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Apr. 16, 2007

AET Films Inc. saw its production costs increase and its profit margins decrease, as crude oil prices escalated rapidly in 2004 and in 2005. This created a price-increasing environment, says AET's Director of Information Systems Jim Berger.

Overall, this can be a path to destruction in what is essentially a commodity business. Realizing this, AET wanted to solidify customer relationships using custom communications.

"Our goals weren't just to make it easy to do business with us, but to make it difficult to not do business with us," Berger says.

Overall, complicating the scenario was the makeup of AET's client list. The company boasts around 500 customers of varying sizes: five billion-dollar conglomerates, 25 firms with revenues in the $250 million to $750 million range, and 475 of what Berger describes as relatively small mom-and-pop firms.

The latter group comprises about 40 percent of AET's sales volume and varies greatly in technological/managerial sophistication.

However, AET faced another challenge more common to B2B companies: getting the right people in each organization to connect. Employees in the supplier's shipping group to their equivalent in the customer's receiving group, for example.

This often proves a logistical nuisance, especially given that no two clients are structured exactly the same way.

Berger added "some customers have no internal systems at all. They're still doing business on the back of envelopes."

"However, they still have the same needs in terms of order fulfillment that the larger customers do. You can't just dismiss them or make them jump because they don't do things the way you'd like."

On any given month, AET gets several requests for freshly customized films and labels, or changes to old ones. In the past this resulted in weeks of sending paper documents like order forms and change requests back and forth, not to mention endless phone calls and emails.

AET's plan was to make the process as easy as possible, and at the same time useful that customers would be willing to pay a small premium for the same product they could get cheaper elsewhere.

To help accomplish this important goal, in 2005 AET tapped enterprise document presentation company StreamServe to streamline the customization process.

Using StreamServe, AET integrated electronically with its customers. All physical order forms, label designs and communications are accessed and processed through the same tech framework.

The process wasn't easy. AET had hundreds of documents that had to be converted literally one by one into the StreamServe system.

AET made the decision early on to concentrate on those documents and processes that would best satisfy its most valuable customers first.

"Basically, we prioritized," Berger says.

As a whole, the customer-relationship push seems to have worked. Upgrading its communications and tech infrastructure knocked the wait for customer requests down to a few weeks, rather than the previous 8 to 12-month backlog.

AET has steadily seized more market share, now commanding about 40 percent of the market.

Feedback from internal and external audiences has been uniformly positive. On the home front, AET's salespeople are now able to tout the company's speed in filling requests to potential customers.

Externally, AET communicates with customers more efficiently, with Berger's information systems group occasionally even taking direct requests for specific forms and documents from customers.

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Source: One to One Media