W.A. Wilde

Marketing Company Streamlines Campaign Development with Collaboration Solution

Few would argue against the value of collaboration in an organization like W.A. Wilde, where customers play a critical role in every aspect of developing direct marketing campaigns. Wilde’s commitment to innovation and service has differentiated it both as a trusted partner to its customers and as a leader in the direct marketing industry. However, collaboration was costly due to the high degree of communication that took place by e-mail, phone, and meetings between customer and Wilde teams for exchanging, reviewing, and approving content. With its technology partner Magenic Technologies, Wilde saw a great opportunity in the collaborative power of Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to implement a streamlined content management solution that provides an improved customer experience, enhanced security, and enables account managers to drive increased sales.

 

Situation

Founded by William Allan Wilde in 1868, W.A. Wilde Company began as a publisher of nondenominational sermons and religious textbooks. In the 1960s, when direct mail became a significant medium for communicating marketing messages to customers, Wilde became a direct marketing services leader, known for attention to detail and commitment to service. A member of the Mail and Fulfillment Service Association, Wilde has led the direct marketing industry in proving the technologies that are today regarded as commonplace.

Wilde is a fifth-generation, privately owned company. With over 400 full-time employees and multiple locations in and around Holliston, Massachusetts, it has the capacity to laser print over 1.8 million pages per day, insert and mail over 2 million envelopes per day, and fulfill over 25,000 broker/dealer orders and 20,000 retail literature requests per day.

Business Priorities
W.A. Wilde was pursuing a strategy to differentiate itself from its competitors through superior service and innovative offerings that produced better results for its customers. To this end, Wilde identified several business priorities:

• Partner with customers to deliver innovative products and services
• Empower customers to play an active role in campaign development
• Enable customers to have greater agility in their campaigns
• Allow account managers to focus on new initiatives with existing clients
• Ensure campaign deadlines are met

This [solution] will enable our clients to create more personalized, effective, and profitable campaigns. Their time-to-market will shrink as well as their management costs. Robert Reeder Chief Technology Officer, W.A. Wilde

Wilde had made good progress toward some of these priorities, but there was room for improvement. The company works with its clients to ensure that the direct marketing communications created are both personal and relevant. This is accomplished by collaborating with clients to develop content that can be tailored, with measurable results, to specific individuals.

Wilde works with the client to develop logical rules that vary the direct mail’s content for each recipient based on factors such as gender, age, and other variables. Content tailoring uses data labels that are applied to the images stored in the customer’s content library. Wilde’s internally developed application then applies the logical rules to tailor the marketing materials. This is one of Wilde’s key differentiators and produces highly effective campaigns. Wilde’s aim was to enable customers to access their own content library directly so that they would be empowered to directly define and refine the “intelligence” applied to their content.

Once a proposed marketing piece, or “proof,” is generated, Wilde sends it either by e-mail or in hard copy to the client’s contact person, who is responsible for walking it to the team for review. This process of feedback, proof generation, and client review is repeated until final approval is given by the client.

This process has involved a high degree of face-to-face, telephone, and e-mail communication, plus sharing documents over e-mail and on disk and often routing them for feedback on foot. These methods of collaboration were time consuming, both in the effort required for the people involved, and also in the turnaround time while material was passed back and forth. This was particularly distracting for Wilde’s account teams, who were spending a lot of time supporting the process. Says W.A. Wilde Chief Technology Officer Robert Reeder, “Our account managers were tied up managing the process rather than building new business.”

Document control was also a concern, because multiple versions of files, images, and proofs were circulated, and occasionally the wrong file would go to print. Although this error would be caught in the print room, it delayed printing until the correct file could be generated. Related to document control was document security, which Wilde felt had room for improvement due to the competitive importance to Wilde’s customers of the material being exchanged. 

