One of the challenges of launching online ordering for your customers is that many printers don’t believe their customers will adopt online ordering. There is a belief that customers “like” interacting with the customer service team and that the customer service team is really good at their job. Those things can be true; your customers can like your customer service team and your customer service team can be very talented at the same time your business can benefit from online ordering. 

One of the most common mistakes in launching online ordering to a print customer is to fail to see it as a sales pitch. You have to emotionally get the customer to understand what’s in it for them. Too often printers introduce online ordering from their perspective and hence the customer sees it as benefiting the printer and not them. You are asking the customer to change their behavior—the entire pitch should be why that is worth it to them! People in the sales role understand you have to see things from the customer’s perspective. You have to solve their problems. You have to make it all about them. People who aren’t in sales don’t naturally think like this. That’s why we see online ordering introduced by an email from customer service mentioning the word “training” to the customer. No customer wants to be trained! No customer wants to spend their valuable time having to learn something new just to do business with you. If your online ordering system requires training, it has missed the mark.  

I think the best place to start to drive online ordering adoption is with your customer service team. I have yet to see a successful online ordering deployment where the customer service team wasn’t on board. These are the people talking to your customers all day every day. They know them the best. And, I’m sure some of you are thinking, the customer service team could be resistant to online ordering because they see it as a threat to their job. It is a threat to parts of their job—the boring and tedious parts. Do you think your customer service team enjoys receiving tons of emails which require them to look something up in their internal Print MIS system and respond to the customer? When you delegate the tedious parts of their jobs to online software, the customer service team can actually provide real service. The kind of service that finds new and innovative ways to solve customer challenges.