Pitney Bowes - Document Messaging Technologies

Reprint from Output Links: The sixh of a six-part series on customer communications management and optimizing the mailstream

Special Interests: Customer Communication Management Series
Unlock the profitability in your mailstream.

August 29, 2006

Retention and Revenue through
Intelligence in the Mailstream

Part Six: With CCM intelligence end-to-end, it all adds up.

By John Schloff
Vice President of Strategy, Product Management and Marketing
Pitney Bowes Document Messaging Technologies

Let’s take a look at a more intelligent mailstream where each process is optimized for efficiency,effectiveness, profitability and customer satisfaction.

When we add more intelligence at every point in the customer communication cycle we unite the physical world of paperbased documents with the digital domain of internet and electronic documents.

The Intelligent Customer Relationship
For an example, let’s go back to Janet, our prototypical customer portrayed in the first article of this series,to examine how more intelligence helps make the most of that relationship at every step.

Let’s start at the point where Janet’s monthly mortgage payment arrives at the bank by mail. Since her last statement, Janet has gotten married, changed her surname, rented her old house and changed address to her new home. She has noted this on her returned invoice with her monthly payment. Her new address isn’t taken at face value, however. It needs to be verified against the USPS® NCOA database and made to conform to address formatting standards.

So now we know that Janet is a newlywed in her new home and has another house, too. This makes her a prime candidate for mortgage refinancing. This new data can be applied to the creation of a document carrying a message that offers her a halfpoint discount for financing both of her homes with her current bank. There’s no need to start from scratch. A template already exists in the central document repository and can be quickly personalized and generated in fullcolor for inclusion in her next mortgage statement.

Janet’s revised next month’s statement is then sent to production for printing and insertion. Here’s where a new wrinkle can be added Janet’s offer message will also be sent to her via several channels – a printed statement “onsert” in full color, to her personal account web page and via email. Her highly personalized offer will be sent by mail with complete confidence that it will reach her through highintegrity, filebased insertion. Thanks to a complete suite of postal address hygiene and sortation compliance solutions, maximum postal discounts will be realized, too. The exact offer message that was sent to Janet is then stored in the central data repository.

Thanks to mail tracking and tracing, her bank knows the exact day that Janet receives the statement with her offer. If Janet makes an inquiry to the call center for more information, that same offer – along with its delivery date will appear on the customer representative’s display. This gives the bank one more chance to speak with Janet about her special refinancing offer. Meanwhile, all her other customer data, including updated mail tracking information, is instantly available for fast inquiry resolution.

Janet can also access her personal web page to resolve any potential account issues. She can review her payments history and the status of her current payment online. Additionally, she’ll see her options for refinancing her mortgage, a choice of home equity financing plans and offers for other bank products like credit cards, savings options, online banking and more.

Because her offer was presented through a highly efficient multichannel
delivery system, she can’t miss it. She calls the bank’s call center for more information and the customer service representative is able to instantly see the details of Janet’s offer, along with a live script to help close the sale faster. During the same call, the representative convinces Janet to pay her bill online. Moving to online payment is more convenient for Janet and reduces the costly float time of incoming payments for her bank, as well as
making her payments more secure and reliable.

All the while, a complete record of Janet’s account information is held in a secure data repository for fast access by all appropriate users in the bank.

Does CCM intelligence need to be added all at once?
Not necessarily. What’s happening at companies around the world is a gradual, phased-in transformation. For the most part, each company is first applying CCM intelligence at critical “pain points” and then rolling it out to other departmental areas according to need. Some are focusing on data integration, others are applying it in their production stages, still others are building up their capabilities in channel management.

A key benefit of moving to a CCM framework is that it can be expanded in phases using legacy systems. This is important, because CCM technology won’t be standing still.

By partnering with companies experienced in CCM products and systems implementation, enterprises can add intelligence to position themselves to get the most from every step in the communications cycle – the most efficiency, the most effectiveness, the most revenue and the most happy, loyal customers.

About the author
John Schloff is Vice President of Strategy, Product Management and Marketing for Pitney Bowes Document Messaging Technologies. He has provided thought leadership to small businesses to Fortune 100® firms on how Customer Communications Management optimizes the mailstream to create cost savings and increased revenues.