Critical Success Factors for Campaign Development Process
Debra Brucato, Director of System Development for W.A. Wilde, is responsible for improving customer satisfaction through technology and process improvements. She has identified several critical success factors (and associated key performance indicators, or KPIs) for the marketing campaign development process:

• Accelerate the marketing campaign development process (the average time from initial request to approval to print)
• Improve customer satisfaction (reduction in the number of customer issue resolution sheets received)
• Increase account managers’ productivity and drive additional sales by reducing administrative work in the campaign development process (the number of hours account managers spend on each client request; account manager sales)
• Improve the security of customer data and file transfers (the number of files received from clients as e-mail attachments)

Solution

W.A. Wilde, with implementation partner Magenic Technologies, participated in the Microsoft® Rapid Deployment Program for the 2007 Microsoft Office system. In the course of the program, Wilde deployed a content management solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.

By working with Microsoft’s newest productivity tools, Wilde has been able to address its critical success factors.

Our account managers were tied up managing the process rather than building new business. Robert Reeder Chief Technology Officer, W.A Wilde

Reduce Time and Effort Required to Develop, Review, and Approve Campaign
Using Office SharePoint Server 2007, Wilde creates customer content libraries that store, exchange, and track the approval status of campaign content, Wilde provides customers with direct access to their own content library to avoid relying on e-mail and physical document exchanges with account managers. This provides a centralized location for customers and account teams to pass campaign materials back and forth, while reducing the possibility for confusion and version control issues. The solution also minimizes the effort involved in searching for and exchanging files while they progress through the iterative creative process. With round-the-clock access to the library, customers can upload and review the material as required and provide feedback by e-mail to the Wilde account team.

Enhance Security of Customer Campaign Materials
Customers are able to upload and manage their own content directly in Office SharePoint Server 2007 using a secure Internet connection, as opposed to sharing or storing content using e-mail or disks. This enhances the security of sensitive customer data, accelerates content exchanges, and increases collaboration between W.A. Wilde and its customers.

Enable Customers to Have Greater Control over Their Content
The solution enables customers to directly manage the data that determines which content is used in a campaign, by enabling them to directly access and modify the data residing in their content library. Because this data feeds directly into W.A. Wilde’s other back-end systems that produce the tailored content, when a customer refines data labels—perhaps based on how effective a previous offer was—the changes are immediately actionable.

Benefits

Following the implementation of a content management solution based on the 2007 Microsoft Office release, Wilde immediately experienced several important benefits. By taking advantage of the content manage¬ment capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007, Wilde was able to streamline the end-to-end process for campaign content development, review, and approval. This has enabled customers to collaborate more closely with Wilde’s account teams and reduced the workload on account managers. See Figure 1 at the end of this section for detailed information on the measurement of process improvements and benefits.

Reduced Cycle Time Required to Process Marketing Campaign
By enabling account managers and customers to collaborate using Office SharePoint Server 2007 as an easily accessible and reliable repository for exchanging, reviewing, and approving materials, Wilde was able to remove a lot of e-mail and phone communication and meetings from the approval process. Since most of this work can be done individually and according to the customer’s schedule, changes or approvals can be done anytime without disrupting production plans and with fewer frantic, last-minute changes.

The solution makes sharing files easier and also ensures that everyone sees the correct and current version while different ones get produced through the editing process. By simplifying the process for sharing and approving content, Wilde was able to accelerate its average campaign development process by 50 percent, reducing it from seven days to three and one-half days.

Improved Customer Satisfaction
Bringing customers more directly into the campaign development process yielded immediate returns in improved customer satisfaction. Since customers have direct access to the content library, they are able to upload and manage the images and files used in their campaigns. Customers are also impressed with how smoothly the document library keeps track of files, the various versions, and their approval of the final version. They feel more confident that the correct version is going to print.

Customers are also pleased with the quality of their marketing materials. After the implementation of the solution, issues related to incorrect content entering production were almost completely eliminated, and rework was reduced by a factor of ten.

