Matrix - Manage customer contact and improve distribution processes

Circulation is a vital area of the publishing enterprise that is often overlooked when it comes to IT investment. Many newspapers still maintain the home-grown systems that were developed in the early days of IT automation, but the costs of maintenance and the costs of lost opportunity may now be too high a price to pay.

The growing reduction in paid for newspaper purchase is a reality. This leads to increasing imbalances between centralised investment and revenue. At the same time, the delivery channels are proliferating and customers are becoming less loyal and more demanding.
 
Any opportunity to engage with customers and to provide a relevant service must be exploited. Organising customer contact and improving the circulation offer can help to retain subscribers and protect the revenue base. Matrix consists of a single relational database that can manage all of the circulation complexity that
modern publishing demands. Based on the principle of the three P’s (People, Products and Places), the system manages all of the processes and interfaces within a single database providing an efficient unified view of the business. The underlying principles go way beyond traditional CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and into the realms of TRM (Total Relationship Management).
 
Matrix is designed to capture all contacts from subscribers, vendors, carriers, employees, readers and advertisers and attach them to print, online and ancillary products. These relationships are then framed against defined addresses (homes, offices, web, email, vending machines, trucks and print sites). This multi-dimensional data warehouse is further enabled with tools for relationship management such as rating engines, logistics capability, search engines and subscriber
management tools.
 
The key benefit to the publisher is that any relevant information can be quickly and easily found and then acted upon to provide a more efficient service to stake-holders. This applies to single copy sales customers as much as subscribers. The individual’s information may be blind to the system but purchase patterns will not, and the ability to recognise events, seasonality and promotional effects will help serve casual readers as well as committed ones.