Social Media B2B

This post is a recap of a case study presented at the recent B2B Social Communications event held in New York City. Matthew Broder, VP, External Communications, Pitney Bowes shared how the world’s largest provider of products, technology and services within the mailstream and beyond, created a social network of customers that improved service and lowered costs. The customized community provides RSS feeds, polls, integrated search, private messaging and interactive chats and blogs to its vast customer base.

Many approaches to social media involve generating leads and ultimately sales, but Pitney Bowes looked to social media as a way to save money. Combining the $10 cost of each customer support phone call with a spike in calls surrounding the annual postage rate change that surpasses 400,000, Pitney Bowes had tremendous incentive to develop more cost effective solutions. They developed a fully social customer forum located at forums.pb.com and promoted it on their home page. Users build their reputation on the site through other user feedback of kudos and best answer tags. Using metrics for call savings based on research in Groundswell, Pitney Bowes estimates savings based on views of specific answers and general answers. The savings in one month, granted the biggest customer service month of the year for postage related companies, was more than 2-3 times the annual cost of forum.

Jeffrey L. Cohen is the Managing Editor of SocialMediaB2B.com. Follow Jeff on Twitter at @jeffreylcohen.