Published in ProficiencyPost.com - Tuesday 31 January 2012
Winning Women in OPS
Banner’s managed services champion
Catherine Burke talks about her ‘land and expand’ personalized services strategy
Banner Managed Communication (BMC) is the fast expanding services division of UK leader office2office. We discuss its success with MD Catherine Burke.
We first met Cath back in May ’11 when we visited o2o CEO Simon Moate and Banner Business Services chief Richard Costin at their Norwich HQ. Back then she introduced the managed services drive of the company, otherwise known as Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).
We sat down with Cath to discuss her background, BMC’s progress, and its strategy and service differentials.
Proficiency Post Profile
Catherine Burke – personal profile
Educated at University of Essex (Colchester campus) and studied history. Cath joined Fenwicks (leading UK retailer) in 1996 as a management trainee in procurement. After 2 years she moved into the print industry with Ingersoll and then onto The Print Factory (TPF Group) based in Watford, Northampton and Guildford.
Although trained in procurement Cath’s outgoing personality and people skills made her a natural for selling and quickly she became involved in building valuable relationships with major print management accounts e.g. Hilton Hotels, Ladbrokes, Virgin and Sky.
Cath helped transform TPF from a transactional printer with print management services, into a managed print services provider including operational and marketing documents. TPF grew its revenues from £10m to £60m during Cath’s employment with over half the sales coming from innovative development in direct marketing, transactional mail and document services.
BMC Dimensions
Sales £65m Employees: 196
Contracted Corporate Customers: 124
BMC formed from o2o’s acquisition of Access Plus Marketing Services in 2008 and part of TPF Group in 2012 to form a services division of £60m total sales.
BMC is an operating division of office2office, the publicly owned business services company with £200m+ group sales.
Key differentials – ‘Land and expand’
“We work very closely with a relatively small number of customers. Our goal is to help increase business and consumer communication effectiveness by introducing greater efficiency, productivity and speed into the campaign or documentation cycle. Ultimately we’re here to save money on behalf of our customers who outsource marketing services, document management and direct marketing to BMC. We help our customers by managing the entire campaign cycle from cradle to grave including creative, data preparation, artwork and execution whether via print, email or digital,” explained Cath.
“Our first key differential is personalised customer service. We listen carefully to our customer’s needs. We identify requirements and tailor our services to achieve agreed goals. More often these goals are transformational moving away from office into digitized services. Our preference, at the outset, is to conduct initial deep dive ‘insight’ audits to thoroughly assess our customer’s processes and identify improvement opportunities. Where we can then validate our findings, with either hard cashable savings or process improvements, customers are eager to engage with us,” Cath continued.
“Secondly, part of our unique offering is the full outbound and inbound service composition. Not only are we able to help our customer execute a campaign, but we can also assist with the responses via our call centre, scanning division or response management team. We then analyse response rates and ROI and make recommendations for improvements, to try and achieve a greater future response. We take a cyclical approach to review, refresh and renew, looking for continuous improvement.”
“Thirdly, the power of the office2office group provides tremendous credibility and support that as a smaller independent would not be possible with the type of client we seek to engage,” concluded Cath.
“Apart from our priority to maximise penetration with existing clients, we of course seek to win new accounts. Our proposition is based on a “more for less” philosophy whereby we can confidently offer a superior service and save processing costs averaging 30%. Our goal is to “land and expand” with new clients. Typically we approach clients with over 1000 employees where they have significant marketing and communication expense budgets. We focus on a single proposition that we can deliver efficiently, then seek to build and expand on our success,” enthused Cath.
“We can offer prospective clients greater savings when we take over operations that are currently conducted internally. Old habits tend to die-hard and our ‘insight’ audits are able to identify potential efficiencies and savings very quickly. After winning contracts we make sure we study and stay close to our clients with regular reviews and reports to our procurement contacts and the CFO,” explained Cath.
Metrics
We asked Cath about the typical reports required by clients in the frequent reviews:
1. Cost savings v proposals
2. Efficiency in meeting timelines v proposal
3. Response rates / ROI
4. Spend analysis
Conclusion
Throughout our discussion with Cath, it was very clear that customer intimacy in understanding clients not only at ‘C level’ but deep into the processes was crucial to BMC’s success.
These qualities are typical characteristics that shone through in Cath’s personality. Her 15 years experience at the shop-end in operations and customer relationships; the personalization of productivity services; her leadership by example style; and her charming and engaging nature make Cath an outstanding champion of the new office productivity services industry.