It must have been about a year ago already, since I last fled the Netherlands for a short vacation in Italy. I always use to do that around the autumn vacation. By then, in the Netherlands it gets dark quite early and the weather is rainy and grey. Also the very idea of me sitting on a terrace at the …
An acquainted business relation sighed after receiving a letter from a large Dutch company last Friday: “It’s a pity I’m not a jurist or a tax advisor, it actually seems to be quite easy,” she concluded with a grin. She runs a restaurant and she never before had been in contact with the company in question. “How did they ever …
The Marketing Director of a potential customer approached me asking whether we had the capacity to handle more than 10,000 customer cards. After we presented our action plan including price quotation, the Marketing Director, slightly embarrassed, called us back to inform us that the majority of the board did not see the need for this data processing. He stressed that …
“Good afternoon… “I heard with a hasty tone coming from the other side of the phone last week, “I know today is Friday, but could you provide me with 6 data entry people by Monday? French, German and Spanish speaking please, and eh… they need to work with our system”. His stream of apologies was washed over by a flood …
Registering, processing, administrating, documenting, and managing invoices is terribly expensive. National Audit Office calculations show that the average processing cost of an invoice is 15 euros. 15 euros, at a point nothing has actually been done yet. The actual invoice hasn’t been made, checked out nor registered yet. Then that same invoice needs approval and of course a payment needs …
Like a mother watching over her children, taking them under her wings, guiding them, that’s how furniture retailers should take their customers under their wings as well. On a daily basis, we process the batches of forms with filled out addresses we receive from various large furniture stores, often situated near each other in the Netherlands. These are scanned the …
For the past 5 years, I’ve been Head of Marketing and Communication of a large franchise formula that offers mortgages and insurances. We make sure we are following regulations and are doing quite well. My department consists of a senior marketing guy with two employees, a senior communication lady who also has two people working under her and me as …
Six words that represent how in general 7% of an average mailing ends up and of which about 5 to 10% actually gets returned. Even bank statements and new credit cards get sent to the ‘wrong’ address. Why? That is because not everyone is good at keeping the CRM-system up to date. Some send out a mailing using an Excel …
About 15 years ago, I organised a data processing project based on filled out coupons for a personal relation of mine. In that period we processed and completed about 200.000 addresses in four weeks. Jobs like that are great and challenging, and help you prove that hard work really does pay off. You can imagine my surprise when I ran …
