“Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

Leave aside the equations and spreadsheets for a moment; the question above is what it boils down to when you’re talking about ROI for your tech solutions. Are you seeing a sufficient impact on profitability and/or efficiency? Even when iMeet Central helps teams start working together better than ever, eliminating some of the status quo headaches from their day-to-day, it can be a challenge sometimes to, well, measure the juice.

There are ways to really focus on the bottom line impact. Frank Nardi explained to the audience at Collabosphere how iMeet Central saved his company over $15,000 per year—on a single project.

Who’s this Frank guy?

When we first announced the agenda for Collabosphere, Nardi was the COO of the marketing communications company PrintArt. By the time the conference arrived, he was truly one of us; he now works in our Pasadena HQ as a senior account manager. It seems weird to keep using his surname, but for the purposes of journalistic integrity, I’m going to keep doing it.

ROI challenges

“ROI is challenging in core business systems like iMeet Central because [the solution] affects so many people,” Nardi said. “You’ve got people in multiple departments with multiple responsibilities and different agendas.” Are your admins and users united on what they want to get out of the system? Is your creative team on the same ROI page as other departments? By trying to wrangle ROI data in all the different corners of your company’s day-to-day, you may fall victim to data overload and wind up with more numbers, but fewer significant numbers.

ROI best practices

Counter data overload with sharp focus and constant communication. What was the one stress point that you wanted to fix? Don’t just talk about this during implementation; keep returning to it as the weeks and months pass. Make sure you’re staying on target. And while internal work processes may not always seem to have a direct impact on your campaigns and clients, you aren’t doing anyone any favors by spinning your wheels in outdated processes.

“What we were noticing in some of our processes was that we were duplicating; I was doing something, then someone else would do it. We didn’t trust the process. That doesn’t add value to the customer,” Nardi explained.

User adoption is another key to ROI. Find quick wins to gain buy-in from your teams – and, again, be sure to continually communicate your goals. If some of your users aren’t sure about the reasons you switched from an old process to the new process—or, even worse, are openly pining for the old process—your path to ROI glory will be more arduous.

Why PrintArt turned to iMeet Central

PrintArt needed a streamlined system for file and proof management. To make proof approval more efficient, they wanted a “proof portal” for their clients. Nardi and his colleagues focused on the outdated processes they wanted iMeet Central to fix or replace: cumbersome proofing via email, offline spreadsheets without version control, the telephone-game miscommunications caused by isolated email chains and phone chats, and limited accountability (for both people and the process itself).

iMeet Central ROI in action

PrintArt was working with a high-profile casino company on a monthly mailer. It was a great account with plenty of expansion potential, but also created some challenges due to demanding deadlines and a slim profit margin. “Anything we can do to increase our profitability – if it’s days, hours or even minutes – is huge,” Nardi said. In the company’s recurring proof approval cycle, they had zero built-in breathing room – which was a problem when proofs were too large to be emailed, or when clients took a long time to print out and mark proofs.

“The best part about this is to add client value,” Nardi said. “What we didn’t understand until we got into the process: our clients are sitting in their offices, getting all these emails from us. They get five emails with 26 versions of proofs. They start downloading and printing these out – and they’re oversized. So now they’re taping them together. Then they lay them out on a table, then they grab five people from all different offices – legal, management, everything – and they get in a room and look everything over. It took hours. Then someone would call us and say ‘Here’s all my changes’ and sit on the phone for another 40 minutes to communicate the changes. And then someone in legal comes back and says ‘We gotta scrap all that. That promotion is not going to work. We’ve got to start over.'”

It was, indeed, time to start over – with a new process. PrintArt rebuilt their workflow to streamline proof approval (take a product tour to learn more), removing issues associated with file sizes and ending the taped-up proofing parties in conference rooms. Custom branded workspaces made life much easier for clients while also allowing PrintArt to have much better visibility throughout the process; there’s no more guesswork around bottlenecks.

The results? More flexibility for changes, fewer errors and omissions, improve client ownership of projects, and the elimination of overtime and weekend expenses.

How do you put a number on all that?

Nardi and PrintArt did the math. Their customer service representative in charge of working with the client on the proofing process saved 144 hours in a year – a cost-savings for the company of $4,680. By eliminating production overtime, they saved 16 hours every month (two people working on a Saturday to catch up); that saved $6,912. By simply saving a half-hour here and there by no longer wrestling with version control or file sizes, they saved another 13 hours each month—or $3,900 for the year.

Add it all up: $15,492 in savings.

Even better: this was just one project. And it was a lesson that was repeatable for other clients.

“When I saw that number, I was blown away,” Nardi said. “Fixing that one thing, that one huge bottleneck in the process, resulted in getting our ROI for our entire system.”

You can see the full session video below—and you can also download Frank’s deck (note: he refers to a previous version of iMeet Central known as SocialBridge).