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Pitney Bowes is a global technology company that offers a range of innovative products and solutions in areas of shipping and mailing, data and global ecommerce in approximately 100 countries around the world. Below is our recent interview with Manish Choudhary, SVP – Global SMB Products & Strategy at Pitney Bowes Inc:
Q: Could you tell us about your offerings?
A: Our products enable more than 250 retailers, brands and online marketplaces sell to more than 6.5 million buyers in more than 220 countries and territories, using more than 74 currencies.
Q: You are a 100-year start-up in an era where most technology companies are only a few years old. What makes Pitney Bowes different from other tech companies today?
A: Innovation is at the heart of everything we do at Pitney Bowes and that is what has kept us around all these years. Today, we are fundamentally a different company that has moved into growth markets.
We have changed our brand identity, transitioned our go-to market with creative channels that did not exist before and launched groundbreaking products like the Send Pro C series, which transforms the traditional postage meter into an all-in-one office sending solution, opening up exciting new possibilities for our business. We are creating a new open digital platform – the Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud – that allows us to deliver entirely different types of value to our clients than are completely new to them and us.
The world of commerce is complex, and Pitney Bowes is continuously innovating to help clients navigate —right from helping them use data to market to the best customers, to efficiently enabling the sending of parcels and packages, to securing payments through statements and invoices.
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Q: What do you offer Small and Medium Businesses?
A: Our core offerings for Small and Medium Businesses are around our Shipping and Mailing capabilities, that sit at the intersection of physical (hardware) and digital (software). We offer digitally connected equipment that is connected to the Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud and offers SaaS solutions and APIs that help SMBs efficiently run their businesses.
Our latest and most ground-breaking product innovation, the next-generation SendPro-C Series, enables businesses to select the ideal sending option for parcels, letters and flats, take advantage of full tracking and delivery savings across multiple carriers, and access technologies from the Google Android operating system. The Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud provides access to many new Partner Program applications including: Google G Suite, Yext, Acquisio, DocuSign and Nimble CRM.
For example, think of a mid-sized legal services firm that needs to ship documents to clients. By using Pitney Bowes SendPro C-Series, the firm can manage the calendar, make payments, ship and mail directly from calendar appointments and manage customer relationships at the click of a button.
Q: Can you tell us about the Pitney Bowes Open Innovation journey?
A: In late 2017, Pitney Bowes launched its first Global Hackathon. We invited developers and start-ups from around the world to build intelligent solutions for our clients on the SendPro C-Series device. More than 2,000 developers and innovators from major technology companies submitted 65 solutions and applications for SMB customers. By opening up our shipping and mailing APIs to developers, start-ups and our partners, we understood the profound shift in the type of value and offerings we can bring to small and medium business clients.
The applications and solutions were built in areas such as mailing and shipping, global ecommerce, information management, marketing and analytics. The Pitney Bowes Global Hackathon was an opportunity for developers to leverage our technology and gain access to a large customer base. We collaborated with 20 tech partners for APIs and technologies including Microsoft Xamarin and Azure, Zoho, Freshdesk, Algorithmia and DigitalOcean.
Since then, we have started to work with other companies who have built developer ecosystems from scratch. We have spent a lot of time talking to Intuit, Google, Cisco and Microsoft about how they built and nurtured their developer environments. We also launched the SMB Startup Portalc that helps startups and developers efficiently access tools and resources to build high-quality applications for Pitney Bowes customers.
The collective intelligence of the community extends the value we can bring to customers beyond in-house ideas and enhances our core offerings, making us more valuable for our clients. It also opens the aperture for us to explore adjacent markets.
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Q: How can SMBs use new technologies like Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning to grow their businesses?
A: SMBs across the globe are much the same. They are all looking for ways to grow their business and provide their customers with relevant and personalized experiences. Today, cloud-based SaaS applications and technologies are easily available to small and medium businesses (SMBs) at a fraction of the cost, making them far more accessible than ever before.
When we talk about new technology adoption, SMBs are leading the way. SMBs now have access to Big Data Analytics tools that generate terabytes data with the click of a button and can extract relevant insights quickly. Machine Learning applications help SMBs automate routine tasks such as mailing and shipping to optimize cost and manage efficiencies. Artificial Intelligence can help SMBs get deeper insights about their customers and provide dynamic product, pricing and customer support options, thereby delivering a personalized experience each time the customer interacts with the brand.
This is just the beginning, with increasing accessibility and sophistication in technology, SMBs will continue to leverage business intelligence tools and data to scale their businesses.
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