Bernie:  With consumers becoming increasingly comfortable with Internet and portable platforms, many banks and retailers are downsizing/optimizing their brick-and-mortar network footprint and are focusing on developing new touch points with customers.

Jay:  I also see new touch points and experiences emerging in those brick-and-mortar outlets.  Apple emails me my receipt for example.  I see the time where I can go, select something, and pay for it unassisted.

Bernie:  As a mobile innovator, USAA, is building these self service touch points in their brick-and-mortar experience — using touchscreens for self service or live videoconferencing with experts for complex transactions in lightly staffed branches – really optimizing their cost structure but providing a range of options for consumers.

Jay:  As traditional brick-and-mortar moves to a mixed ‘click-and-mortar,’ there’s opportunity for more customer insight and intimacy at the point of sale without a loyalty card. How will the retailer take advantage of it?

Bernie:  I would say at both the point-of-sales and on social media.  High-end retailers H&M, Zara, and Burberry’s have done a great job of blending social media, the online shopping experience, and physical retail network to drive growth and build loyalty.  It’s an interesting thought to note that not many major B2C corporations have been wildly successful on social media.

Jay:  It’s getting easier than ever for a consumer to conduct business with an organization without ever interacting with a human. What does that do to your brand?

Bernie:  That was some of the early feedback we received about Volly from major B2C corporations – that they needed a capacity to manage the brand and experience as consumers conduct business online.  The challenge they saw with social media is that they were going to have to syndicate their brand and relationship to where their customers go on the web.  That is a major challenge.

Jay:  If service providers like insurance companies can replace a significant proportion of their customer transactions online, what needs to go in a communication channel and how does the provider drive value in that channel?

Bernie:  Especially when the provider relationship is complex – think insurance company, general agency, and the consumer.  When I speak to financial services companies about Volly – the conversations shifts from saving money on postage to how can they increase the number of products per customer.  It’s not just about cost saving – it is about driving value.

Question for you: Who do you think gets the multi-channel mix right?  Clicks and Mortar?  Physical and Digital? Social and Transactional?

Pitney Bowes was one of the sponsors of the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) Privacy & Data Protection Town Hall in New York City and I was honored to join members of the New York State Attorney General’s Office, Intersections, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and the FBI, on a panel regarding data protection and breach readiness.

The event coincided with the release of the OTA’s 2013 Data Protection & Breach Readiness Guide that provided data breach statistics for 2012.  Here are some interesting highlights:

• 1,478 Breaches
• 242.6 Million Records
• $5.5 million cost per organization
• $3.0 million cost due to lost business
• 97% of data breach incidents were avoidable!

The above statistics underline the importance of even the most technology savvy organizations to prepare for a potential data breach or loss incident.  It’s less a question of “if” you will suffer an incident but “when”, and the ability to respond with immediacy and consistency can help to mitigate the potential financial and reputational impacts to the company.

To that end, the following summarizes the key principles recommended by the OTA as part of organizational preparation and planning.  Included below each principle is a recommendation from the readiness guide aligned to that objective:

“Acknowledge that the data you collect contains one or more forms of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or sensitive data.”

• Create a data lifecycle strategy that continually evaluates the data you collect from acquisition through use, storage, and destruction.

“Accept that you will experience a data loss incident or breach.”

• Adopt a data governance and loss prevention strategy to understand the data you are responsible for protecting and limit access, storage, and retention to only what is necessary.

“Understand that your company falls under multiple government regulations requiring notice and remedies.”

• Establish a business relationship with an attorney or service provider who is well versed in the various data breach laws and compliance regulations.

“Being unprepared can significantly add to the direct and indirect costs including management resources and lost productivity.”

• Develop an effective data incident plan that includes a cross-functional playbook that describes the plan fundamentals that can be deployed on a moment’s notice.

“A data incident can result in significant damage to your business’s brand reputation.”

• Develop an effective communications plan to address six critical audiences:  internal teams, key partners and customers, regulators and reporting agencies, law enforcement, impacted parties, and the press, media and analysts.

For further details and information on how you can better protect and prepare your organization, download the OTA’s guide here. While the importance of protecting the data has not diminished, it is just as important to be prepared to minimize the damage to your company, your brand, and most importantly your customers when a data breach does occur.

