I was walking my dog last week in San Francisco and I overheard a mother talking on the phone about how hard and confusing it was for her middle-school daughter to manage distance learning. Her complaints were a long list: a login to get homework, a different login to be on video, another login for testing, so many emails about where to upload files, sharing on cloud platforms, and warnings of security issues. COVID-19 has forced our education system into a quick transition from in-person to online learning. It’s to be expected that there are bumps along the way as school districts scramble to get curricula and teachers online. The overall theme coming from this mother is that online learning is really hard to administer for her children, it takes a lot of work, and, according to her, it is overly complicated.

In the business world we have been in this transition for decades now—the transition from face-to-face interactions with our customers—to online engagement with our customers. It doesn’t matter if you prefer face-to-face or you don’t think online engagement is as impactful. It doesn’t matter because your customers are expecting—in fact assuming—that they will be able to engage with you online.

All print businesses have several to many print software solutions. Because software companies have to continue to enhance their products and we still buy on the adage that “more features are better” virtually every software solution extends their product to allow customers to engage. In some cases, this makes good sense, but you can’t look at anything in isolation any more. There are no point solutions! Just because the software solution provides customer access does not mean you should use that customer access.