Workflow
Enfocus Conducts Customer Survey
Thursday 11. December 2008 - Survey results highlight high levels of satisfaction with Enfocus products and increased prevalence of PDF workflows
Enfocus, an EskoArtwork company, recently completed an extensive survey of its customer base to gather feedback on use of and satisfaction with Enfocus products, opinions on market trends as well as overall involvement with PDF technology and workflow automation. The global survey was conducted in six languages by a third party: Readex Research.
“Keeping in touch with customers is extremely important in a market that changes as fast as the professional publishing market”, said David van Driessche, Director of Enfocus Marketing. “We need to understand how the world of our customers is changing and how well our products still fill their needs. A customer survey is a good tool to accomplish that”.
Survey details
The survey netted nearly 5,000 responses, 30% of which came from commercial printers. The balance of respondents was a mix of designers, publishers, specialty printers and representatives of other graphic arts disciplines. Nearly 50% of respondents were either prepress managers or designers, job titles that are typically heavy users of Enfocus solutions. Seventy percent of respondents operate from the Mac OS X platform.
Other data points included:
In the last 12 months, respondents reported that 53% of jobs were submitted in PDF format, while 78% of the jobs they sent out, either inside or outside their company, were PDF.
60% of incoming files are preflighted, most commonly using PitStop Professional.
Respondents reported that 26% of PDF files received are PDF/X compliant, and 11% are compliant with a Ghent PDF Workgroup (GWG) specifications.
Most common preflight errors are: fonts not being embedded, low resolution images and RGB colors used.
Both PitStop Professional and PitStop Server carried very high levels of customer satisfaction, with more than 85% of respondents being satisfied.
PitStop Professional is most commonly purchased for correcting and editing PDF files, preflighting is a secondary reason.
More recent Enfocus products such as Switch reflected fewer installs within the survey base, but carried high levels of satisfaction among those who owned and used the products.
Positive feedback
“The good news is that our customers are very positive about our products”, continues van Driessche. “Both value for money and inherent quality of the products are scored very high by customers. Its also very encouraging to see that the new Switch product line gets top marks from its customers. Were definitely on the right track with the new focus on automation in publishing.”
Educating the market – an ongoing effort
It is less encouraging seeing that only sixty percent of PDF files get preflighted before being sent on in the workflow. “Enfocus, and other parties such as the Ghent PDF Workgroup, have spent an enormous amount of time and effort on advocating the need for quality control. Our survey shows that there is still a large amount of users who are not convinced of the need to check every PDF file that hits their workflow. Continued education remains of the essence!” concludes van Driessche.