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