Pitney Bowes plans to expand to 31 cities in India

MUMBAI: Pitney Bowes, an NYSE-listed company offering customer communication and management solutions, plans to expand its operations in the country by launching customised products in 31 cities, a top company official said. "The customised products include services like customer profiling based on various attributes, ATM locators and delivery point validations among others," Pitney Bowes' Managing Director South Asia and Global Strategic Alliances Jeetendra Kumar told PTI here.

Customer profiling would take into account attributes such as buying habits, propensity to spend among others, thus helping the company to develop customer intelligence and truly customise communication to them. Services like delivery point validation would help the company verify the correspondence address before sending a communication across, thus reducing postage costs.

"The ratio of preparation of a document to its postage costs is 1:6," Kumar said. The company which has a presence in over 130 countries and has 35,000 employees globally, started its direct operations in India in 2004 and has a revenue of over USD six billion, Kumar added. "With the retail boom in India there is a greater need for understanding the customer," he said.

"Thirty nine per cent of SMSs in Asia are generated in India," Kumar said here adding that SMSs as a tool for customer interaction has not yet been tapped well. Service providers in the country need to move from mass production to mass customisation, Kumar said.

On the scope of improvement with regard to communication with consumers, Kumar said, "41 per cent of calls that company call centres receive are on a particular communication that has been sent to them. In case of financial services, 25 per cent calls are statement related".

Each opportunity to interact with the customer must be considered an opportunity to do business with him or her, he said adding that it was important to understand the customer in totality.