One of the key ingredients to providing great customer service is developing a rapid-response team.
Fact is, the pace of business today demands rapid response to solve client needs to stay competitive. It’s critical that any organization have the strategy and people in place to deliver goods and services quickly and efficiently while maintaining superior quality. Consider Andrick & Associates. Since it was founded in 1984 in Sarasota, the company has developed a reputation as the go-to firm for highly effective direct-mail campaigns.
Here are Andrick’s keys to developing a rapid-response culture:
- Be a one-stop shop. Clients don’t have time to shepherd a project through different vendors. That’s why Andrick now provides design, printing, mailing and digital services. Like a relay race, a project flows seamlessly from one task to another without any downtime.
- Be a drama-free organization. In a superior organization, team members are great communicators and they’re generous and non-judgmental with feedback. At Andrick, informal communication is encouraged to make sure a project remains on track. Andrick’s team considers every day to be an opportunity to learn and become better at their craft.
- Use smart technology. Andrick uses technology to manage its rapid response. For example, the firm schedules and tracks a job from beginning to end using projectflow software, alerting team members of the progress of a job. This is important for direct mail because clients must have their promotions delivered to mailboxes at specific times. In addition, Andrick can use the software to assess efficiency for continuous improvement.
- Use data effectively. Thanks to speedy advanced printing technology, Andrick can use variable-data printing to target mailings to specific kinds of customers in a single print job. For example, the printer can program and print different messages based on zip codes, genders or any other demographic or psychographic select. These supersophisticated printers even let clients select different images based on who the recipient will be.
- Know your partners. Andrick works closely with the U.S. Postal Service to make sure mailings are delivered on time, tracking every piece of letter mail. Because it is intimately familiar with how the postal service functions, Andrick can deploy strategies such as shipping mailings by truck to the nearest postal sorting facility for each specific order to ensure fast on-time delivery.
