The transformation to electronic bill payment has been a long, slow slog that seems to have stalled despite many financial and social incentives for consumers to change. In designing its new customer consolidation platform known as Volly, Pitney Bowes decided to give consumers a lifestyle makeover that would lead rather than force them to the water.
Last week, Pitney Bowes launched Volly as a secure digital delivery service that connects mailers and consumers. It makes the biller and mailers less domineering and puts the customer in charge of their own processes, which include not only bill payment but coupon management, catalogs, promotions, and other direct marketing.
“We saw trends 18 months ago around the world that pointed to how the biller-direct model was beginning to fall apart from a consumer perspective because of the disparity between people paying online and people not suppressing billable statements," said Bernie Gracy, vice president of strategy and business development at Pitney Bowes. “And we saw an opportunity to serve our existing base of mailers and billers in creating a consumer consolidation portal aligned to the needs of the consumer."
Volly is a cloud-based digital mail communications platform. It provides a single application consumers can use to receive, view, organize, and manage bills, statements, direct marketing, catalogs, coupons and other content from multiple providers. It will be available to consumers in the U.S. in the second half of this year.
It is part of Pitney Bowes’s Customer Communications Management portfolio and is designed to have an opt-in, spam-free experience to help organize and manage a part of their lives.
The application will work with mailers existing physical mail-delivery processes and will help them initiate the electronic relationship with their customers. In practice, however, it will be the consumers who are in charge, Gracy said.
Traditionally, Pitney Bowes has aligned its business with the needs of the mailers and billers – which include 74 percent of high-volume mailers across U.S. – and developed tools to drive communication with the consumer. Its business is still focused there but its new tactic focuses on the consumer and lets them control and aggregate which bills and statements or coupons or catalogs they want to see.
“The consumer is in control in a 100 percent opt-in environment. We created an experience for the consumer that makes sense for them which the biller then joins," Gracy said.
