Outsourcing services is a standard practice today, for activities of all different types. No matter how large or well funded a company is, it’s unlikely to be able to handle every aspect of its business in-house. With service providers available who specialize in certain tasks and have already invested in the equipment needed to do them well, it makes sense for organizations to entrust those tasks to the experts.

While it is usually a smart move for a company to outsource a specialized service to a third party provider, it’s obviously critical that the partner they choose is able to follow through on the promises that they make before the contract is signed. It is incredibly damaging to an organization to trust a service provider to support their operation and then discover that the provider doesn’t share their commitment to quality, integrity, or customer service.

Putting Your Customer First

The most delicate relationships with outsourced service providers are those that involve direct interaction with your customers. When you hire a partner to work with your customers on your behalf, you trust them to maintain the good relationships that you have already developed with those customers. Whether or not your customers are aware that you are outsourcing a task like fulfillment or mailing, they will ultimately see your organization as responsible for their experience, either good or bad.

Proven experience is perhaps the most important factor to consider in this regard. As you assess the ability of a print and distribution provider like Spectra to serve your customers, you should look carefully at how that provider’s current and past clients have reviewed their work for them. A negative track record with customers, including a history of making mistakes, wasting money, or failing to deliver on time, is a huge red flag. No matter how affordable that company’s services are, they are not likely to suddenly become a trustworthy, dependable partner for you.

On the other hand, decades of positive reviews and numerous long-term partnerships with major clients are “green flags.” Those accomplishments show that the service provider has proven its ability to meet the client’s needs consistently and keep their customers cared for. Make sure that’s the third party partner that’s representing you!

Staying Behind the Scenes

Another important quality for a third party service is the ability to stay behind the scenes. It’s not that your organization wants to keep it a secret that you are using other vendors to accomplish some tasks for you. But customers can be easily confused when they feel that they are working with several different companies instead of just communicating with your organization. 

A really great third party service provider has the ability to carry out the tasks that you entrust to them while functioning as much as possible as if they are your own in-house department. In the area of print and distribution specifically, here’s what that looks like.

Custom Branded Printed Materials

Printing isn’t just about how cheap it is to create each piece of collateral. It’s also about how close the printer can get the final product to your organization’s look and feel. At Spectra, we print materials that reflect each client’s logo, brand name, color scheme, and other details in a unique way. Getting to that point isn’t easy; it takes both personal experience in the printing industry and access to industry leading digital print equipment.

Quality and Extras

High quality is essential with your printed materials. You need even details as small as the feel of the paper to reflect the professionalism and trustworthiness of your organization. Spectra also offers clients powerful “extras” that elevate the quality of printed materials, often without the customer even being aware exactly what is different about that particular piece. UV printing is a great example, as well as specialty inks and textures.

On-Time Distribution

Your customer won’t care how high quality your printed materials are if they can’t get them delivered on time. Unpredictable delivery times erode confidence and suggest that your organization can’t be trusted to get tasks done in an organized manner. 

This is another area in which Spectra’s hands-on experience gives your organization more value than an in-house mailing department would be able to. Instead of learning through trial and error how to achieve affordable, on-time delivery every time, you get the benefit of Spectra’s decades of success in the field at your disposal.

White Labeled Storefronts

Online storefronts have become a very powerful tool that organizations can use to offer printed materials as well as other items to their customers. Particularly in the B2B space, these e-commerce-like websites streamline the process of finding out what customers want and getting it to them as soon as possible.

Spectra stays behind the scenes as an “invisible partner” while building and managing an online storefront for a client. The storefront is completely branded for the client, and the B2B customer that logs onto the site has the impression of ordering directly from the client, not from Spectra as a third party provider.

Spectra’s expert team is able to provide much more expertise and versatility than the average organization would be able to source from in-house, allowing the client to get a professionally designed, functional online storefront established extremely quickly. They can begin offering materials and taking orders right away, with efficient, accurate fulfillment of those orders handled by Spectra.

Partner With the Best

When the Spectra team is completely invisible to your customers, that means we’re doing things correctly! We work hard to make the communications between you and your customers as smooth and efficient as possible, leaving the door open for both you and your customers to expand your business and grow into new areas of opportunity.

Interested in learning more about Spectra’s outsourced print and mailing services? Schedule your consultation with us to learn about the opportunities for marketing, e-commerce, B2B fulfillment, and much more. Our digital print and mailing solutions are ready to make you look great with every project!