Hank Riner: The Attention Grabber

Does the marketing value add take on more significance in this economy where you can only streamline processes so much?

Absolutely. Nobody ever cut their way to greatness. Sooner or later you have to figure out how to grow a business. It is much less expensive to sell more services to an existing customer than it is to go out and acquire new customers. Studies have proven that it’s as much as 80 percent less in terms of marketing and acquisition costs. So it behooves any client in any business to make sure they are maximizing the value from existing customers. Remember, transaction documents are opened. They have a high degree of visibility and they present an ideal opportunity to do just that.

You have a lot of marketing experience yourself. Is it that marketing mindset you bring to OSG?

Yes. It’s all about helping clients understand their customers and what those customers need and want and then to create targeted messages to them. We help them create one-to-one marketing through the transaction documents and then help them capture a response. So again, it’s applying all the principles of database targeted marketing and one-to-one marketing and applying them to the transaction document, which is ideally the most effective way of communicating with the customers.

But you still need to focus on the processes, right?

We embrace and use technology in several ways; one is to make us more efficient in serving our customers, but also to provide more value in products and services. Our clients trust us with their most valuable assets: their customer data and information. We have very high client retention rate, in excess of 96 percent every year. I think the best measure of customer satisfaction is if customers are staying with you.

Do you feel you must prepare OSG and its customers in the long run for a primarily electronic marketplace?

I remember in 1980 everyone talked about the paperless office and here we are almost 30 years later and we have more paper than we have ever had, so I cannot believe paper is going away. We will always provide paper transaction documents. I also believe as young people who grew up with the Internet begin to take a bigger role in society, the adoption rates for electronic will continue to increase. But clearly we think we have a leadership role to play there. We are actually media neutral and are prepared to deliver documents through any medium.

But the youth market is different. The demographics will change. My son just graduated recently and the family was having a nice social lunch when he and my daughter and girlfriend all pulled out their Blackberrys. Focus is not in. Multitasking is. It is taking us to a whole different level where kids feel like if they’re just talking to you, they’re not optimizing their time. That’s the world we live in now. So that’s what we tell our clients. When it comes to marketing, one of the beauties of the transaction document is — and what brought me into this company and into this industry — that you do have their focus. If they’re paying their bills, they’re focused. When you look at all the other marketing channels, it is hard to get people’s attention through all the noise.