ESP Computer Services Newsletter
Summer 2004	Volume 1, Number 1
IN THIS ISSUE - New Call Handling Structure - Back Issues - New Online Reports - Enhanced Documentation - Match Tool SUGGESTIONS You are welcome to email us any questions/issues you would like covered in the newsletter.  We also welcome any suggestions you may have with respect to possible topics that you would like us to address in the future. ESP Computer Services 12444 Victory Blvd. Suite 400 N. Hollywood, CA 91606 Phone: (818) 487-4500 Fax: (818) 487-4501 E-mail: sales@espcomp.com We’re on the Web! www.espcomp.com Note: To stop receiving emails from us please reply and write UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line. We respect your privacy and time.		Staying in Touch with Customers It gives us great pleasure to e-mail you our first newsletter for 2004. It is designed to update you on the latest ESP has to offer, make you aware of new capabilities and provide valuable information. We’ve been hard at work over here at ESP and we have some new developments that we’d like to share with you. HOT TOPICS   Customer Service – Managing Quantity and Quality One reason circulators and publishers choose to outsource fulfillment is because it’s so difficult to staff a customer service department. Especially with smaller publications, the volume of phone calls is not large enough to warrant employing more than one or two customer service specialists. Direct mail drops and other promotional campaigns cause customer service peaks and valleys, making it seem like the one or two customer service employees are always either too many or too few. Still, some publishers prefer to take on that burden rather than risk quality service by outsourcing. ESP finds a way to affordably cover the peaks and valleys of customer service staffing without sacrificing quality service. ESP has the advantage of doing service for many publications, which helps smooth out those peaks and valleys. But in doing so, how does ESP provide quality service for numerous publications? ESP’s phone system allows for customers to be siphoned into small groups of Customer Service Specialists. This means that one publication’s phone calls are almost always handled by one of just a few people. ESP’s Customer Service Specialists, become exactly that, specialists. This is because they are each handling a manageable number of publications, gaining experience, knowledge and practice with every phone call for that specific publication. What about peak times? ESP also has a safety net for high call volume months, days, and hours. Backing up the Customer Service Specialists, is another layer of staff. This staff is comprised of well-seasoned Customer Service Specialists, capable and experienced in handling phone calls for a greater variety of publications. During peak times, calls overflow to this secondary layer. Past that, there is a group of Supervisors and Team Leaders that can assist with exceptionally high call volume, complicated customer service requests, or irate customers. In this way, ESP ensures its publishing clients that all customer service calls are answered, and that quality service is provided to every caller. Pubservice.com: New features/enhancements Back Issues If you fulfill your back issues requests at ESP, we'll automatically sell them on pubservice.com for you as part of our basic service. Only paid orders are accepted and this ordering information will be cross linked with the subscriber account if available. You can see this new feature by going to the account information page for your publication and clicking on the link in the left-side navigation bar. New On Line Reports. The online reports are basically the same as the regularly scheduled reports that you receive. However, there are some really nice features that the online reports provide that are not included in the standard report package. The difference is that the online reports let you select some of the parameters. For example, if you want to:  Run reports against a query. Say you're curious if hand delivery subscribers are more prone to pay with their order. You could  run a query selecting all hand delivery subs and then run the sales by source report against that query. Save that report. Now, run the same query except select accounts that do not have hand delivery. Run the sales by source report against that query. Now you can compare the reports and satisfy your curiosity. Compare Stats with more flexibility. For example, if you want to look at the Sales by Source  report comparing the last 1^st six months of last year to the last 6 months. Instead of adding the totals from the monthly reports, you can select those date ranges and run them for yourself. Use various reporting formats. The reports are downloadable in Adobe PDF, Excel, Rich Text (Word) or plain text. Where applicable, charting has been done to convey information on the report more effectively. Some of the new reports are: Earned Income by source - This report will break down your Earned income by Source for a selected date range. Deferred Income – This report will show you how much you’ve earned on an accrual basis during a selected date range. Call Categorization - You can review what kinds of calls you are getting right during any selected date range. This includes looking at counts of calls that you are receiving right now! The online reports are available from the “Reports” link after you login to pubservice. For your reference, here’s the login URL: www.pubservice.com/reports.asp Enhanced Documentation- Did you know that examples of the most common reports are documented and available online? Did you also know that they are available from the electronic version of your reports? If you look in the upper left hand corner of your report and see a hyperlink there, that means there’s online help available for that report. Just click on the link and it’ll bring you to the sample report. If you’d like to review all the current report documentation just go to www.pubservice.com/reports.asp to get the latest details. What’s going on this quarter? Match Tool - Matchmaker, Matchmaker, make me. . : This is one of our latest features and while it may take a little time to understand how it works, we believe you'll find it an extremely useful tool. There's just four easy steps and best of all there's no charge!                  Step 1 of 4 - Datasource: Suppose you received an Excel file of potential subscribers for a direct mail effort and you want to eliminate current subscribers from the list. While your fulfillment house is pretty good about turning around lists for you, you need this one done right now! So login to www.pubservice.com , click on Online file match. There you'll be asked for the excel file of your potential subscribers. Click on the browse button and find the file on your computer. If the first row has column headings make sure to click on the first row that has field names checkbox. This will make it easier to match columns up later on. Now click on the "Next" button and we're off to.... Step 2 of 4 - Mapping On this page, click on the Source file fields drop-down to display the available work sheets in your Excel file. Select the one that you want to match. Up will pop the column headings, now click and drag the column headings to the corresponding fields on the left. This is how the computer will know what columns on your spreadsheet will match to it's fields. Drag over all of the fields, one by one, that you can map to the  ESP Field Name. Now click on the "Next" button to go to... Step 3 of 4 - Match criteria Fill in the fields and select the type of match you'd like by selecting a loose match, tight match, or an exact match. A loose match will give you a lot of matches, a tight match not so many, and an exact match let's you match the exact values field by field. If you select "exact match" the fields list will unlock and you can select those fields to match to. Once you've done that, click on submit. You'll get a notice on the screen similar to this one:  Your job has been submitted as Job : Stefan's test. You will get a email notification at sbeeli@espcomp.com upon completion of job. The email will direct you on how to retrieve the results of your match.: Now wait about 15 minutes and check your email. It will read something like this:  STEFAN'S TEST is completed. Please click on the following link to download the files. http://www.pubservice.com/matchfile/vwresults.aspx Click on the link and we're on to... Step 4 of 4 - Retrieve Results On this page you'll see a list of job(s) that have run for you. If you click on the record count in the "Match file" column you'll be able to download the records that matched. If you click on the "Non-Match file" column you'll be able to get the records that didn't match. For the records that did match you can append data from the ESP file and then clicking on the Get Data button.
		Visit us at http://www.espcomp.com/ Note: To stop receiving emails from us please reply and write UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line. We respect your privacy and time.