Consumers face exponential amounts of information from multiple sources daily. Just as organizations strive to manage incoming communications, individuals are confronted with the same task. Pitney Bowes has taken on the challenge, developing a way for high-volume mailers to effectively communicate with key target audiences, while enabling relevancy for consumers through an opt-in, Web-based communications management system. Introduced last week, Volly is a secure digital delivery service that digitally and physically connects high-volume mailers to customers, enabling one mailstream for all customers’ physical and digital mail.
What is Volly?
Volly expands Pitney Bowes’s Customer Communications Management (CCM) portfolio, to provide a digital delivery service for secure, electronic communication. With this service, the company plans to enable high-volume mailers to integrate into their existing physical mail delivery processes.
For businesses, Volly provides the ability to develop an integrated CCM program to lower customer service calls, penetrating a more engaged audience, and cost savings through electronic delivery. The system leverages existing mailstream investments, including composition, printing, and document insertion by acting as a hyper-secure online gateway between a mailer’s data profiling, segmenting, preparation, and composition CCM functions and their print and mail production tasks.
Acting as a virtual mailbox, the Volly platform targets technology-apt consumers. It provides users with a way to organize a number of incoming statements, promotions, coupons, and other direct marketing pieces from one portal. Additionally, Volly provides a personal document management solution that enables online bill payment, due date management, and coupon and promotion tracking to hit on four key benefits—easy bill payment, retail savings, reduced clutter, and enhanced security.
Why Now?
From a consumer perspective, dealing with increased communications is a continuous issue. Relevancy is also important as more marketers embrace data management techniques to better target customers. At the same time, computer and Internet access has reached a majority status in the U.S. In its white paper, The Mutually Managed Customer Experience, Pitney Bowes highlights 2009 Nielsen data stating that more than 80 percent of Americans have a computer in their homes and, of those, almost 92 percent have Internet access.
While some are still weary of the risks of online activities, many realize the benefits and efficiency it brings to the table. Statistics support the growing acceptance of online channels for bill payment and banking. For example, a recent survey by the American Bankers Association shows that 36 percent of bank consumers prefer to do their online banking online compared to other methods, including branch visits, ATMs, mail, telephone, and mobile devices.
“Consumers want to be able to take care of the same thing, but on different days they may prefer calling, texting, going online, or visiting the branch down the street,” states The Mutually Managed Customer Experience. “They also want—and expect—to be able to check on yesterday’s activity and perform tomorrow’s transactions without being bound to one channel or another,” it continues.
The emergence of social media also enters the discussion, as consumers are getting used to being in the driver’s seat when it comes to dealing with how they access and receive information. It is now up to the communicator to comply.
Why Pitney Bowes?
With Volly, Pitney Bowes expects to provide more than a product that is mutually beneficial to mailers and consumers, they are promoting a lifestyle change. It is an intriguing concept that undoubtedly fills a need, but requires the cooperation and acceptance of many to prevail. Understanding this, Pitney Bowes outlines a list of requirements necessary to attract mailers at launch, such as minimal integration costs, immediate savings, proven security, data reporting, and job tracking.
The company believes they are well positioned to bring this type of revolutionary service to fruition. Pitney Bowes provides a trust-worthy brand that consumers recognize, along with a proven partnership with 74 percent of high-volume mailers across the U.S.
Looking Forward to the Future
Volly addresses the growing need of communications management at a consumer level while simultaneously providing advantages to high-volume mailers looking to reduce costs in a mutually beneficial program. Pitney Bowes is currently recruiting mailers to the program, which is expected to launch to consumers in the second half of 2011.
