CASE STUDY - Pitney Bowes Improves Total Cost of Ownership with Enterprise Business Intelligence
- By William Duffy
- October 18, 2007
Commentary by William Duffy Data Warehouse Project Manager, Pitney Bowes Inc
Pitney Bowes is a mailstream technology company that helps organizations worldwide manage the flow of information, mail, documents, and packages through its integrated mail, messaging, and document management solutions. Its 35,000 employees deliver technology, service, and innovation to more than two million customers worldwide. It operates four call centers and employs 1,250 sales associates and 1,500 field service representatives in North America alone.
Pitney Bowes turned to Oracle for a comprehensive business intelligence (BI) solution that not only brought cohesiveness and greater analytical capabilities to its sales and marketing operations, but would also work in the context of Pitney Bowes’ multifaceted IT infrastructure. “Our technology requirement spans more than 10 legacy systems deployed on different technologies,” said William Duffy, data warehouse project manager at Pitney Bowes Inc. “Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition was one of the few BI tools capable of meeting the challenge.”
Over the past few years, Pitney Bowes has been on a nonstop growth trajectory, fueled by a string of acquisitions and a worldwide push to expand its service operations. To ensure that all customers—new or old—receive fast, appropriate services and offerings, the company launched a program called “The Power of One” in 2002, which sought to provide customers with a consistent experience across all business units.
Pitney Bowes receives approximately 30,000 customer calls daily. “On any given day, each of those customers has the potential to speak to a salesperson, need a repair on a piece of equipment, or need to talk to someone about a bill,” Duffy said. “Managing all that information is a huge challenge.” So Pitney Bowes sought continuity and compatibility with its CRM solution and broader IT infrastructure, which includes several Oracle databases in its data warehouse environment. “Oracle is our primary database platform, with well over 600 different production databases installed. We are running Oracle Real Application Clusters in some of our high availability environments,” Duffy said.
Pitney Bowes needed to enable its sales representatives to associate each customer inquiry with a type of account—large or small—to ensure they were providing the appropriate level of service. Its Oracle solution now allows each representative to immediately access all information on each customer.
“We needed a business intelligence solution that would provide all customer-facing associates with the same customer information in real time so they understand who the customer is—regardless of the customer’s location, history, and time with Pitney Bowes. We also wanted to be able to analyze productivity and performance, which is key to helping us deliver the best possible service” said Duffy.
“Oracle business intelligence provides laserlike visibility into the performance of every sales rep,” Duffy said. “We can better understand how agents are spending their time and what’s not working. Oracle’s business intelligence is key to our success in managing key performance indicators in call center productivity, field service organization, and effective campaigns.”
On the marketing side, Duffy noted, “Our biggest challenge was creating campaigns and using the data effectively to understand the buying and service behaviors of the customer. Now analytic dashboards drive every important customer retention campaign, including identifying and targeting customers with expiring leases. By enabling marketing to segment customers, we can ensure that we call the right customers at the right time so we can retain those customers and generate new business.”
Taking advantage of the prebuilt Oracle BI applications, Pitney Bowes was able to reduce the total cost of ownership of its BI infrastructure and also integrate BI into its business processes. Because the solution is based on a “hot-pluggable” architecture, the company can get insight from its legacy systems and third-party solutions and analyze information from historical and real-time data sources.
Other benefits achieved include enhanced sales productivity through better customer insight, increased responsiveness of sales associates, leading to greater customer satisfaction, and improved marketing effectiveness with better segmentation and targeting
This article originally appeared in the issue of .