Pitney Bowes Portrait Explorer Tames Big Data For Business Users at Their Desktop

Pitney Bowes Launches Breakthrough Customer Analytics Software Tool

STAMFORD, Conn.–Pitney Bowes Software, a global leader in customer data, analytics and communications management, announced the global launch of Portrait Explorer, a groundbreaking software solution that brings powerful data analytics into the hands of today’s business users. The solution makes understanding and navigating complex “big customer data” as easy as using a digital photo album.

“Which customers reacted positively to a recent marketing offer?”

According to technology research firm IDC, the big data market is expected to grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $16.9 billion in 2015. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40% or about 7 times that of the overall information and communications technology (ICT) market.

Portrait Explorer empowers business users to access customer information directly to perform their own ad-hoc queries and reports providing fast, actionable insight without the need for power analysts or IT. The innovative interface is a powerful example of “the consumerization of IT.” It was purposefully designed to look, feel and behave like applications marketers use in their personal life, making it instantly usable.

Pitney Bowes Software customer Sven Arnestad, Director of Business Development, DirektMedia / BISNODE, describes Portrait Explorer as “powerful, flexible and lightning fast … a hugely compelling solution for rapid campaign selection and segmentation.”

Popular digital photo management apps help consumers make sense of thousands of individual photos by organizing them, with the click of a mouse, into albums based on date, location, tags or other selection criteria. Portrait Explorer delivers that same level of accessibility and usability to marketers for customer data. Every customer is represented graphically as a “customer card” with dozens of key attributes to provide a clear customer portrait of that individual. Cards can be examined individually to give deeper insight into segments and selection decisions using specific examples. The collection of cards representing all customers can be segmented or selected by any attribute, with heat maps used to highlight quality differences between segments, providing a powerful visual environment to improve targeting queries and even highlight potential data quality issues.

“Portrait Explorer is taming big data for organizations so their offers and interactions drive customer loyalty and increased revenues,” said John O’Hara, President, Pitney Bowes Software. “By delivering intuitive, business user access to customer data, organizations can achieve increased productivity, faster decision-making, and greater campaign profitability.”

The role of customer insight is paramount in consumer-focused organizations. Brands are applying data to customer communications and looking at data analytics for customer insight on everything from “Which customers reacted positively to a recent marketing offer?” and “Which customers recently contacted the company with a complaint?” to “How do I understand who are my highest value customers?”

Traditionally, customer data queries have been a process of trial and error between business managers looking to apply data to marketing activities and data analytics professionals who expertly parse customer data to create customer insight. Each query often presents new segmentation information that may require clarifying queries until the two teams arrive at the best data analysis for each situation. By sharing appropriate access to customer data and tools more broadly, business and marketing users can make better data-driven decisions more quickly, delivering increased productivity and more effective customer interaction management.

For more information on Pitney Bowes Portrait Explorer, visit www.pb.com/software.

About Pitney Bowes Software

Pitney Bowes Software provides multichannel solutions that leverage data to create relevant dialogue between organizations and their customers. These solutions enable lifetime customer relationships by integrating data management, location intelligence, sophisticated predictive analytics, rules-based decision making and cross-channel customer interaction management to increase the value of every customer communication while also delivering operational efficiencies.

Pitney Bowes Software is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pitney Bowes Inc. (NYSE:PBI), a customer communications management technology leader. For more information, please visit www.pb.com/software.