​“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”
– Seth Godin

Your brand is an important aspect of your company's identity as a whole. It is an image of your company's vision, mission and values. Repeatedly displaying a unified and cohesive image is the best way to communicate your message to your customers and build their trust, which will positively impact your bottom line.

Your business-critical and transactional communications are the perfect vehicle to visually boost your brand's identity. Here are three ways your document vendor can help you build brand loyalty:

1. COMPLEX & DYNAMIC BRAND MANAGEMENT
   A vendor with experience in complex and dynamic brand management will work with you to create brand standards and design documents that integrate your brand across all entities. Centralizing the data management of your business-critical communications is crucial to streamlining the process for companies that operate a parent/child structure and manage multiple brands under a single umbrella.
   
   
2. PERSONALIZATION
   In today’s world, personalization is no longer an option- it is an expectation. According to Forrester, 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience.
   
   Personalized communications create a better user experience and are the difference between disruptive marketing content and useful material.  By personalizing your business-critical and transactional communications marketing, customers will see you as a trusted source for valuable and relevant information, thus enhancing your brand identity. An excellent document services vendor will have complex marketing capabilities that allow you to target and segment your customers with automated business rules for more impactful marketing.
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3. STANDARDIZED FORMATTING
   ​Standardized formatting for all same-type documents will ensure that your customers recognize your brand instantly, as well as know where to find their information easily. Consistently formatted documents contribute to a more user-friendly experience and, as an added bonus, will reduce customer service calls.
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Click here to contact Lanvera and learn how we can help you effectively communicate your brand’s message to customers.

Your loan profit margins are under constant pressure from borrowers, competition, regulation, inflation, and the economy. However, there are ways to offset these costs through strategically composed borrower communications. Here are five ways you can use borrower communications to increase loan profit margins:
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​1. Add Color. We don’t just mean a colored logo! A well-placed call-to-action in bright colors can do wonders in capturing your borrowers’ attention and influencing them to make their loan payments a top priority.
 
A good color scheme will have a significant impact on your digital and print document marketing response rates. This is proven to be true by a recent study conducted by the secretariat of the Seoul International Color Expo, which determined that 92.6% of those surveyed stressed the importance of color visuals. If you want to increase speed-to-pay, make sure your documents are full color.

2. Go Digital. According to ACI Universal Payments, Americans pay more than half of their bills online. Create a unique and memorable borrower experience by providing applications that allow for easy online and mobile payments, as well as offering opt-in push notifications and SMS alerts. Offering these applications provides borrowers with multiple ways to make payments.

3. Segment Your Audience. Not all borrowers are the same, which means standard marketing will not produce the same response rate as segmented marketing. Incorporate targeted and personalized messaging in your documents by using business rules and workflows, and you will significantly improve your marketing ROI.

4. Utilize Dynamic Messaging. Dynamic messaging allows you to present strategic, real-time messaging to specific borrower groups by using your document ‘white space’ to market products and services that align best with each borrower’s needs. There are many ways to incorporate dynamic communications on specific borrower criteria, including zip code, gender and marital status, to name a few.

5. Implement Affiliate Marketing. Form partnerships with outside businesses to utilize advertising space on your borrower documents. This is an appealing opportunity to prospective advertisers because personalized borrower communications tend to have much higher open, view and read rates than other print and electronic communications.
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The Bottom Line
Strategic borrower communications can be used to improve your loan profit margins. By adding color, going digital, segmenting your audiences, utilizing dynamic messaging, and implementing affiliate advertising, you can put more money in your pocket.
Learn more about how Lanvera’s solutions can help you increase profit margins by clicking here to contact us.

Business-critical documents are an important component of your customer communications.
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As face-to-face customer interactions decline, documents such as statements and bills are quickly becoming the primary line of communication between your business and your customers. If designed and delivered properly, they have the ability to influence customer behavior, drive sales efforts and increase brand loyalty. That said, here are three common problems that may be hindering your business-critical documents:

Problem: Poor Document Design
Delivering poorly designed documents can damage your bottom line. Some examples of this damage include unnecessary customer service calls, low electronic adoption rates, customer frustration, lost marketing opportunities and poor corporate image.

Solution: Optimize for Readability and Production
By designing documents that are optimized for readability and print production, you remedy many of these issues, create easier to understand documents, and increase customer satisfaction. Formatting with tables, summaries and bolded headers makes documents easier to read and understand; and utilizing duplex printing, eliminating white space and consolidating numerous documents into a single envelope will lower production costs.

