Print
Solutions June 2005
Case
Study
E-Commerce
Online
Ordering Offers Control
In
mid-January, Tom Gurd received
a call from the managing director
of Mortgage Intelligence: “We’ve
got a problem,” she said.
“How quickly can you implement
the solution?” That’s
music to the ears of any solution-selling
distributor like Gurd.
Mortgage
Intelligence, based in Bournemouth,
Dorset, England, provides home-buyers
guidance and arranges mortgages
through a network of 3,200 independent
advisors who are registered to
use the firm’s services.
Prior to Jan. 1, British mortgages
were unregulated. But legislation
changed, and all mortgages now
fall under the governance of the
country’s Financial Services
Authority (FSA).
“Mortgage
Intelligence woke up in January
and one of the directors said,
‘What do we have here?’”
says Gurd, managing director of
FT Print Ltd., a distributorship
in Hertford, England. “They
had a real culture shock.”
Under the new law, mortgage companies
are responsible for all materials
used in their names. Rather than
allowing its network of advisors
to create their own marketing
materials, Mortgage Intelligence
now needed to control print materials
and ensure they met FSA criteria.
An
employee at Mortgage Intelligence
suggested the firm call FT Print,
which offers an online solution
for designing, proofing and ordering
printing. The distributorship
demonstrated its Equator system.
The mortgage company was impressed
and signed a deal with FT Print,
and the e-commerce package was
installed in March 2004. “Within
eight weeks of the pitch, the
site was up and we were fully
operational,” Gurd says.
FT
Print initially set up an online
ordering system for 300 of Mortgage
Intelligence’s top advisors.
The advisors log on to the mortgage
company’s web site using
a protected password and ID to
order 16 products, including posters,
brochures, fliers and stationery.
They click on an icon for marketing
materials and are seamlessly transported
to FT Print’s web site.
From there, users are welcomed
by name and can view a list of
all the marketing materials. The
advisors download PDF files, which
they can personalize. Mortgage
Intelligence controls the system,
so advisors are only able to customize
select information, such as their
fees and interest rates. The system
automatically fills in other data,
such as the advisor’s name
and address, based on the log-in
information.
Users
pay by credit card and send orders
to FT Print, where an account
manager forwards the order to
one of the distributorship’s
in-house digital printers. The
plant prints, packs and ships
orders. “The beauty of the
system for Mortgage Intelligence
is they’ve gone through
a compliance meeting with FSA,”
says Gurd. “FSA has pre-approved
all this documentation.”
FT
Print received its first order
in April. Most are small, averaging
approximately $365. A typical
order might include a couple reams
of letterhead, a few hundred business
cards and a few posters. But Gurd
expects the advisors will spend
a combined $185,000 online this
year. FT Print is currently rolling
out the e-commerce program to
the remaining 2,900 advisors and
plans to add more documents.
The
distributorship originally installed
Equator so clients—many
in the airline industry—could
check real-time inventory of their
items in stock. But it landed
Mortgage Intelligence because
of the system’s online ordering
capabilities. “The reason
they came to us is not because
FT Print is the best thing since
sliced bread,” says Gurd.
“It’s because we had
a solution in place and it gave
them control over marketing materials.”
Gurd
believes e-commerce provides distributorships
a competitive advantage. “There
will always be companies that
don’t embrace new technologies.
This is your way to stand away
from the crowd,” he says.
“You can sit on the fence
for as long as you want, but ultimately
the fence will give.”
—Susan
Keen Flynn
Tips
Thinking
of installing an online ordering
system? Tom Gurd, managing director
of FT Print Ltd., a distributorship
in Hertford, England, offers this
advice:
1.
Don’t expect custom results
from a canned package. “Think,
think and think again before you
buy and afterward,” says
Gurd. He is pleased with FT Print’s
Equator system, but warns that
no e-commerce solution will do
exactly what you want, how you
want when it’s first installed.
Gurd encourages distributorships
to carefully consider their needs
for an online ordering system
before buying one, then revisit
those specifications once the
system is installed. Most packages
must be tailored to meet the needs
of your individual company and
customers.
2.
Assign a “product champion,”
says Gurd. When you install an
e-commerce system, not only do
you need management buy-in, but
you also need an employee on staff
dedicated to learning the system
and training other employees.
FT Print installed Equator in
March 2004. It took six months
to tweak the system and train
employees to use it. The distributorship
assigned one employee who works
four days a week as the product
champion. “She debugged
the program, mastered it and knows
the infrastructure intimately,”
says Gurd. She helps train other
FT Print employees and implement
e-commerce ordering for clients.
3.
Use it for low-value transactions.
Low-value, low-volume orders,
such as ones for business cards,
are ideal for getting your feet
wet in the e-commerce market.
“When we’re handling
low-value transactions, I absolutely
can’t have people involved,”
says Gurd. The cost of paying
a sales rep a commission, a CSR
to handle the paperwork and someone
in accounting to go after the
payment is too high. An e-commerce
system with a credit card payment
option is ideal.