We’ve seen more than a few cases where customers were furious that they might lose their paper communications, or have to pay extra to keep them. But how did they express that anger? Simple. They took to social media, posting and tweeting and otherwise expressing their feelings online. This strikes us as very interesting. They’re upset about losing paper access but they express it digitally? That’s a tough environment in which to make sense of communication channels.

Creating a bridge between traditional and new communications channels isn’t easy. But it can be done. The two-word solution is integration and streamlining. This approach solves a lot of problems. IT and communications systems don’t need to be upended. Customers can be segmented so each person’s needs are met. Savings can be significant — up to 50 percent in some cases. Plus, integrated systems are flexible, accommodating everything from bills to direct marketing.

Streamlining and integration were central to the development of Volly™, our opt-in, secure, cloud-based communications platform that works with established service bureaus as well as individual brands. People access the platform using a single application and can perform a full range of integrated activities, from paying bills to accessing a central document-storage location. We’re rolling out Volly™ nationally and are delighted that it was adopted by Australia Post, the Australian equivalent of the U.S. Postal Service.

Volly™ has a lot of built-in safeguards and advantages. In a world where brand integrity is essential but can easily fall under attack, our platform protects your brand. It’s also secure, which is critical, because nothing kills consumer trust faster than a security breach. Finally, a Secure Electronic Delivery Service (SEDS) such as Volly™ is the legal equivalent of paper for virtually any kind of communications, with a few exceptions like divorce papers, wills and foreclosures.

One final piece of advice. When updating, streamlining and integrating your mailstream system, keep the needs of your customers front and center. Think of it as mailstream technology with a personal touch.

You can read all about it in our press release.

It’s big news, and not just because this will help transform the way companies and consumers engage with each other in Australia. It’s recognition by Australia Post that the Volly™ secure digital delivery system has the technology chops to perform on a national scale in one of the twenty biggest postal markets in the world.

That makes us proud. So—after a brief pause to pop a few champagne corks—we’ll get right back to work to help Australia Post create a seamless, delightful and highly secure digital delivery experience for our friends from Perth to Sydney.

For consumers who are not yet up to speed on the myriad of channels available to receive communications from their favorite and most trusted brands or customers who choose to continue doing business the traditional way, it is important to remember to integrate while you innovate. Earlier this year, we announced the Volly™ secure digital delivery service. This innovative service is designed to take the experience of traditional mailing – a familiarity some consumers don’t want to leave behind – and bring it into the digital age via an online platform available via desktop, tablet and Smartphone. Right now, Pitney Bowes is working with mailers and service bureaus to meet the demand for change in the industry while still maintaining the brand integrity of their customers and confidence of consumers that modernizing their interactions with businesses can be done easily, effectively and best of all … for free.

We believe that there are three key factors for generating a true shift in the way consumers behave and conduct their daily lives and personal business. In digital mail delivery, these are density, distribution and delight – or the 3Ds.

Viewing Change in 3D

1. Density
Density is key. It’s the difference between going to your online account and seeing nothing but a welcome note and instead seeing a full array of mail with most of your critical bills and statements all in one place. As a company with a 90+ year legacy in the mail and postal industry and current relationships with three-quarters of high-volume mailers across U.S., Pitney Bowes is uniquely positioned to deliver density in digital mail. Thirty large-volume mailers and service bureaus have already seized the opportunity to provide this innovative solution to their customers, with many more on the way. The Volly™ secure digital delivery service fully integrates into mailers’ print streams in multiple places, allowing mailers to integrate their physical and digital mail into one comprehensive and efficient stream.

Building density to create an experience that consumers really use and depend on can only be done with trust— trust not only between solution provider and mailer, but also trust between consumer and mailer. It is imperative to guarantee the integrity of the mailer’s brand digital delivery. At Pitney Bowes, our Volly™ secure digital delivery service was purposefully designed so that it supports the mailer’s brand while offering a new, powerful channel for customer communications. Brands control their messaging, and consumers control their chosen senders, creating a powerful, interactive marketplace.

2. Distribution
Distribution, having the product be widely adopted in the market is first and foremost linked to a compelling experience and significant density of mail. Distribution will be further supported by co-marketing activities with our rapidly expanding partner network, and through our digital marketing efforts.

