Sustainable customer communication

In a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit people were asked “What will change most about how your company does business in the next five years?” The answers reveal that as much as 40% of respondents state “How my company interacts with our customers”. Consequently, customer communication is definitely an area where we will see changes.

A major global development, which will affect the trends in the communication area, is the climate changes. Therefore, it is relevant to explore how StreamServe Enterprise Document Presentment can fit into new customer interaction strategies that better serve a sustainable development.

Consolidating information into one envelope

When acquiring a new customer it is not unusual that several mailings are sent out, such as a welcome letter, information packs, and user identification or PIN codes. StreamServe makes it possible to assemble, print and sort documents that may originate from different back-end systems so that one single envelope can be sent out to a new customer.

One of our customers, a German bank, opens 500 000 new accounts each year. Assuming a saving of on average 15 sheets of paper from sending out one welcome pack instead of five separate mailings the total decrease is around 34 tons of carbon annually. (One ream, i.e. 500 sheets, of paper results in 2.27 kilos of carbon discharge).

Using electronic communication channels

Another StreamServe customer, an insurance company, converted 60% of their customer communication to electronic formats. In their case, this meant a 18.8 million decrease in the number of physical documents, which gives a reduction of 49 tons of carbon discharge.

Minimizing paper waste and using appropriate marketing messages

A less obvious example is the impact of dynamic messages. When promotional offers are printed as separate inserts (or preprinted on regular paper) they cannot easily be changed to better accommodate the needs of different customer categories, or events in the market. Imagine that a bank would like to include promotional offers for car loans. With StreamServe you could quickly adapt the messaging in response to market events, and give special loan rates for small and hybrid automobiles. The messages can be changed and approved just before the material is produced.

We also see cases where the possibilities to use StreamServe to extract data and produce reports on demand saves a lot of unnecessary work and paper waste. Among financial institutions, for example, compliance reporting can be significantly streamlined.

In all of the above cases StreamServe EDP gives companies an opportunity to not only save costs and increase efficiency, but to be environmentally responsible and move towards sustainable customer communication.

Sources:
(1) http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/sgw_actionitems.asp
(2) http://carbonneutralconsultant.blogspot.com
(3) http://www2.fdic.gov/hsob/hsobRpt.asp