Best of Print & Digital: Best of Print & Digital: Actionable Insight, Results

By Jeannie Bastos

In March, Butler Street, a leading management consulting, training and research firm specializing in client and talent development, in conjunction with NAPCO Media, the publisher of Printing Impressions and Print+Promo magazines, announced the winners of the 2016 Best of Print & Digital program to recognize those printing companies with the highest customer loyalty in the industry.

You’ve likely seen the award emblem in email signatures, websites and proudly displayed at trade shows and events. Customers are noticing, too. And they want to work with companies that can prove their claims. Companies get paid to say how great they are, their customers do not.

So what does the Best of Print & Digital Award mean to a company that claims they have a quality and service advantage: instant legitimacy. When there is a decision to be made between a company that has won the award and one that has not, who do you think has the advantage?

But It Isn’t Just About the Award

The Best of Print & Digital is about continued and balanced improvement. It is about gaining actionable insights to drive better outcomes for your business. Jonah Hill’s character, a Yale graduate in economics, said to Brad Pitt’s character in the movie “Moneyball,” “People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players; your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.” In the printing industry, we need to buy outcomes. And in order to buy outcomes, we need to have actionable insights.

To those of us willing to dive into the data and analytics trenches, we understand how powerful actionable insights can be. Actionable insights garnered through customer survey efforts such as Net Promoter Score are catapulting organizations into new understandings of their business processes and their customers’ desires.

Going beyond the concept of customer satisfaction, the resulting actionable insights can help illuminate potential customer defection, high levels of customer loyalty, and the best opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell additional products and services. The outcome of such actionable insights can change the way we interpret, understand and think as it relates to creating a “frictionless” customer experience.

Companies that participated last year are already reaping the rewards from using the survey to not only benchmark their customer loyalty, but to identify loyal customers and those that are at risk.

John Falconetti, CEO of Drummond Press, recently stated, “We know now where we stand with our customer relationships and where we need to improve. If you want to be competitive, credible and really grow aggressively in this business, I don’t see how you wouldn’t do this.”

The Net Promoter Score (introduced by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Co. in 2003) is the one number you need to know, and it is a consistent leading indicator of client retention and future growth.

It focuses on client loyalty, not just satisfaction, to measure the customer experience with your organization.

Growth is the “oxygen” of a company. Existing customers are your highest return on investment for profitable growth. To take a line from Big Tom Callahan in the movie “Tommy Boy” when challenged on his desire to invest in his company for future growth, Big Tom says, “In auto parts, you’re either growing or you’re dying. There ain’t no third direction.” The Net Promoter Score lets you focus on creating more promoters inside your business to drive profitable growth. Just consider the following:

• Promoters are powerful as they have less churn and a higher customer lifetime value.
• Promoters increase spend more than detractors; they are interested in new offerings and consolidating to less suppliers.
• Promoters are less price sensitive; they’re not always looking for “the best deal.”
• Promoters typically cost less when it comes to selling, marketing and advertising.
• Promoters account for 80-90% of referrals. More promoters equal more referrals.

Butler Street provides third-party credibility through the Best of Print & Digital program with the data and analytics to benchmark and increase your customer loyalty and retention so that you can achieve outcomes too.

Register to participate at www.bestofprintanddigital.com PI

About the Author
Jeannie Bastos serves as VP of operations at Butler Street.