M & G selects Info Print personalisation from dsicmm

dsicmm, the company which transformed ticketing for the package holiday industry with the TUI booklet, is doing the same for financial services with M&G. Where dsicmm consolidated the collection of information sheets, tickets, luggage tags and promotional leaflets every TUI customer received into a chequebook-style booklet containing everything the customer needed for his family holiday, it has done the same for the M&G Investment Update mail out pack. The data sheets, statements, promotional literature that used to spill out of the envelope are now supplied as a single personalised book that is helping transform M&G’s communications with customers for its ISAs and other investment products. But where work for TUI is short-run print-on-demand, triggered by the sale of a holiday, that for M&G is far more demanding. dsicmm has just a fortnight to print and mail to 450,000 addresses, well beyond the zone of sheetfed digital print. Consequently the printer has become the first customer for the InfoPrint 5000 inkjet press.

The changes have been well received across the financial services industry, and the impact goes further than replacing the collection of printed items that used to comprise the mailing with a single relevant book. Customers who might have received the same material twice because they had purchased different products, now receive everything in one letter. For Andy Young, Managing Director of dsicmm, the Investment Update is a perfect example of using data handling and digital print technology to improve customer communicatons and to make a significant impact on the environment through re-engineering what is produced. “Our concept is to find the most environmentally-friendly and effective way to produce,” he says.

Kate Rowland at M&G confirms this, saying: “We wished to continue to keep ahead of the market through providing enhanced relevant communication for our investors. We engaged specialist design practice Information Engineers who created and specified an ‘ideal’ solution based on our requirements, from which dsicmm has been able to deliver this in its entirety, exactly as envisaged.”

The Cambridge design company works with organisations on ways to make complex communications much simpler to understand, so increasing customer satisfaction, retention and the likelihood that they will purchase further products.

What Information Engineers developed along with dsicmm, is the new Investment Update book, highly personalised with data tailored to the individual client’s profile. The print company’s team of 40 engineers work on nexdox, a powerful environment for taking in different data streams, applying logic and pagination rules to create either printed documents or equally to shape that information so it can be supplied via CD-Rom or as a web page or SMS text message.

For M&G the solution has been the printed book comprising the investment statement, a graphical representation of the performance of their investments, plus valuations and commentary of the funds where the investments are placed. Where the investment is held as an ISA, the balance that the individual can invest for the year is calculated and an integrated subscription form is pre-populated with this data.

In short, M&G’s clients receive information that is pertinent to their investments and they no longer have to decipher complicated tables to work out how hard their money is working.

The tight timescale to complete each six-monthly mailing means gathering data from different sources, combining these into a single product and printing and mailing these to 450,000 people within the two-week time window decreed by the Financial Services Authority. In all 7 million A4 pages are printed in this time.

Young explains the size of the job was impractical for its existing resources. Instead, with the project defined, the company turned to InfoPrint, a joint venture between Ricoh and IBM, becoming the first UK customer for the InfoPrint 5000 inkjet press. It needed to marry the duplex print engine with Hunkeler unwind unit and sheeter, MBO folder and Höhner stitcher, so building an intelligent print and finishing system to guarantee integrity of each personalised booklet as well as coping with fluctuations in format from 8pp to 64pp depending on the individual.

Young explains: “Customers like M&G are demanding more from us as they set about reducing their environmental impact. We talk about reducing waste, about using recycled materials and so on. The whole concept is to find the most environmentally friendly way to communicate. This means using colour digital printing and 1-2-1 communication so that the right people are getting the right message. It cuts down on paper, it cuts down on waste and it cuts down on postage. In the case of M&G we cut down paper use by 40 tonnes a year and reduced the size of a mailing by an average of 90g.”

Once the product had been decided on, InfoPrint was chosen as the supplier with the most effective, most environmentally sound solution to handle the production within the set time scale. InfoPrint’s background in mission critical printing meant that it understood the need to have the duplex print line up and running from the outset, even though it had only two months to install and test the system before the first live run. Phil Self, InfoPrint Managing Director says: “It was a very aggressive time scale for us, but we understood its importance. That this is a significant investment the printer is making and they need everything to be up and running from day one. On a project like this, nobody can afford to have teething problems.”

Self points out that the drop-on-demand inkjet technology that the InfoPrint 5000 uses has advantages over other digital technologies, not least that it can comfortably print on the Revive 50:50 stock that the client wanted to use. “There are significant environmental advantages,” he explains. “The system doesn’t need any heat for fusing, so the electrical consumption of these printers is much lower and there is generally no need to fit air conditioning to cope with the heat generated because it is minimal. This is of concern because the costs of energy continues to spiral upwards. This is on top of the advantages that printing on white paper has in terms of reducing waste and cutting down on postage costs.”

While dsicmm is the first in the country to use the InfoPrint 5000, it is not going to be alone for long. Others have seen the advantages that the technology brings and Self says that InfoPrint is involved in a number of projects that will lead to other installations.

For M&G the success of the project has been reflected in the reduced number of inquiries that its customer help desks have had to deal with. Oliver Lago at M&G says: “The call volumes we receive have been falling, which in volatile stock markets is a positive indicator for us. People can be unhappy when the value of their investments fall, and this is where the communication to them is critical because we can explain why this is happening. It’s an indication that this strategy is working when they do not feel compelled to call in.”

So far two of the Investment Update mailings have been sent out and a third is about to be completed. Now M&G is looking at how it can build on this success, spreading the new product to different clients for example.

dsicmm is also looking to expand use of the InfoPrint 5000 as it prepares to complete a move to new 179,000sq ft premises. The success of the M&G project has meant that its competitors are keen to talk. Like TUI before it, the Investment Update is a perfect marriage of application and technology.

Andy Young adds: “It’s not just that this is environmentally friendly – this is a smart piece of communication!”