Customer preference is trending towards self-service, yet most printers continue to offer only one way to do business with them – a full-service order entry process that involves multiple back and forth communications between customer and printer via e-mail/FTP.

There is at least some portion of almost every printer’s business that is well-suited to a self-service transaction. Banks made this transition decades ago, training us to use the ATM machine for simple transactions that gave us more control over when/where we conduct our business with the bank and simultaneously decreasing the bank’s labor costs in a major way.

Too much labor (both on the customer and the printer’s side) are being wasted on transactions that should be conducted using technology, not people. This is one of the primary objectives of investing in a web-to-print solution and more importantly a VISION for empowering your customers and optimizing the use of your labor on the orders that require full-service collaboration.

Your sales people have to “get this” otherwise they will continue to resist the idea of web-to-print because they see it as a threat instead of the best way for them to scale their sales results. A sales person is limited in the number of transactions they can facilitate – technology has a virtual unlimited scale and it can process more than one order at a time!