Printing Industry Commentary & Analysis

Reanimating the Customer Experience: Take Radical Ownership of Outcomes

Published January 4, 2022

The ultimate goal of customer experience management (CXM) is to establish greater customer stability and loyalty resulting in predictable, sustainable company growth. In every customer relationship there is a time when promises made must become promises kept. Preston Herrin explains how your entire team should be acutely focused on correctly establishing, measuring, and delivering on the customers’ expectations.

Reanimating the Customer Experience: Like a Good Movie, Give Your Customers an Immersive Experience

Published October 19, 2021

Customers seek an immersive experience orchestrated by authentic people that consistently delivers. Do this well and you will build long-lasting, predictable customer relationships. Do this poorly and the discontinuity of an unpredictable experience will churn customers out of your portfolio. Contributor Preston Herrin evaluates two types of customer context: “New” and “Nurtured.”

Cut Through the Chaos: How to Quantify Your Current Operating Reality

Published September 21, 2021

Today, change is happening at an unprecedented rate, and this hyper-change has become a new operating reality for businesses. Customer experience management has matured at the right time to be starkly relevant to business relationships navigating the pressures of hyper-change. Contributor Preston Herrin explains how to use a professionally designed Voice of the Customer survey to gather actionable information about your customers’ experience.

Reanimate the Customer Experience

Published August 16, 2021

How do you evolve your business and imbue your culture with a customer-centric ethic that actually modifies your organizational DNA? Preston Herrin offers four steps to becoming a customer-experience-driven company.

Innovate Incessantly: From the Printing Press to a Streamlined Workflow, It’s All About Agility

Published April 12, 2021

The gap between early adopters and laggards continues to widen. Weighed down by the technical debt and disconnectedness of legacy systems, many print companies are investing precious capital and time in course-correcting their technology strategy. B2B customer expectations of user experience are increasingly blurred with the B2C ease of online shopping. Thus, the print service providers who can tightly align with emerging customer expectations will own the future. The answer to this growing problem is to establish a new agility within your operation.

Bridging Strategy to Execution: How to Implement the Three Cs

Published March 10, 2021

Studies have shown that as many as 90% of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution. These are epic failure rates that, but for a plan to bridge strategy to tactical execution, could instead be sustainable successes. Why then do leadership teams continue to endure poor execution? Admitting that there is a problem is a good first step, followed by a decision to do something about it.

Wield the Data Sword: How to Use the Growing “Datasphere” to Your Advantage

Published February 15, 2021

The successful curation of the data springing from your business operating systems has the potential to unearth rich clues for improved growth and performance. However, it can be a daunting task to know where to start and where to stop. Preston Herrin offers a balanced approach to metrics and analytics and understanding how to apply them in your business to advance a data-driven culture and galvanize a new agility.

Orchestrating Success: Advice from Trade Print and Service Leaders

Published February 10, 2021

Every motion you make in your business sets the tone for the ultimate performance of the supply chain. Whether you are a manufacturer/service provider shepherding the genesis of the supply chain or a reseller/distributor working bi-directionally within the supply chain, success hinges on advanced collaboration in order to deliver on customer expectations. Preston Herrin takes our annual look at trade brokering and distributing.

Develop New Agility Phase Two: Plan from the Foundation

Published December 7, 2020

In part two of Preston Herrin’s ongoing series about building an agile business, he describes how to tap into the power source of organizational agility: employees.

Develop New Agility: Continuous Evaluation Is the Key to Success

Published November 10, 2020

Agility is not an elusive concept, neither is it a disruptive, one-time effort. Rather, it is a quantifiable system of continuous evaluation of your fundamental business practices. The stepping-off point is an assessment of the core practices from which your business culture emanates. Preston Herrin identifies three phases with which you can build purpose and agility into your organization and continually nurture it with the discipline of continuous improvement.

Newly Agile: Crisis Demands New Agility, Not a New Normal

Published October 1, 2020

We often hear that we are entering a “new normal”—but this assumes that there was ever an “old normal.” Nothing has been “normal” in the complexity of business change for at least several decades. Contributor Preston Herrin identifies five steps for “training” your organization to respond to change and crisis with speed and agility.

Articles by Preston Herrin