some favorite tools used for marketing. Broadcast advertising and billboards may share room in the budget along with bus wraps and taxi top signs, or you may be one of the many companies that rely on direct mail, print media advertising and web banners.  For many marketers the idea of looking at the billing statement as one of those tools is still new. I'm here to tell you, it should be at the top of the list.  

Can your customers customize their entire experience with you?  Can they pick type sizes and colors for their interaction with you?  Many gaming sites do it and that is training the current and next generation of consumers to expect the ability to customize and skin the web experience for their needs. What about the bills you send?  Can a customer tell you they need a larger type size?  Can they opt in to special programs? That's the emerging requirement.

What about new forms of marketing. Are you marketing using social networks? Do you Twitter (www.twitter.com - come find me!) Do you have a corporate blog that is alive and fresh each day? Do you have a corporate facebook or myspace page. They aren't just for teens looking for friends! Are you making use of YouTube.com in your marketing efforts? All of these things form the basis for the next generation of marketing, and they will only expand as we begin to use SMS and epaper as more common marketing tools!

I hope this has planted the seed and I hope you'll come say "Hi!" on Twitter! Or, here! Add a comment!

Noel Ward over at WhatTheyThink.com ran a column talking about a need for a sanity check around the concept of TransPromo and the hype around inkjet printing solutions.

First, I want to thank Noel for telling my story!

TransPromo is not a panacea for incomplete workflows, lack of a marketing strategy, or information designs that fail to communicate and inform.

InkJet is not a panacea for any of these either.

I'll disagree with his characterization of the speed of acceptance of ink jet. I think the last few years have clearly demonstrated that the economic proposition of inkjet is a clear and compelling one. The challenge for any print operation is change, and change to a new print technology can be daunting.

But, not any more daunting than the move from pure line data impact printers to the lasers that have become ubiquitous. No more daunting than the change from pure line data to AFP or metacode. As an industry we did all of these things in relatively short order because the business case was there. Companies that didn't adapt and adopt found that they couldn't compete. Ink jet will not be adopted over night, but as you look at the options inkjet opens up, it will clearly be part of the due diligence process for every printer who is looking for solutions to controlling print costs. More and more you don't need ultra-high volume to justify an inkjet device. What you need is the requirement to make a substantial change in how you use the current documents to communicate.

Will toner go away? Of course it will not. Heck, there are still applications using impact printers, and there will always be a compelling financial reason to use toner-based solutions. Monochrome, especially. It is stable, understood technology. It is possible to buy a full range of new and used equipment, and the paper issues are well understood.

Will color toner have a shot in this space?  Clearly! For some applications it will be a great solution.

Is TransPromo the answer to everyone's economic needs?  As Noel said, many of us tell a more cautionary story. I will never tell someone that putting an ad on their bill is their pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I will say that using the bill as part of a total integrated customer communication strategy that integrates the web, direct mail, and the transaction document is the best use of your time with the customer.

Maybe Noel is reading a lot of stuff I don't see. I haven't seen all of this smoke and mirrors he talked about. I haven't seen even one presentation that implies that TransPromo is easy or produces magical results. I have read research and talked with customers who are using some or all of the techniques and it seems that it is a valid approach to implementing a more comprehensive customer communication program. Like anything, "Crawl, Walk, Run" is the best philosophy!

Want to weigh in on the discussion?  Comment!