3. Delight
Pitney Bowes is in it for the long-term — to change the future of communications– and to make the Volly™ secure digital delivery service a compelling experience for mailers and consumers alike. Creating the best consumer experience is categorized as delight. High-volume mailers in the U.S. understand the cost efficiencies of transitioning to digital, yet few consumers have gone paperless. Despite the fact that broadband in the U.S. is ubiquitous, only 10 to 15 percent of people receive their bills and statements digitally. Why the gap?

Everything comes back to density and convenience. Few consumers will create the user names and passwords for each vendor — dozens for most households – to let an aggregation site “scrape” website content. For the brands, those consumers are the ones they have fought hard to get to use their websites directly. The real challenge is to get consumers to adopt digital mail broadly, and that means secure access to lots of mail under one account. There are several new digital mail services out there, but Pitney Bowes wants consumers to have a compelling experience (not that empty mailbox scenario). In fact, today there are about 4,000 brands attached to the Volly™ secure digital delivery service. In addition to “filling the mailbox”, we have been iterating design and adding more social features and functionality to provide the best possible experience. We will not be another lemming racing off the cliff, launching something that doesn’t have enough mailbox density to be compelling to consumers. We’re racing to build the density in the industry that gives everyone – consumers and brands — a reason to join the revolution.

The primary reasons for the success of postal delivery are simplicity and consumer behavior. The typical consumers each day walks to the end of their driveway or to the mailbox in the lobby of their apartment building to check for mail. The simplicity of the delivery process is that information from a variety of companies, individuals and organizations arrive in single place, enabling the consumers to quickly retrieve and review what they have received.

E-delivery has taken this simple process and turned it on its head. Companies now ask consumers to sign up for a website and to be notified of inbound mail via e-mail alerts. While this solution satisfies many of the needs of the corporation and reduces costs significantly, it makes a consumer’s life much more complex.

On average, consumers have approximately 20 different relationships for which they receive periodic communications (bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages, utility bills, brokerage accounts, insurance, etc.). In a traditional world, this information is delivered to a single mailbox that the consumer checks daily. E-delivery requires that same consumer to check their e-mail, remember one of 20 different usernames and passwords, log on to the corporation’s website, hope the e-mail does not end up in a junk folder, and then view their statements and bills. Arghhhhhh!

Given this complexity, it is fairly amazing that any consumers have agreed to receive any documents electronically. There has to be a better way.

At Broadridge, we are continually looking for ways to assist our financial industry clients in reducing the costs associated with communicating with their customers and shareholders while improving the effectiveness of their communications. As highlighted previously, too often the cost saving results in a reduced experience to the consumer. With Volly, however, we finally have a solution that satisfies the needs of both the consumer and the corporation distributing the materials. Consumers are provided an online experience that is much like their offline experience; they go to a single location, open the mailbox and review what they have received. The added functionality of being able to pay bills and be notified of important dates is icing on the cake.

The ability to distribute information to a common online mailbox offers a network that all firms in various industries can use to reduce costs and improve communications through a channel of a client’s choosing.

For brokerage and asset management firms, Volly provides a mechanism to communicate with clients in a cost-effective manner while presenting opportunities to up-sell new products and services, integrate regulatory communications with value-added services and to extend their brands to new channels. This brand extension capability is particularly attractive as it enables companies to communicate with their clients through a channel of their client’s choosing while maintaining control over the information being displayed and providing opportunities to pull clients back into portals and introduce new products and services.

Within the shareholder communications space, Broadridge believes that Volly can help us to reduce the costs associated with printing and mailing materials to shareholders of public companies and mutual funds while presenting opportunities to shareholders to become more involved in the governance process.

A key for our clients is finding partners they can work with to access new channels that are committed to securing consumer content and ensuring compliance with regulatory rules. We are confident that integrating Volly into our distribution platforms will satisfy these needs.

See what Broadridge executives are saying about Volly in this video:

Certainly there will be some anxiety, there always is with new, transformative shifts. Do you remember the first time you reluctantly put your credit card number into the computer for a purchase? What a leap of faith that took. Chances are you conducted that same transaction process multiple times this past December alone. As we saw with online purchases, there are ways to make those documents secure, or AS secure as they are reported today within the walls of the companies that store them. Our risk would be to discredit this solution due to unwarranted concerns that represent no incremental exposure or risk. It’s not difficult to find companies with significant data breaches daily, either social security, credit card, or account numbers. Today’s “security theater” deployed by most firms should not represent the high water mark necessary for success of this new delivery alternative.

