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Pitney Bowes Introduces Volly, a Comprehensive B2B Communications App

By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor

If you're a business-to-business company, no doubt you regularly drown your customers via a variety of media. You may mail them invoices, statements and reminders, bulk mail them catalogs and brochures, e-mail them updates and newsletters, text them coupons and send them promotions via social media. What you may be looking for is a way to streamline the flow of multimedia communications. It would save you time, and it would cut down on the annoyance factor for the customer – and perhaps save some trees.

Pitney Bowes recently introduced a new service called Volly, a secure digital online service that not only enables your customers to get their bills, statements, coupons, catalogs and promotions digitally, but also empowers them to pay their bills — using their checking accounts or credit cards — all from one site. With one click, your customers can remove some of the clutter from their day-to-day administration, and you can benefit from keeping all your customer contacts in one location.

Companies can use Volly to keep all their customer correspondence neatly organized — by brand — and let the service automatic keep track of due-dates and expiration-date reminders. From the customers’ perspective, they can manage bills, statements, promotions and coupons without ever leaving Volly. When they receive an invoice, they can access the financial account they want and pay the bills all without ever leaving the security of their online Volly account. They can check their balances, keep track of bills and due dates and review all their past bills and payment.

With everything in one place, customers can avoid missing payments and paying late fees, and have all financial transactions in one place for the purpose of improving their budgeting and projections.

Customers can also choose from a variety of platforms through which they can access Volly. The application will be available for the iPhone and iPad, as well as consumers' desktop and laptop computers. Pitney also plans to launch an Android (News - Alert) version of the application soon.

Bernie Gracy, VP of strategy and business development at Pitney Bowes, told Direct Marketing News that the application will help consumers organize their mail and e-mail communications, and allow companies to reach consumers on a uniform platform. While improved organization is the benefit for consumers, brands can use the service to cut down on mailing and processing costs, said Gracy.

Pitney plans to recruit businesses who want to increase their paperless communications with consumers, he said.

“[Marketers] get the benefit of lower-cost delivery but without the switching cost, and without having to go through an expensive integration,” said Gracy. “The customer has indicated that they don't want to get lost and caught up in the clutter.”

And less clutter is something all of us can use. Remember what the top of your desk looks like? You may get to find out.