For instance, small-to-midsize financial services companies, manufacturers, retailers, telecommunication firms or utilities can build awareness for new or additional services or payment options by using monthly account statements as personalized marketing tools. Automatically generating customer documents that inform customers about the benefits of additional offerings to their specific needs will drastically increase the likelihood that the existing customer will investigate these new offerings. After all, we all know that 80 percent of revenues often come from 20 percent of a company’s existing customer base. Additionally, for small companies that outsource customer service operations to call centers, EDP can sustain the customer link by enabling call center representatives to pull up an exact copy of the customer’s account statement. This is a value-added opportunity to speed the resolution of account questions while reinforcing cross-sell/up-sell marketing messages.

EDP empowers a customer-centric communication strategy. It enables companies to convert internal information systems into dynamic channels for the creation and presentment of documents and customer statements in any format through any channel. For example, a small distribution company could use EDP to streamline the process of producing pick tickets, bills of lading and shipping manifests. Each document throughout the distribution chain could be branded with the company logo and delivered via any channel the customer chooses. This not only makes for a happier customer, but it also reduces costs by streamlining communication between the firm and its customers.

By automating the creation and distribution of enterprise documents, EDP shortens the time required to communicate personalized messages and new product offerings to customers. With EDP, a small business can reduce response time to new marketing initiatives because it takes days, not weeks, to automatically create new document templates, and the documents will be more accurate because the need for manual entry of information has been eliminated.

For businesses that want to do a better job of reaching out to their customers, EDP is ideal for extending brand awareness activity deep into the customer base through flexible, efficient channels for ongoing communications and targeted offers. It also reduces cost by efficiently consolidating information into fewer documents and enabling a shift to electronic and mobile delivery.

In short, EDP provides the means for small businesses to compete on the level of larger rivals by efficiently crafting and presenting important, personalized and branded documents – printed, electronic, mobile and Web. By offering customers well-crafted, meaningful documents that actually show more than a balance at the end of each month, small businesses can capture the elusive loyalty they need to grow into an even bigger company. Personalized offers easily translate into more opportunities to sell additional products and services. Given the understandable desire to enhance the value of customer relationships, the acronym EDP may soon become as recognizable as CEO in business circles.

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