The sky's the limit for Print Service Providers

Tuesday, Jun 28th 2022
construction zone with sunrise sky in the background

When meeting with Service Providers around the world, I often ask the following question:

How do you define your business?

There are typically two common answers:

  1. My business is printing documents
  2. My business is about helping enterprises improve their customer engagement

Depending on the answer, their long-term strategy differs – as do their investment plans.  If an SP views their business as print-centric, in many cases, they tend to migrate toward technologies like 3D-Printing. Some have even entered the labels and packaging game.

On the other hand, if their vision is around helping enterprises increase customer engagement, many are focusing on gaining the necessary skills to position themselves as a strategic business partner for digital transformation and customer experience.

The latter is a very interesting shift.

If these Service Providers become digital transformation experts, aren’t they essentially helping to extinguish what they built their business on in the first place – print? And more importantly, why would large enterprises need third party outsourcers to help them with this transition?

The hard reality is that according to some of our key Service Providers, the larger the enterprise is, the more help they need to execute on a cross-channel customer communications strategy. The reason is simple: agility!