When a customer buys a single report supplied over email in PDF format, they can just sit and read it. No functionality is required to help them do this. But if a subscriber has access to more than 100 reports, to make all that content work in their favour, they’re going to need some help to find and pull out all the necessary and pertinent information.

For the relationships that exist between all pieces of content in a portfolio to add up, and for customers to be able to maximise the value of their subscription, a publishing firm needs to provide end users with a set of smart tools.

Improved levels of service

For an individual subscription to be worthwhile, the user has to feel like its benefiting them and helping them to their job better and quicker. A wealth of workflow tools not only helps the user achieve this, it helps a publishing firm understand more about what the user wants and enables them to feed this back into the development process.

So then, which tools are most useful?

Good quality search and the structuring of returns is vital. In fact, search is the number one workflow tool, in terms of usefulness to the subscriber. Corporates value search so highly some have been known to cancel entire global subscriptions because users have not been able to find the information they need from large portfolios.

If an end user is trying to make a comparison of data or analysis from multiple reports, it’s unlikely they’ll want to open all those reports simultaneously. A snippet of each relevant section is more useful. In addition, it might be quite handy for a user to view relevant returns for all reports – even those for they don’t yet have access to.

Relevant snippets of content should then be easily saveable in a clippings list, which is equally easy to locate at a later date.

So, you’ve found info. What next?

What about exporting various points of information, wherever they have come from and in whatever format, and unifying them all for export as an Office doc?

Search, find relevant content, save to clippings, and export to Word, PPT, or Excel in seconds. Then edit your document in the platform to finalise that dataset for your meeting, that presentation for the Board, or that report for your boss, without having to reformat any of the elements it contains.

Smart tools = happy users

Once a subscription has been sold, the ability for the end user to easily navigate and pull together bespoke reports is the main element that will ensure high renewal rates. It’s this simplicity that will also encourage end-users to advocate use of the platform amongst colleagues and for a subscriber base to grow within that business.