Problem: Codes and Jargon                                                               
Including codes, jargon and information that is confusing for the general public is a common customer communications mistake. When documents are optimized for the average person, as opposed to a processing machine or insurance company, document readability and customer satisfaction will significantly increase. 

Solution: Simplify and Eliminate 
Try using simple sentences and common words, while eliminating codes and industry jargon. A good way to benchmark if your statement has been simplified is to ask if the information serves a purpose, helps a customer reach a conclusion, or requires a direct action. Everything else can be eliminated.

Problem: Black and White
According to CCICOLOR - Institute for Color Research, the average person makes a subconscious judgement about a product, another person, or the environment within 90 seconds. Between 62% and 90% of that judgement is based on color alone.   Based on those statistics, it’s fair to say color is a key factor in marketing. However, there are many organizations that still do not leverage color in all branded materials- namely business-critical documents.

Solution: Full Color Print
A consistent set of colors expresses thoughts without words and influences audiences. If you want to up the ante on your brand’s document marketing and watch your ROI increase, start incorporating more color into your documents.
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For more information on how you can improve your business-critical documents by incorporating optimized document design, click here to contact us.

The “we’ve always done it this way” mentality will cripple your credit union as your competition adopts the latest technology and business practices to maintain success and growth. Continuing to operate as-usual year over year without change creates challenges for your credit union operations, and ultimately your members. Therefore, it is critical to continually evaluate new processes and opportunities to achieve your credit union’s current and future goals.

Today, we have outlined the top business challenges facing credit unions that are opposed to change, as well as a few ways to effectively implement change:
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• Challenge: We’ve always relied on face-to-face interaction 
  The Wall Street Journal recently released an article claiming retail banking automation could take over 30% of credit union and banking jobs across the United States within the next ten years. The rise in digital banking has forced credit unions to think differently about member engagement. As brick and mortar locations are closing all over the United States, most that remain open are downsizing employee counts in lieu of Intelligent Teller Machines (ITM).
  
  Solution: With the rapid decline of face-to-face interactions, most of your members will develop their opinions of your credit union based on your website, online banking, ePresentment, and print & mail communications. These communications should be designed to give your members a streamlined, personal experience. Think self-serve options, ease of use and mobile responsive designs! READ MORE>> 

Optimizing your business critical communications doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive.  A best practice is to implement standardized document templates that can help your business improve brand consistency, eliminate unnecessary costs, reduce errors, and incorporate personalized marketing messages into designated areas of the documents.
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Utilizing templates for all your customer-facing communications can improve your ROI by:

1. Eliminating Unnecessary Costs
​The impact of poorly designed documents on your print operations is much larger than you may think. Increased postage on heavy envelopes or documents that take up many pages, excessive paper consumption, and redundant postage costs accumulating by sending numerous documents to a single household, frequently arise as a result.
 
To combat this postage increase, you can create standardized workflow templates that allow you to utilize duplex printing to decrease page counts, use re-pagination to increase lines per page and control line spacing, eliminate wasted white space, and practice householding, which is the consolidation of numerous documents meant  for one residency into a single envelope. All of these practices will lower production and postage costs and increase efficiency.

2. Reducing Errors
Before a template is released to the production process, it goes through several tests in different platforms and conditions in order to eliminate programming bugs. By utilizing standardized templates, for all customer communications, the potential for errors is significantly decreased.

3. Improving Readability
Without the use of standardized templates, unexpected collateral damage can occur. From unnecessary customer service calls and low electronic adoption rates to customer frustration and poor corporate image, the repercussions can trickle down to almost every element of your business.

Standardized templates can provide documents with a consistent user-friendly design. By formatting your documents with tables, shading, summaries and bolded headers, you make documents easier to read and understand, increase customer satisfaction, and improve the overall impact of your documents.

Templates make the entire document lifecycles easier and faster, and will significantly improve the ROI on your document processing operations. Contact us today to find out about our document creation templates and how Lanvera can help you optimize your documents for production, readability and marketing.

Businesses that manage print and mail in-house might not consider the true costs involved. Materials, consumables, operations, IT support, full postage, and other related expenses easily reach 3% of a business’ total operating budget (which also tends to be roughly the same amount of budget allotted to an entire IT department).

50% of a business’ print and mail operating budget is used for support initiatives. Additionally, 50% of the budget spent on support initiatives often ends up with the IT department. After all, support initiatives include more than just maintenance, consumables, operations, and postage. Calls to the help desk for printer jams, "out of toner" messages and broken machines are adding to the cost of running these devices. Service calls for devices without a managed print service arrangement in place can easily cost more than $100 per call, when factoring in downtime for all employees involved in the fix, and the ones delayed in the first place.

