Print publishers - it's time for a Copernican revolution

Today, we see a lot of print publishers willing to leverage IPad interactive capabilities to better monetize their assets. Since paper is currently their main source of revenue, they thus study how they could extend their IT systems and processes with minimal impact to deliver interactive experience.

Experience proves that adding interactivity along the way is complex and painful, often requiring manual costly processes. For a future-safe approach, publishers should consider redesigning their whole IT, taking digital and interactive as the source and "passive paper" as one of the multiple and diverse outputs.

Some of them already started this move in to adopt to the online space. It's only the beginning. This definitely requires a "Copernican revolution" and related change management processes to move the whole company in 21st century.

Thanks to evolutions during the last decade in this domain, by both industries and open source, this investment will make it much more cost effective and seamless for introduction of new formats and extension to new devices.
Having "rock-bottom" costs for the production factory can leave the money on the long run to either attract top writers and bloggers, bringing the right audience and/or give flexibility to evolve in terms of business model.

Yesterday, moving in the new space was an opportunity. Tomorrow, keeping current methods will yield a threat.

Are "Print publishers" ready for this change ? Future will say.

To be continued

Benoit Quirynen

Digital dialog - definitely engaging

This week, I once again had to invoke my preferred customer care - the one of my telecom service provider - in order to activate a data roaming pack.

After a few hours, I received an SMS asking if I wanted to freely participate to a survey about the quality of the interaction with customer care agent. I positively answered and received 2 questions with possibility to reply by sending an SMS including 1 for yes or 2 for no. The last question was asking for open comment. My last personal comment was a proposal for service activation through SMS or web self-care, which would be much more efficient for me than dialing my well-known call center.
Funny to personally experience a format I tried to convince this industry to adopt a few months ago for different usage.

As a subscriber, I honestly found the format more interesting than audio survey usually proposed at the end of the call. It gave me some time to digest if I was happy or not and I felt it much less intrusive.

Answers were explicitly mentioned to be free. Since I answered the survey while in roaming, I'm curious to see if these messages will be charged or not on my next bill. A next test about the consistency about customer communication.

The previous test about communication consistency failed. When in roaming, I received as usual 3 messages indicating rules and caveat about usage abroad. A 4 digits phone number is mentioned in the message. I tried it and ... the answer is that I am invited to dial another 9 digits number. I actually wonder why a telecom operator can not automatically ensure the re-routing of the call to the right support center.

So, still a long way to run for full customer communication consistency but, at least, some telecom operators start to use compelling formats to communicate with their subscribers.

To be continued ...

Benoit Quirynen