While there is money to be saved by firms not mailing you your bill or statement, they might not be as excited about this new digital mailbox solution as you are. Why? The answer is the potential disintermediation of those firms from your online life. Those firms are afraid they could be made irrelevant in the digital frontier if they allow you to get their/your data somewhere other than THEIR website, where they can control what you see, the user experience, maybe some ad spend, and your information access. Depending on the market, their concern is legitimate. Where will people choose to view their bank statement, at the digital mailbox, or at the bank’s website while transferring funds? We’d argue that it’s both, as it is today. And let’s ensure we inform the firms we do business with that this is how we’d prefer to receive our documents and information. It doesn’t have to be either or, but should be both. Plus, there is a way to support both and NOT store it twice, thereby reducing the bank’s storage costs!

So embrace the brave new world, and let your document providers know that you want a simpler solution – a single, secure, convenient and permanent place to archive all consumer documents.

Many executives are completely reassessing their value in the overall business processes of their company. They are also spending sleepless nights worried about where mail volumes are trending, and will electronic channels truly serve their companies well. The common motivating factor is that customer communications are vital to the customer lifecycle. These large volume mailers express concerns that electronic adoption has slowed, even as more consumers are connected online, and mobile is yet another communications platform to contend with. These executives know that there is something very different about the consumer today and that looking in the rear view mirror is not only uncomfortable — but can lead to a big crash.

Many of these executives have said to me, “Let’s make this simple. What do I want as a consumer? What do my friends want? What do my kids want?” The answer is: a simpler life. So this observation then becomes part of the goal as to how they can best serve the communications needs of their company. .

There is real excitement and revelation when we share Pitney Bowes’ strategies and consumer research around the Volly™ secure digital delivery service, because it maps so naturally to what these executives see in the data, but also to what they feel in their gut. It also gives them satisfaction to see that they are in the position to leverage their infrastructure and workflow processes to take customer communications to the next level.

It’s a very exciting time to be in this industry and many heroes will be made as customer communications will drive tighter, more loyal relationships while lowering costs.

Can you see it? Can you feel it?

- Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point)

About 10 years ago, Malcolm Gladwell published his thesis that ideas “spread just like viruses do.” The Tipping Point is predicated on people, content (the idea), and context (situational environment). Last week, Pat McGrew tweeted that 300K Finnish Itella NetPosti users can now use their iPhone, iPad & Android to get access to invoices, payslips, and letters. On Friday, Norway Post announced that Norway Post is to launch a digital mail system, allowing customers to choose to receive mail in a digital mailbox as well as physically — with that digital mailbox based on a person’s street address and national ID number.

Moreover, we know that more than half of the population of Denmark is using their consumer consolidation service which Pitney Bowes helped develop. And most recently, Siemens Mobility and Swiss Post have agreed to pursue a joint marketing strategy of an automation offering for post and postal service providers that converts physical mail into electronic mail accessible from consumers mobile devices.

The context is clear: ubiquitous broadband (wired and 3G/4G), WiFi, and an explosion of smartphones and tablet computers.

The content is clear: secure access to my mail when, where, and how I want.

This idea – a fire lit in the Nordics some 10 years ago is now spreading like wildfire – and it looks like it is ready to reach American shores.

Is America at that tipping point? We think so. But viewed from our shores, the idea goes well beyond mail delivery. Our consumer research shows that how we as individuals organize, manage, retrieve, and interact with the critical electronic content in the home is just as important as the convenience of how we receive it. And that research strongly influenced the design of the Volly digital delivery service.

Context: Check. Content: Check. In a few months it will be up to people – the Volly service users – to determine if we are headed for that tipping point.

For the past 18 months, I have been immersed in a project to help Pitney Bowes create something completely digital, and completely new. Today, I experienced real joy as we announced this new service to the world. It’s called Volly™, and it promises to bring the real advantages of digital delivery and interaction to the medium of physical mail.

You can read all about it in the press release that I have pasted below. If you’re a mailer, prepare yourself for a future in which you can have richer and more robust interactions with your customers, and at a much lower cost. If you’re a consumer, hang in there for a few more months. We’re putting the finishing touches on a service that will help you save time, save money, and put you in complete control of who markets to you.

Welcome to the future of customer communications. It’s called Volly.

Pitney Bowes to Launch Volly™: Secure Digital Delivery Service that Connects Mailers and Consumers