Reduced Account Managers’ Manual Work per Client
The company’s account managers, who previously had to devote a great deal of time to managing the approval process, now focus on developing new business. Because the content management solution has taken over much of the administrative work and efficiently coordinates the exchange and approval of documents, the account managers have been able to devote more time to driving sales growth from existing clients. Where account managers used to spend an average of 12 hours per week managing a campaign, this has been reduced to four hours, meaning they have an additional eight hours per week to devote to new initiatives. W.A. Wilde expects this will translate into a 5 percent sales increase in account sales.

Enhanced Security of Customer Data and File Transfers
For most of Wilde’s customers, campaigns under development are highly sensitive and competitively valuable. By enabling customers and account teams to share images and files directly over a secure connection to the Office SharePoint Server 2007–based solution, security is greatly enhanced. While the process of developing a typical campaign used to involve approximately 20 documents being e-mailed back and forth, this has been reduced to almost zero.

Created Foundation for the Future
In addition to streamlining the campaign development process, the solution is another step toward Wilde’s vision of even greater innovation and collaboration with customers. Because Office SharePoint Server 2007 has provided structure to the routing and approval of campaign materials, Wilde is able to offer increasingly innovative and tailored direct mail solutions to its customers—without the added workload and potential for errors that greater complexity used to bring. “This will enable our clients to create more personalized, effective, and profitable campaigns. Their time-to-market will shrink as well as their management costs,” says Reeder. “Offering this value is how we can compete against larger competitors.”

Looking ahead, the workflow capability of Office SharePoint Server 2007 will enable continuous improvements in the document review and approval process. Further integration with Wilde’s production systems is also envisioned, which will enable customers to initiate, edit, approve, and even manage their own jobs into production.

Figure 1: Measurement of  Improvements in the Key Performance Indicators for the Campaign Development Process

Key Performance Indicator	KPI Calculation/ Measurement Method	Baseline Value (Before Deployment)	Measurement Value (After Deployment)	Improvement
Accelerate the campaign development process	For comparable campaigns, average time from the initial request and the final approval to print	7 days	3.5 days	50 percent reduction in average time required for customer campaign development
Increase customer satisfaction	Number of customer resolution sheets per month involving campaign development	2	0	All customer quality issues arising from errors in campaign development (e.g., using the wrong image) eliminated
Increase Account Manager productivity	Number of Account Manager hours logged per client request	12 hours per week	4 hours	75 percent reduction in administrative time, or 1 day per week. Wilde estimates this will enable a 5 percent overall increase in account sales.
Enhance security of customer content	Number of customer files received as e-mail attachments (per week)	20 per campaign	1	95 percent reduction in unsecured exchange of customer data and content

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Microsoft Office System
The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.

For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:
www.microsoft.com/office

About Business Value Assessment
This business value research study was developed by Capgemini using the Microsoft Rapid Economic Justification (REJ) Framework to assess the business value of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

For information on how to repeat this study for your organization, contact your local Microsoft representative or go to:
www.microsoft.com/value

 

 

 

Partner Profile
Magenic Technologies was founded in 1995 in Minneapolis as a technical consulting firm focused exclusively on Microsoft technologies. While Magenic has grown rapidly, it’s continued to differentiate by maintaining a close working relationship with Microsoft and creating a pool of expertise in all Microsoft development technologies.

Today, Magenic has business consulting and technical development expertise in Microsoft technologies. Magenic professionals have designed and delivered more than 500 Microsoft-based solutions and have written more than 40 books on the Microsoft .NET Framework and .NET software.

Magenic has achieved Microsoft Gold Partner Certification in Integrated E-Business, Microsoft Business Solutions, and Business Intelligence, and is Microsoft’s 2005 Worldwide Partner of the Year for Technology Innovation for Custom Development Solutions.

 

For More Information

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For more information about Magenic products and services, call (603) 222-5600 or visit the Web site at:
www.Magenic.com

For more information about W.A Wilde products and services, call (508) 429-5515 or visit the Web site at:
www.wawilde.com