Ramesh Ratan Speaks with OutputLinks About His 1st year at Pitney Bowes

Greetings Ramesh. In your January 2010 OutputLinks Entrepreneurial Spirit Interview you were a brand new Pitney Bowes employee and the new president of the Document Messaging Technologies division. Can you share with us how the past year progressed for you and the business?

Andy & Julie thank you for this opportunity.  It has been a great year. As I shared before, I came to Pitney Bowes because I was phenomenally excited by what I felt was the world’s best business opportunity.

My excitement was based upon Pitney Bowes’ incredible collection of businesses and assets coupled with Document Messaging Technologies being at the center of it and stitching together the future of what I call “hybrid physical digital communication infrastructure solutions.” I personally felt that this “hybrid physical digital communication infrastructure solutions” was the direction that all businesses were headed in terms of how they spend their marketing and customer communications dollars.

How has the past year gone?

I am now even more convinced that it is absolutely true. I think in the past year, we as a company have made very significant progress in that direction. We have focused our company on Customer Communications Management solutions or what we call CCM.

We believe that we are unique in terms of the collection and portfolio of assets we have across the company. A good example is our software business, Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI), with capabilities in data, analytics, customer intelligence, profiling, segmentation, and targeting. We added multi-channel campaign management to our PBBI offerings with the recent acquisition of Portrait Software.

When you add all this up, we have done incredibly amazing things in terms of new innovations in the digital print space.  And there is more to come!

The HP - Pitney Bowes partnership for high volume printers was just launching when you joined the company. How has that progressed?

It has gone very well and we are expanding our customer reach across the globe. We started our HP partnership with one printer, the IntelliJet™ 30 Printing System and we have since added the  IntelliJet™ 20 Printing System as well as a number of important speed and width innovations to serve the needs of our customers. Between our two companies, we have placed over 20 printing systems (40 engines) around the globe and are rapidly establishing a leadership position in the very high volume print marketplace.

Our Print+ Messenger™ system is another example of how our HP partnership can create powerful solutions for our customers. Pitney Bowes inserters can be equipped to generate high speed, full color personalized content directly onto the envelopes. Messages and images can be matched to the content on the document inside. We have had amazing success in early customer trials in the US and Europe.

The combination of Pitney Bowes IntelliJet™ printing systems, inserting systems and Production Intelligence® workflow systems drive new opportunities for our customers to tightly link their print and mail operations. Customers tell us that they are excited about how tightly integration of print and mail processes can help them lower operating expenses and generate more powerful, valuable customer communications.

It sounds like you feel the dreams and goals you discussed with us last year are coming to fruition.

Over the past year we have made significant progress in realizing this vision of the seamless end-to-end customer communications solutions infrastructure. Our innovations in the analytics space, our core inserter space, and in the digital printing space as well as the innovations acquired with Portrait Software all contribute to that progress.

Join us over the next 2 weeks for the full interview where Ramesh discusses how the changes Pitney Bowes has commanded have and will affect their customers. And please let us know if you have recommendations for additional questions you would like us to include in our future  interviews.

Andy & Julie Plata

PLATAS@OutputLinks.com

Ramesh Ratan Speaks with OutputLinks About Mail & Beyond

An OutputLinks Conversation with Ramesh Lakshmi-Ratan Part 2 of 3

President, Document Messaging Technologies at Pitney Bowes

Ramesh, in the first segment of our discussion we covered the achievements over that past year. In this segment we would like to discuss how the changes Pitney Bowes has commanded have affected your customers and how they have responded to and benefitted from the changes.

 It's all panning out well in terms of the interest in the market place. We are poised to deliver on these dreams (as discussed in Part 1) and provide tremendous value to our customers. I think we'll start seeing accelerated results both in our businesses as well as our customers’ businesses this year.

So bottom line is a year ago a lot of it was vision and dreams. A year later, I'm incredibly satisfied with how much those dreams have actually become real. It is real not just from creating product or capability but from actually delivering value for our customers.

As an agent of transformational change have you been successful in stimulating new approaches in achieving business objectives?

Oh, absolutely! I'd love to take credit for it but I have to say that our chairman, president and CEO, and the senior leadership team at Pitney Bowes have all been focused on being agents of change.  Coincidently, Pitney Bowes had launched an effort to cause strategic transformation across the business when I joined the company.

A big piece of what we call “strategic transformation” had to do with taking a few hundred million dollars of cost out of the business and increasing efficiency by integrating the over eighty-five companies we had acquired over the past ten years. After integrating those assets and removing redundancies we then began investing the savings into our new growth areas.

The results have been phenomenal and not just within the Document Messaging Technologies organization but across the entire company.

I’m very, very happy with how much progress we've made in the overall company in a very short period of time.

How have you and your team dealt with all these changes over the past year?

Yes we had to implement tremendous change. I credit the strong business foundations established by our past leaders that allowed us to accomplish this transformation.

How much change has there actually been in the organization?

I'll just give you a flavor of some of dramatic changes we implemented over the past year.

Besides the fact that Document Messaging Technologies has a new president, we also have a new VP of engineering. We changed the leadership in Europe and have new VP of Europe. I brought in a new VP of global product management who reshaped the entire operating model. We reshaped Document Messaging Technologies by implementing a global business model, integrating the US, Europe and North American operations.

In addition, we changed the operating model to a strong form product management operating discipline. We did this to accommodate our evolution from a mail dominated world into an integrated CCM multi-channel communications world. In that world things are much more dynamic and in flux and we needed to make sure we had a much stronger perspective from data driven, product management point of view.

