Understanding the consumer is an integral piece of the loyalty puzzle, but having the appropriate tools to achieve the ultimate customer experience is icing on the cake.
Pitney Bowes Inc., a global technology company that provides innovative products and solutions to power commerce, recently launched five new Communicate capabilities to help organizations reach and engage consumers at every step of their brand interactions. The latest iteration of the Communicate solutions takes advantage of emerging modern technologies to empower companies to ramp-up customer experience in dramatically new and differentiating ways.
Chris Hall, vice president of customer engagement solutions, Pitney Bowes, talked to Loyalty360 about this major launch.
How will these capabilities elevate the customer experience?
Hall: The customer experience is predicated on a brand fundamentally understanding the needs of their customers. By managing and personalizing each interaction, organizations can have a two-way discussion with their customers to identify any problems and bring forth solutions. Understanding the customer is one aspect, but it is equally important to give organizations the right tools to respond quickly and efficiently. This is where new elements of the Communicate 2.0 release, such as the EngageOne Communications Suite, are elevating the customer experience.
What makes these five new Communicate capabilities unique and what are your goals from a customer engagement perspective?
Hall: With the Communicate 2.0 release, we’ve given our customers a dramatic increase in flexibility. From an interface-perspective, the Communicate suite guides personalized communications across desktops, tablets, smartphones and other browser-based surfaces for a multi-channel strategy. In addition, Communicate 2.0 includes ready-made, market-proven templates to reduce the amount of time spent developing the personalized videos, and generate a return on investment in as little as 21 days. We’ve focused on incorporating feedback from our last release to enhance elements, like time-to-market, to ensure these updates are directly addressing customer needs.
How will these help fickle consumers that often shift allegiances in an increasingly digital world?
Hall: Fickle consumers–especially in the digital age–will always be fickle. With so many companies competing on the strength of their customer service, rather than solely on the quality of their products, managing interactions with the customer has become critically important. The impetus is on the organization to respond to consumers before a problem causes a shift in allegiances, rather than the other way around. Brands should provide consistent, personalized experiences to their customers at each and every touchpoint. The Communicate 2.0 solutions help to guide these experiences, as well as keep pace with customer preferences as new channels and technologies emerge.
First launched in 2016, Pitney Bowes’ Communicate solutions are designed specifically to help marketers, customer service and customer experience executives deliver tangible improvements in customer engagement with technology that dynamically guides personalized interactions across all channels. The new capabilities, which include innovations for digital engagement as well as physical communications, have been developed in direct response to customer feedback, evolving client needs and the changing digital landscape. They include:
EngageOne Video (EOV) v2.3 is an award-winning solution that combines video with user data to deliver interactive, personalized video to help brands enhance customer engagement, scale expert interaction without the overhead and reduce call center costs. Through a new partnership with Rapt Media, clients across Telecommunications, Insurance, Utilities and Financial Services industries can now access four video templates to expedite the return on investment in just 21 days. The analytics and feedback generated through deployment allows companies to learn and adjust before investing in a fully customizable solution with the EOV platform. EOV has most recently received global recognition for customer excellence and service through accolades from the European Contact Centre Service Awards (ECCCSAs), POST’s Digital Insurance Awards, FS Tech Awards, and the Xplor France Awards.
EngageOne Digital Designer v2.0 provides a simple yet powerful browser-based interface that lets anyone create and deliver email, SMS and push notifications using interactive and dynamic content optimized for display on any device. Using interactive templates and drag-and-drop tools, business users can quickly create more engaging and responsive customer communications through better design, non-delivery handling, dashboard reporting capabilities, and template import and export capabilities.
EngageOne Communications Suite v4.4 enables clients to design and deliver engaging and personalized real time and batch multichannel communications to their customers. In the latest release of the EngageOne Suite, users can embed interactive video content in their print and digital communications. Other notable features include updates to EngageOne Interactive, to allow users to complete their templates across an expanded roster of compatible web browsers, such as Google Chrome and Firefox, and faster processing of Batch and On Demand communications.
EngageOne Output Manager v3.0 optimizes document workflow and frees users from the limitations of proprietary vendors and data streams with robust print management. In this update, we are including a new optional module, EngageOne Accessibility that allows users to ingest PDF communications, create the necessary accessible tags for output, and archive communications during the production workflow. This allows communications to be available to visually impaired customers and employees on their assistive devices.
MAIL360 v4.0 collects electronic mail event data from the United States Postal Service (USPS™), automates translation of USPS event data and matches it to your business data using a standardized format. This enables companies to track and trace delivery of each mail piece, and gain visibility for both in-home delivery dates and undeliverable-as-addressed (UAA) mail. MAIL360 is introducing a new feature called Return Mail Workflow, which uses an automated process for reviewing and reconciling delivery addresses to reduce both the number of undeliverable addresses applied to outgoing mail, and the costs that arise from customer communications over undelivered mail.