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We are helping SMBs take the complexity out of shipping: Pitney Bowes' Jason Dies


Global technology firm Pitney Bowes has been in the business of offering commerce solutions in shipping, mailing and data since the last 100 years. Their Small and Medium Business (SMB) mailing portfolio churns out $1.7 billion in revenues annually, contributing extensively to the company’s profits and cash flows. India is a strategic market for them with close to 1000 technical engineers spread out between their Noida and Pune offices.

In a detailed chat with ET Online, Jason Dies, President, SMB Solutions and Manish Choudhary, Senior Vice President, Global SMB Products & Strategy and Chairman India at Pitney Bowes outlined how they are reinventing shipping for SMBs and etailers in the country by removing complexity from processes.
Excerpts:

ET Online (ET): How significant is India as a market for Pitney Bowes given that you have 750,000 SMB customers spread out globally?
Manish Choudhary (MC):
Earlier, mobile phones were limited, people were not transacting as much online and the digital payments were not that much in place. Fast forward 10 years – I think India is now one of the biggest markets when it comes to shipping.

As per the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index 2017, India followed China in year-on-year largest parcel volume growth at 15%. The index also found that global shipping volume would surpass 100 billion parcels in 2020 across the 13 countries reviewed which also included India.

We have close to 1000 engineers between our Noida and Pune office. So if you combine all that, we now have local presence, local knowhow and a large market – India does become a very strong place. There is a second element to India – having a talent pool here and building the shipping capabilities globally.

India as a market is at a point where there is consolidation and there are clearer government policies now in place. We see a huge opportunity in helping SMBs and retailers find a seamless experience for their clients in shipping needs.

SendPro-C-Series-3

ET: In what way are you trying to reinvent shipping and mailing for your SMB clients?
JD:
I like to call our SMB business as the shipping and mailing business as opposed to the small and medium business – that is more accurate. Our history, core heritage and DNA is around shipping and mailing. So as we start to look at our SMB client base and as we start to understand the verticals better, there are adjacent work flows and environments that we think we can add value to. The android operating system and the SAS platform allows us to invite other people to come in and help us design solutions for our client base.

We have done a couple of hackathons over the past 24 months, given personas of our clients and asked them to think about how they would design solutions. So it is all about building a partner ecosystem and one within Pitney Bowes as well which allows us to think at how to extend that value across the core shipping and mailing process. We make work flows less complex.

MC: In India, there is leapfrogging of technology which is taking place and with the C-series and our products, we are really reinventing shipping for SMBs in a way which has mobile, AI – we are among the top IoT companies given that it is always a connected device. I think India is at a point where it is really ready from a shipping standpoint.

What we are seeing here is the global nature of shipping. Our open technology and our relationship makes it so much possible to reinvent such processes.

ET: Your latest offering, C-series, aims to simplify and redefine the shipping experience. What has been the industry response?
MC:
What we have been trying to do with the C-series is to check how do we disrupt and find an edge in the market. We have sold 57,000 of those devices since we started in January this year. There isn’t anything in the industry which is an android based platform and is a sending platform. There isn’t anything which gets all the carriers together on a platform where the consumer can actually make a choice than going to 50 places to figure out the right way to do it. This whole complexity of sending – this is what Pitney Bowes handles!





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