In its place, I would suggest that "marketing response management" is by far a more representative term.
What it comes down to is the presumption that response handling simply consists of putting a widget in a box and despatching it. In reality, this process is just one element of the services offered by most modern handling houses. Very often they are the first point of contact for the brand and offer a business service that provides benefits far greater than "pick, pack and despatch".
Attracted by a direct mail piece, advertisement or promotion, a potential customers' first brand experience will be when they have phoned a call centre or posted a request for more information. If the handling house fails to provide a speedy and accurate service or if the call centre staff are not pleasant, knowledgeable and efficient, the often fickle customer's first impression is tarnished and the mailing wasted. The brand may not get another chance to impress. Handling houses really are brand ambassadors and protectors and must treat their clients' brand as their own.
But marketing response management is far more than call and despatch handling. Clients require real-time information to monitor response trends, to react to response levels over or below forecast and they want databases of applicants. To provide this many handling houses now have vast and highly sophisticated IT capabilities and data handling expertise which can, if utilised, be an enormous asset to businesses. Data capture and analysis for CRM purposes is now as important for many clients as the despatch process itself.
Real-time interactive reporting allows organisations up-to-the-minute project monitoring and enables modifications to be made to campaigns as they progress in order to ensure first-class customer service throughout.
Speed is of the essence and the handling houses must have end-to-end project management capabilities to enable them to work within "just in time" methodology. One of our contracts, for example, requires the secure collation of 1.2m sets, a tailored pick-and-pack to 17,500 destinations and the track and trace of the 100,000 despatched parcels, all within one month.
All too often handling and fulfilment is thought of as a commodity that can be bought purely on price because the despatch process is seen as a standard low skill service. The requirements of the direct and promotional marketing sectors today have driven modern mailing and fulfilment houses to become diverse outsourcing specialists.
However, although many marketers with their fingers on the pulse have not only recognised the benefits and influenced this change, too often the outmoded view of this industry as pick and pack warehouses prevails.
This is the marketing response management industry. It is time we, and our competitors, described the full service, not the core process.
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