Enterprises that haven't
gotten the expected results from their CRM implementations
may soon get a boost from an unlikely source: Pitney
Bowes Inc., a company best known
for its office postage meters and other mailing equipment.
Pitney Bowes, a $4.6 billion company that has more
than 2 million customers worldwide, has been executing
a plan that will enable it to improve customer interactions
through better data integration solutions.
A big part of that strategy
has included building up the Stamford, Conn., company's
technology portfolio. The result has been the July
acquisition of document management software developer
Group 1 Software Inc. (Last year, Group 1 bought data
integration and warehousing software developer Sagent
Technology Inc.)
Pitney Bowes followed
up the Group 1 announcement with its acquisition of
the eCartography data analysis and profiling tool
from AMB Dataminers Inc. earlier this month.
The company plans to
release in January the first deliverable from these
efforts when it puts together a technology stack from
the technology it has acquired; quarterly updates
are to follow.
In so doing, Pitney
Bowes hopes to become a dominant player in a nascent
branch of the CRM (customer relationship management)
industry known as CCM (customer communications management).
With its CCM approach, Pitney Bowes will help companies
derive more value out of their customer communications,
such as in the billing and call center areas.
Through data integration,
the company plans to offer technology to embed marketing
offers with bills—both paper and electronic—and
track customers' responses to those offers. The same
could be done through the customer service channel,
including customer self-service applications, company
officials said.
"We're like BASF.
We don't make CRM; we make CRM better. We're not a
CRM company but an enabler," said Bernard Gracy,
vice president of business integration for document
messaging at Pitney Bowes.
Vertical industries
Pitney Bowes initially will target include financial
services, health care, telephone companies, utilities
and government and will rely on partnerships with
CRM companies to get its technology into these areas.
November
29, 2004
Analyst
Reports