It’s been three months since I joined Cimpress and have been delighted to meet with numerous team members across our business — not only those from our many brands but also with those building our mass customization platform (MCP). After the 160th team member, I lost count of how many I’d met, but every interaction has reinforced what a great and talented company Cimpress is today and will be in the future.
I came away from my Cimpress World Tour and these discussions impressed with the passion for innovation, growth and customers our businesses have and what they do to entice, retain and serve customers in their markets:
- At Exagroup, they see their primary mission is to help their reseller customers grow – not only providing them with outstanding products, onboarding tools and sales kits, but also consulting on competition, markets and even segments they should target to increase market share.
- At EasyFlyer, they place no limits on customer satisfaction and differentiate themselves in customer intimacy, response time, application consulting, remediation and proactive post-delivery follow up calling.
- At Druck, they put their brand promise out there on the front page of their website – letting customers and prospects know in real time what percent of orders were shipped ahead of time, on time or late as well as giving real-time visibility into their quality management system. Moreover, they use their invoice to create trust. If customers do not like the quality of their product – they do not have to pay.
- At Pixartprinting, they entice volume and trust through a relentless focus on market price advantage, co-innovation with their vendor community and continuously testing with, learning from and being a safe harbor for their customers, no matter what.
- At Printdeal, they provide operational transparency with their Manager system and are attuned to how prospects and customers search their website in order to quickly respond with new product introductions through a network of outsourcers.
- At Albumprinter, they are innovating to reach a new population of mobile buyers of photo products by exposing their capabilities as APIs to be consumed by other app developers.
Our businesses serve different market segments and geographies with different expectations in experience, color conformance and overall quality. In fact, for those business units with a substantial (or in the case of Exagroup, exclusive) reseller population, the expectation of quality is often higher than the end customer’s expectation. As we build out our MCP and operating model to provide cost, scale, reach and selection advantages, we must also recognize that as part of their value chain, we are integral to the unique brand promise and customer experience of each of these merchants. It’s a big responsibility, but an existing one as well.
Bernie Gracy is SVP of Global Products and MCP Technology at Cimpress. He cut his teeth in the Automated Document Factory and Enterprise Software markets before coming to Cimpress in March 2015. He has a BS and MS in Computer Science and an MS in e-Commerce. In his spare time, he enjoys kayaking, hiking and camping in the great outdoors and being with family and friends.