InfoSend Succeeds Staying True to Itself

Like other successful businesses, InfoSend—a leading provider of business process outsourcing services—has adapted to the changing market with a clear sense of its mission while staying on the forefront of technology. The company, which celebrated its 20th year in 2016, is headquartered in California, but also has locations in Illinois and Texas. It serves clients nationally and regionally in the utilities, healthcare, government, financial services, and general business.

InfoSend’s 110 employees deliver more than 114 million print/electronic documents annually. Its core competencies—information technology, document formatting, electronic payments, and document production—are positioned into three business groups: printing and mailing, data processing and archiving, and eBusiness products and solutions.

End-to-end customer focus

“The biggest thing for us,” explained Russ Rezai, InfoSend president, “is that we really put quality and support first. We don’t hide behind a phone tree—our clients talk to a live person. They can actually call us when they have questions.”

Top-level customer service and support, coupled with a philosophy that stresses integrity, is part and parcel to InfoSend’s business model. “Since the margins in this industry have been crushed over the past 20 years, there’s really no way for us to be successful unless our clients are happy and we keep them long term,” acknowledged Rezai.

Which InfoSend has done. “Our clients stay with us for 10-years plus,” said Rezai. “To be able to do that, we have to invest in good people and staff to support clients so they don’t have wait too long to get questions answered or work done.”

Investment in technology is also key.  “We were digital from the get go,” confirmed Rezai. One notable example is its migration from cut-sheet laser printers to the Ricoh Pro VC60000 color inkjet digital printer for production of transactional, direct mail, and marketing materials.

Three areas of focus

Clients use the eBusiness products or the print and mail services as stand-alone offerings or together as integrated customer communications solutions.

The data processing and archiving solution provides data processing and document composition to create rendered documents for print and mail, eBusiness, or both. Usually clients send raw data, explained Rezai, but they also send PDF files for processing. InfoSend provides various archiving services to give clients and/or their third-party vendors access to the final composed documents.

“The technology to accomplish this is a mix of proprietary and licensed products that we’ve integrated into one platform for data processing and composition and online billing and payment,” said Rezai. “Having a mix gives us a lot more flexibility. We have two fully featured back-end and composition platforms, one that is proprietary and one that is licensed. They are integrated with our proprietary tracking and accounting system.”

The system, said Rezai, lets us handle whatever our clients throw at us.

Within the print and mail area, transactional print and mail is the key focus, but marketing-related work is also a part of the offering. “In addition,” said Rezai, “we print static inserts that go with transactional documents and perform one-time mailings for our clients.”

The main technology used here is the Ricoh Pro VC60000, another roll-fed press from Océ, and cut sheet laser printers that are being phased out as the company moves over to inkjet.

Within eBusiness products and solutions, InfoSend provides a full-featured electronic bill presentment and payment that supports autoPay and paperless billing. InfoSend offers individual pieces of this solution to clients who don't need the whole bundle. For example, a client can use email eBilling to send eBills out via email but not use its portal-based presentment or payment.

InfoSend’s desktop portal and mobile user interface lets customers sign up for electronic billing, get their bills emailed through portal, integrate on back end with multiple payment processors that process the payment, and customize the front end to look like the client website.

One important element of its service offerings is its approach to disaster recovery, which involves multiple production facilities, redundant equipment, data replication and backup, and remote access by key staff. InfoSend continually improves its procedures, policies, and infrastructure to ensure its disaster recovery efforts are as advanced as possible.

Changes in the landscape

The big change in the market has been the migration to inkjet, noted Rezai. When InfoSend first opened its doors, almost all the midmarket players were using cut-sheet laser printers. “Our clients weren’t large enough to justify pre-printed rolls and clients wouldn’t accept just black on white paper—they wanted their own look and feel. Everyone was printing on pre-printed shells, or using some sort of highlight process or some combination of both.”

But inkjet changed the market. “We can print static color on fly at a reasonable cost; with a full-color laser printer it wasn’t cost effective to do full color, as the price point per image was just too high for transactional,” said Rezai.  “For marketing collateral it was worth it, especially since marketing clients had the advantage to use standard postage; the huge postage savings pay for the extra cost of print.”

For transactional work, however, clients are required to pay first-class postage. “There just wasn’t the room for them to pay full pennies more to get full color; with inkjet, cost per copy is much lower than laser,” Rezai reported. “This allowed the industry to offer full color, eliminated pre-printed shells, and allowed a lot of us to offer variable data.”

The installation of the Ricoh Pro VC60000 has also reduced job-running time, while delivering more consistent image quality. Inkjet cuts printing time to one-third of what it takes a laser printer. “You’re using up a lot of time to get the job finished just with printing with a laser printer; inkjet helps solve that rush,” said Rezai.

 “Within a few months of installing cut-sheet laser printers, if you are growing in job volume you are in danger of exceeding its comfortable capacity,” he stressed. “Then you have to buy another one. It seemed you have to continually keep buying and installing.”

The Ricoh Pro VC60000 delivers 1200 dpi resolution and high speeds, even on media up to 250 gsm. “We can now print our clients’ marketing materials in-house, as well as their billing,” Rezai noted. This further enhances InfoSend’s ability to offer its customers a one-stop shop solution.

More than 99% of the jobs InfoSend produces are sold as a turnkey solution that includes data composition and pre sorting, and printing and mailing. It’s what makes the most sense, both in terms of cost and logistics, said Rezai.

InfoSend’s first job was producing 10,000 medical statements monthly, he recalled. “Now we are printing and mailing more than 13 million sheets a month, not including static marketing inserts. Our total production volume just on our own devices is 175 million sheets a month. We reached profitability in our third year, and have been profitable every year since.

“We started small and used our personal savings,” he added. “We didn’t have any investment capital, just a small line of credit with our bank. We grew organically, relying on personalized support and hard work. We are still privately owned.”

This approach to growing your business may be considered old-school, but combined with the company’s embrace of advanced production technology, it’s a formula that has worked well for InfoSend, it’s employees, and its clients.