Interactive Personalised Media – EngageOne Video

EngageOne Video is an extension to Pitney Bowes’ Customer Engagement solutions (see http://www.pitneybowes.com/us/customer-engagement-marketing.html). As opposed to a one-size-fits-all video experience, EngageOne is designed to deliver a customised video for each person. The video content is personalised in real-time, and the flow of the video can be interactively manipulated by the viewer. Moreover, EngageOne integrates with other elements of Customer Engagement, including predictive analytics (best next engagement), tracking and reporting. Early users of the technology have reported impressive results, resulting in significantly improved engagement and satisfaction, and reduced interactions with call centres.

As a general principle, the use of video makes explaining complexity much simpler, particularly when consumers are increasingly short of time. Providing personalisation extends these benefits further. Proven use cases include explaining bills and statements to reduce bill shock and cancellations, explaining insurance policies to eliminate misunderstanding, and simply describing financial products to increase sales.

Needless to say, it is not easy to describe a visual experience in words, and we therefore recommend trying the demonstration at http://mypbvideo.com/bloor. This demo is very American-ised, but it will give you a good idea of how EngageOne Video works. Remember that each customer can choose how to portray their brand and have the style and languages they prefer.

Pitney Bowes uses a direct sales model based on locations in almost 100 countries world-wide. Its solutions are applicable across industries. The company’s go-to-market approach is also augmented through strategic alliances and an extensive partner network.

Pitney Bowes delivers Customer Engagement Solutions, including interactive personalised media like EngageOne Video, to national, international and global brands in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, healthcare, public sector, utilities and retail vertical industries, amongst others.

More than 900 customers around the globe use Pitney Bowes Customer Engagement Solutions and technology. These customers are well known names in finance, telecommunications, insurance, public sector, retail and utilities. With respect specifically to EngageOne Video, the most well-known customer is Chevron but other customers span insurance, healthcare and telecommunications. A number of customer videos – in a variety of languages – are posted on the Pitney Bowes Website.

Creating an EngageOne Video is like making any other video – in other words you need camera, lights and action – except for what is the key differentiator here: the way that the video is interactive and personalised. To achieve this, what you are actually creating is a series of snippets of video, which are put together at run-time for each particular user. These snippets are linked by real-time information and analytics with interactive prompts. The user selects the topic they are interested in via a mouse click, or touchscreen press and the video plays from the selected point. Thus, what the user sees is an interactive and personalised video, which can be viewed on a variety of platforms, including desktop and mobile computing devices. Moreover, the user can watch the video in bite-sized chunks as their schedule allows. EngageOne Video itself is available for either on premises or via cloud-based deployment.

EngageOne Video can be implemented as a stand-alone product, but there are additional capabilities when deployed in conjunction with Pitney Bowes’ Customer Engagement solutions. This is because predictive capabilities from the latter can be used to drive the generation of videos. In other words, the particular snippets used for this customer can be derived from analytics suggesting the best next action or engagement for this specific customer. Similarly, there is feedback from EngageOne to the Customer Engagement environment, providing measurable results through integrated activity tracking and reporting, which can be displayed via a dashboard. It is even possible to use the predictive capabilities in the Customer Engagement solutions to forecast how users will make use of videos. Facilities are provided to embed EngageOne videos into existing systems and workflows.

Pitney Bowes Global Services delivers EngageOne Video solutions using a methodology that includes an initial scoping meeting, experience workshop, business case and project plan, storyboard creation and video production plus the technical implementation. Typically, this takes 90 to 120 days.

More generally, Pitney Bowes provides a range of consulting, implementation services, analytics, maintenance, training and managed services. It offers full lifecycle support around the globe, including on-site, on-call, on-line and machine to machine. Its consultants develop industry knowledge as well as deep expertise around Pitney Bowes products and solutions. There is also an active online community that offers opportunities to ask questions and get tips and tricks from users across the globe.