Pitney Bowes puts its stamp on ecommerce with Adobe Experience Cloud, resulting in a 198% return on investment
Pitney Bowes has a history of innovation since founder Arthur Pitney invented the postage meter. The company turned to Adobe Experience Cloud for digital innovation.
The ability to engage with customers in deep and meaningful ways is critical. Not only do successful businesses boost brand identity and sales, they forge stronger and more lasting relationships. Pitney Bowes, a household name that’s associated with high-quality mail metering machines, recognized a couple of years ago that a more modern data framework was essential. A variety of homegrown systems and solutions for managing sales meant that the company couldn’t scale and refine campaigns effectively.
Pitney Bowes has a long history of innovation, since founder Arthur Pitney invented the postage meter in 1902. Today the digital commerce company boasts more than $3.4 billion in revenue and has 11,000 employees globally. But innovation in today’s world meant moving to a more advanced digital platform that could extract the maximum value from its data. The company wanted to connect data points across contacts, leads, campaigns, opportunities and quotes — residing in systems spanning the world. As a result, the Stamford, Connecticut company turned to Adobe Experience Cloud to build a foundation for digital innovation.
Making its mark
As a global technology company powering commerce with shipping and mailing solutions, ecommerce logistics services, and financial services, Pitney Bowes knows how the world — and business — has changed. Despite having numerous systems and solutions in place to run its business, a spate of manual business processes and inefficient workflows led to sometimes slow, expensive and, ultimately, unacceptable outcomes. Pitney Bowes’ legacy IT framework also resulted in more complicated updates that further drove up costs.
For example, the company had two full-time IT developers who spent 15 hours per week deploying tracking code to enable reporting. Even then, human errors were the norm, and a lack of automation resulted in gaps, inefficiencies and breakdowns. As a result, many tasks had to be handled manually and a business analyst had to review and rectify every reporting anomaly that popped up. With an average of 30 anomalies per day, Pitney Bowes required two full-time analysts to handle report resolution.
In a data-driven and customer-centric business where performance is everything, the situation wasn’t acceptable. Pitney Bowes recognized a need to evolve to a more sophisticated digital framework that could automate reporting but also add other value. Consequently, after a thorough technology review and vendor evaluation process, the company selected Adobe Experience Cloud. The technology framework includes Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics, and Launch by Adobe solutions.
Creating value in partnership with Adobe
Experience Manager helps Pitney Bowes improve content and digital asset delivery, develop and manage websites better, and produce better forms. “We’ve optimized and personalized our digital experiences, and democratized web analytics across our marketing organization. This has led to a significant uptick in site visits and online revenue,” said Jose Rodriguez, director, Digital Analytics, Pitney Bowes.
The solution also helps the firm deliver highly personalized digital experiences to its customers, thus boosting brand loyalty. Adobe Target harnesses analytics to conduct A/B testing and multivariate testing so that the company could identify the optimal customer experience. With Adobe Sensei, real-time artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) pulls data from different marketing channels and produce actionable insights.
The addition of AI and ML has introduced other advanced features and capabilities. Today, Pitney Bowes can analyze high volumes of customer data and identify patterns and trends that predict future behavior. This makes it possible to refine marketing efforts and even product development. The combination of solutions and capabilities has armed Pitney Bowes with a digital arsenal equipped to excel in today’s business environment. Now, marketing and other teams have the tools they need available for the task they require.
Ideally, digital transformation is more than a way to make incremental progress. It’s a path to creating value — and serving business partners and customers better. On that front, Pitney Bowes has succeeded. The ability to collect, manage and use data more effectively translated into a 198 percent return on investment within 18 months. Marketing and other teams are forging closer and stronger relationships with customers, and they have witnessed reduced the time it takes for some processes by 50 percent. Meanwhile, the 30 anomalies per day are now down to an average of one per week.
After implementing Experience Cloud, Pitney Bowes also trimmed $81,000 annually from its IT budget by eliminating the need for developers to handle report coding. By removing the IT administrators from report preparation, the company saved another $27,000 per year — while having up-to-date and accurate reports at the fingertips of business leaders. Automating these processes allowed staff to focus on more strategic activities. Finally, advanced reporting means that a web analyst can turn around reports 50 percent faster, and with greater accuracy and flexibility than in the past.
To be sure, Experience Cloud has allowed Pitney Bowes to construct a technology framework that’s built for today — but also the future. A more flexible data management framework makes it possible to add, subtract and modify data sources as needed — and use data in new and innovative ways.
It’s a winning approach. In 2020, J.D. Power recognized Pitney Bowes for providing “An Outstanding Customer Service Experience” for its Assisted Technical Support. The company that made the postage meter famous is now ready to push the envelope on the future of ecommerce.