(Read part 1 of this series here.)

At the end of 2017, Keypoint Intelligence – InfoTrends published a research study entitled Pricing for Digital: Exploring New Models for Transactional Communications Delivery. As part of this research, we conducted over a dozen in-depth interviews with print service providers in North America to gain a deeper understanding of the primary pricing obstacles that stakeholders face in today’s changing market. The first article of this three-part series explored procurement’s growing power over the transactional customer communications strategy at the expense of business leadership. This second part of the series considers some of the difficulties associated with demonstrating value through services.

Procurement’s limited perspective into the intricacies of the creation, management, and delivery of customer communications and its rigid RFP practices have perpetuated policies that are disconnected from the realities of customer communications work. This makes it more difficult for providers to shift the value of their partnership away from submitting the lowest bid for the cost of delivery on any given channel and toward superior service offerings. To make matters worse, many enterprises consider services like message archiving, reporting, and analytics as the “table stakes” of a larger print outsourcing deal. As a result, they have become increasingly unwilling to pay for these value-added services. While such a mindset is troublesome, the providers that we interviewed believe that their clients’ fear of losing control is much more pervasive and ultimately more problematic. Their refusal to part with customer data and an insistence on continuing to manage customer preferences is, in the words of one interviewee, “adding more fragmentation to an already fragmented process.”