Customer relations and labor can be a hard hit to a business’ bottom line. A 2016 survey by Bell and Howell of print and mail professionals on operational downtime cites that 61 percent of respondents reported average downtime duration lasting between two to six hours, while 13 percent reported more than 12 hours per incident. The survey also reported that two of the top concerns executives have related to print and mail operational downtime are customer satisfaction and excess labor costs.

The costs and issues associated with in-house print and mail operations can be frustrating. Because the majority of businesses do not operate within the print and mail business, these costs are not related to revenue-generating operations, but are simply a cost of business; they become even more frustrating.

While executives have considered the negative impact of operating an in-house print shop to be essentially unavoidable, the advent of cloud-based connectivity solutions has made managed print, or outsourced print more effective, cost efficient, and secure than ever before. As a result, many businesses are evaluating solutions that would reduce not only these operational downtimes, but also reduce costs in other ways.

If your document processing and delivery is performed in-house, here are some questions you can ask yourself to gauge how much you are really spending:

1. What is the annual maintenance for document composition software? The upfront costs of document composition software are expensive. Tack on annual or bi-annual software updates, and your business will find itself either spending more money to stay on pace with the ever-changing technological landscape, or fall behind the curve.

2. How much space is dedicated to the print operations? This includes printers and warehouse space for consumables, as well as printed documents that are being stored before mailing.

3. How much do you pay for parts, maintenance and consumables? Printers handling high volumes of documents require regular maintenance, as well as replacement parts. Toner and paper, are, of course, the core consumables to consider when producing paper documents.
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4. How many employees are you using to format documents, run printers, insert and mail documents, and manage return mail? Time and manpower will yield a significant impact on your business’ cash flow.

Research has suggested that the document outsourcing market is expected to grow by 4.1% over the next three years. This is because businesses are realizing the substantial savings potential – often as much as 20-30% annually as compared to total, current-state in-house print spends. If your company handles large amounts of printing in-house, outsourcing is a viable option. This option will free your business of the capital expenditures required to procure and maintain printing hardware and consumables, as well as thecapital required to staff such an on-site print shop. Outsourcing print is the way that businesses not in the print and mail business, can stay out of the print and mail business, and remain firmly focused on their core, revenue-generating work.

Lanvera has over 30 years of experience in delivering best-in-class document design, processing and multi-channel delivery. Call us today to discover how we can not only satisfy your print and mail needs, but also your digital delivery needs.

In an effort to meet the demands of digital-first customers, reduce expenses and improve efficiencies, Bank of America has recently opened three completely automated branches in Colorado and Minnesota. These branches include ATMs, as well as video conferences with employees from other branches, according to Bank of America Spokeswoman, Anne Pace.
 
“We are literally automating every single thing,” said Dean Athanasia, co-head of consumer banking. “Paper handling in the middle office, we want to take out. We want to streamline the transactions from front to back office – make it completely seamless – and that goes to auto loans, mortgage, credit cards, deposits.”
 
The banking conglomerate’s move toward a more automated, self-service model is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to creating a more streamlined, cost-effective and digital-first customer experience; and it is the exact path most other financial institutions are following. In fact, the Wall Street Journal recently released an article titled “Citi: Technology Could Cost Two Million Bank Employees Their Jobs,” claiming that retail banking automation could take over 30% of the banking jobs across the U.S. and Europe within the next ten years.  
Most studies show that production, customer service, office and administrative jobs will be among the first occupations to be completely taken over by technology. Furthermore, bank teller positions clock in at a 97% likelihood of being fully automated within the next twenty years, according to BBC.com. Basically, any job that does not require empathy such as social workers, nurses, therapists, and psychologists will be less likely to remove the human element. This will provide most financial institutions with a more cost-effective way of serving customers.

What does this mean for your business?
​1.Personalization is Key
62% of millennials report that brand engagement is more likely to make them a loyal customer, according to USC Dornsife. Because the actual in-person element is being eliminated, it is important to consider that each of your customers wants to feel special- which means that blanket messaging will no longer cut it if you want your business to be successful. Instead, customers want an experience that is unique to their individual preferences. The transition to more hi-tech, less touch strategies will force financial institutions to personalize all communications, including electronic and print customer documents. If your documents are consistently formatted and optimized for readability, easily accessible through any platform or channel and personalized to individuals instead of your customer base as a collective group, you will create the memorable and engaging experience customers crave.
 
