Are Print Job Orders Via Email A Cost-Effective Option For Companies?

Pandemic or no pandemic, print providers rely on email to receive print orders. Companies would have to understand that email is no longer a remote job order submission tool; especially in this period when we are all relearning how to work remotely.

The manual constraints of the email job order - causes an information overload - the customer service and the sales team have to deal with many email touches to get a print job from the initial inquiry stage to the press. The unmeasured email touches create an inefficient ordering ecosystem; lowering efficiency. It is time companies must ask - How can your email responsive team reduce the number of touches it takes to get an order from an initial inquiry into production

Our research working with thousands of printers indicate that the email response team has to reply back and forth up to 14-16 emails on average to confirm one job order; from estimation, negotiation, file submission and approval, order updates, sending invoice and payment follow-ups. Reordering the same item after a few months takes the same amount of time. Sometimes the orders do not get even confirmed but the manual effort of the response team remains unchanged.

Email is disruptive as it is a time-consuming process that requires constant monitoring. Your response team must organize their email communication to manage unattended (unread or unanswered) in the absence of the employee and work upon adding a personal touch (which, to be honest, can be hard with email communication). This is simple teamwork and doesn't require your company to invest in any fancy software or tool.

Print companies would have to learn to cut the slack - rethink repetitive communication with their customers to save time and cost; and ask themselves - how to optimize response time vs. how fast can you get results?

The 2021 North American Production Software Investment Outlook: Exploring the value of workflow automation and print e-commerce research indicates that - job onboarding remains a significant obstacle for end-to-end automation since most PSPs still rely on email as the primary method for customers to place orders and upload artwork.

The latest blog by Howie Fenton discusses this in detail, how email print job orders can cost over $10,000 and what print companies can do about it, in terms of - optimizing the job tickets, offering design templates to customers to save time while maintaining brand consistency across products and address preflight issues before going into print.