And in the middle of all these significant changes across the whole company we were able to deliver strong growth results. I'm thrilled that we've been able to make all these changes and still produce very positive results for our employees and the shareholders.

It sounds like Pitney Bowes is creating new opportunities by evolving from a mail focused company to one which includes mail but moves beyond mail.

Exactly. But you know, I still get questions like “aren't you afraid of cannibalization.”  While we do think about the shifts in the business we believe we are doing the right things for our customers.

In many cases we actually lead the changes in the market place. In the end that is what we need to do to turn Pitney Bowes into a high tech, high growth company and it will be good for us.

I mean at the end of the day who better than ourselves to lead in changing the world in which we operate. I believe that’s better than being a follower and trying to catch up..

Are your customers comfortable with all these changes?

Our relationships with our customers are foundational to our success.  Our customers are also transforming and in many instances we're partnering with them to help them to adapt their changing customer communications requirements in order to help them achieve their business goals.

I've talked to both of you in the past about Pitney Bowes and customer satisfaction measures for our Document Messaging Technologies division. We have absolutely role model relationships with very, very high customer satisfaction and customer loyalty measures.

We have an independent research company to measure our customer satisfaction and loyalty. Over the last fifteen to twenty years the trend has been consistently growing to the point where today we have well over eighty-five percent customer satisfaction loyalty scores – and these are top box scores.

Usually these measurements are made on a ten point scale and most companies report these measures in a top two box scale. On the top two box scale, a lot of companies have been thrilled out of their minds to have a seventy-five percent customer satisfaction, customer loyalty - I'll buy from you again kind of scores. On a top two box scales for us we are in the ninety-nine percentile.

It’s very unique to have this intense level of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. It has been critical in terms of our customers really working with us in the whole movement to digital and full color in their communications infrastructures.

Join us next week for the final segment where Ramesh discusses how every connection can be a new opportunity for Pitney Bowes and its customers.

And, let us know if you have recommendations for additional questions you would like us to include.

Andy & Julie Plata

PLATAS@OutputLinks.com

Ramesh Ratan Speaks with OutputLinks about Making Every Connection a New Opportunity

An OutputLinks Conversation with Ramesh Lakshmi-Ratan Part 3 of 3

President, Document Messaging Technologies at Pitney Bowes

Ramesh, we ended the second segment of this interview with a discussion of Pitney Bowes’ high customer satisfaction scores. Tell us more about what you feel has helped Pitney Bowes earn those high scores even during these times of dramatic changes.

Our customers actually liked some of the change because in making these changes we continue to put focus on their pain points. This actually helps them transform their business models.

In Pitney Bowes overall, and Document Management Technologies in particular, our whole model for delivering value to our customers is based on helping our customers continuously become more efficient, productive and provide more value to their customers through their customer communications.

Can you give us an example?

Our production mail systems have been the standard bearer for speed, accuracy, integrity, and efficiency in processing at very, very large scale volumes. So our customers who operate state-of-the-art automated document factories – or communications factories as I like to call them – have been standard bearers in their markets.

When we look ahead we see significant opportunity to not just help our customers continue to get more operationally efficient but actually enable them to use these new communications infrastructures as marketing capabilities to help grow their business by connecting more deeply and richly with their own customers.

How does helping your customers connect with their customers enhance their business?

You have heard me tell this story that says it costs eight times as much to acquire a new customer as to get your current customers to buy more from you. All the work that we do in helping our customers turn their traditional bills and statements into a full color, highly personalized, data-rich communications media - or transpromo as some people call it - is a huge part of how we view our customers and the value we provide them in new and different ways.

So it's not just to help customers process customer communications faster and more efficiently. Of course, we do that. But, we'll also help them reduce their postage and other costs related to their infrastructures. And then, we can help them convert those savings into new infrastructure investments to help them market better and connect better with their customers.

We believe that "every connection is a new opportunity" and we help our customers realize that every connection they make, every mailpiece, every communication with their customer is a new opportunity for growth. It's almost like a mindset shift into the future.

What do you predict for the corporate communications industry in 2011?

There are two things happening in that context of communicators:

• One is what I've been pitching for the last decade regarding the shift of spend in media, advertising, and marketing from broadcast to narrow cast. That shift is going to continue. As we go into 2011 we'll see that shift continue in traditional broadcast media. I think the newspapers, magazines, radio, television and outdoor will all have more pressure to move dollars to narrow cast, targeted, one to one, direct response enabled media spend.
• Point two - in 2011 you'll also see an accelerated move into media that is mobile and enabled by peer networks like social networks.

These movements in terms of digital, targeted peer networks and mobile are going to find better ways to connect with the physical realm. So you're going to see this whole concept of “hybrid physical digital” becoming better articulated in 2011.

How does this affect printed pages?

When you look at what's happening at the leading edge of media consumption environments, like iPad or Microsoft Kinect , you're seeing a manifestation of “hybrid-physical-digital” realities. iPad is a good example. It's not like a standard laptop or computer. You actually have to physically manipulate the medium by fingering, scrolling, skipping etc.

From our interaction with these devises coupled with our ink and paper experiences, it is apparent that tactile sensation with communications media is something that will always be an important part of our information consumption. 

So I think what you're going to see is greater recognition regarding the need for tactile sensations in our communication platforms. You'll start to see these non-paper communications platforms begin to more easily and seamlessly integrate with mail and paper and traditional tactile environments.

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OutputLinks conducts a number of interviews with industry notables. If you have a suggested interviewee, please let us know.

Andy & Julie Plata

PLATAS@OutputLinks.com