2.Your Vendor Relationships Matter
According to Biztech, when you choose the right document services vendor, your organization can save up to 30% annually. When it comes to user-friendly digital applications, the best defense is a great offense. Be sure to align yourself with a document services vendor that has a digital roadmap and is heavily invested in technology that can help you address your customers’ digital demands.

Interested in learning how Lanvera can help guide your customer communications in today’s digitally driven world? Contact us today.

According to Internet Live Stats, 89% of the population in the United States uses the internet on a daily basis. As technology continues to evolve rapidly, the member online user experience (UX) has to be a key component of your core strategy for developing a better and differentiated member experience through digital transactions and communications at your credit union.

How do you know your online experience is meeting member expectations?
Taking a step back to look at your digital applications through your members’ eyes, here are some questions you can ask to gauge your members’ online user experience (UX):

• How easy is it for members to use?
• Can members accomplish what they need to do on your digital applications (i.e. access their balances, pay bills on online, transfer funds, order checks, etc.)
• How quickly can members find information on your digital applications?
• Do notifications and alerts stand out to members on your digital applications so they are quickly aware of actionable items
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How can you improve the online experience?
Your credit union’s digital applications should be developed to focus on the needs, wants and expectations of your members. This means your website, home banking and ePresentment should all work together to create a UX that meets those requirements. Two of the biggest trends we have seen in UX to help meet member expectations are Mobile First Design and Self-Service...

CONTINUE READING OUR COMMUNITY ARTICLE ON CUINSIGHT>>

With the continued emergence of fintech, the competitive pressures innately forced upon businesses to improve the online customer experience continue to grow rapidly. By 2020, it’s estimated that your customer will manage 85% of their relationship with your business without human interaction, according to Walker Information. 

Many businesses have adopted a self-service online model, giving customers more control over their accounts and transactions. While this is certainly a step in the right direction, where many fall short is the “set it and forget it” mentality. The result? Potentially frustrated customers, increased customer service calls, decreased retention rates, and lost sales opportunities.

Thankfully, there are solutions on the market geared toward improving an organization’s online UX. Electronic Presentment (ePresentment), for example, is an application that can help you satisfy today’s needs with the capabilities of facing tomorrow’s challenges. Here are some tips to ensure your ePresentment is cutting it in today's technology driven world:

1. Personalize. Studies show that customers react positively to personalization. Why? Because they like to feel valued as individuals rather than just numbers.
 
2. Utilize Dynamic Messaging. You have so much customer data at your fingertips- now it’s time to put it to good use! Age, income, geographic location, and marital status can help you deduct if your customers are eligible for your other services. From there, you can display messages and ads that are relevant to each customer. 
 
3. Be consistent in design. Your ePresentment design should look just like it is part of your home banking site, giving the customer peace in familiarity. 

4. Provide interactivity. Including interactive marketing messages and direct check view access are both capabilities that are enhanced through ePresentment. Marketing messages that can be clicked on for immediate access to offers are extremely beneficial and allow for a more pleasant UX.

​By implementing the above tips, you can enhance the user experience and keep your customers coming back for more. To learn more about ePresentment and how it can help your organization, click here.

President Donald Trump has been in the White House for a little over a week and is already following through on his campaign promises. At the top of his priority list is tax reform for United States businesses- a 15-20% reduction, to be exact.

“We are going to be cutting taxes massively for both the middle class and companies – and that’s massively,” President Trump told business executives visiting for a tour of the White House last Monday.

In addition to cutting the current U.S. federal corporate income tax rate (which is among the highest in the world at 35%), President Trump is reported to have said that his administration thinks they can reduce regulations by 75% or more, arguing that existing regulations on businesses are cumbersome and unnecessary.

The possible reduction in taxes and regulations impacts your business allowing you the opportunity for you to utilize those extra funds to focus on the future, which includes smart communications to your customers. 

Mobile Responsive Applications: According to Mashable, 63% of millennials access their bank accounts via a mobile phone, and Generation X and Baby Boomers are following suit. Additionally, in-person mobile payments are projected to reach $23.47 billion by 2018, according to a recent study from Statista. Driving mobile initiatives is critical to meeting the needs of customer expectations of how they receive information.

Information Security: In 2014, 0ver 17 million U.S residents were victims of at least one identity theft incident, according to the Office of Justice Programs. The most common type of identity theft is the unauthorized use of existing accounts such as credit card and banking accounts. Now is the time to ensure you and your vendors invest in security audits. Other ways to be proactive in protecting your customers’ information is to offer transactional alerts and two-factor authentication on all digital communications.
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2017 has a lot in store for your business! Contact us today to learn how Lanvera can help you invest in your business’ future through business-critical communications.