It’s nice to be able to say yes often. It’s even nicer to say yes to customers more often. But customers are… well… customers! They do things the way they want to do them, even if you really should be saying, “No!”
In this video I talk about our philosophy at ZenSmart, why I believe there is competitive advantage in not forcing customers to fit into business processes and the results of doing it differently.
Watch the video and you’ll discover so much more about the challenges in the world of custom and on demand manufacturing as well as what needs to happen behind the scenes to help you say yes to your customers more often.
Transcript
If you’re working in print-on-demand, you’ll know that there’s a tension that underpins everything that we do. On one hand, we’re meant to be in the business of personalisation, but on the other hand, we need to standardise our processes as much as possible to retain long-run manufacturing techniques and carry those as far down production workflow as we possibly can in order to maximise our operating margins. So how do we go about reconciling that tension? We’re in the business of personalisation, but we have a quest for standardisation. And the thing is, the bigger our businesses get, the greater that tension grows, the greater the desire to standardise and standardise to remove options to tighten things down, but our customers are seeking a personal experience. And the customers make mistakes at times. So how do you create and retain a brand that has flexibility built underneath what that brand is? So here at the ZenSmart team, our philosophy is that it’s a real mark of the maturity of a business if you can retain the ability to say yes to a customer more often and not become this high-bound bureaucratic organisation that is rule-based and customers potentially end up resenting when they make inevitable mistakes or change their minds or the marketing department wants to innovate and create a more personalised experience. So our view is that you can directly engineer into the software that runs your business the ability to systemically flex with the needs of the customer to adopt more innovative and personalised options the marketing department might be driving and have that engineered into the very heart of how you go about running your business. And to do that in a way that there is zero impact to the cost structure and in fact to the contrary, there’s probably an opportunity here in order to create incremental new income streams. So if all of those ideas sound of interest to you, then ring my bell, reach out, I’d happily describe in more detail what we’ve done in different factories around the world.
