Itella to transform bills into versatile customer communications media

Itella Information Logistics within Finland Post Group will modernise its Itella Advoice service.

Since early 2007, the company has provided its Itella Advoice customers with the opportunity to manage their campaigns from their desktop via the web user interface.

An innovative direct communication concept developed in Finland, Itella Advoice enables the easy and cost-efficient integration of personalised customer communication with bills or bank statements sent to customers. A number of organisations with large annual volumes of B2C bills have adopted this service.

‘Thanks to the web user interface, our customers are able to flexibly edit the content of messages printed on bills, making it possible to inform customers of various changes or soon-to-be launched campaigns cost-efficiently, since the content can be edited and personalised shortly before printing the bills’, explains Tuula Erolainen, Concept Manager in charge of the Itella Advoice business.

Bills delivered by post still form a major part of customer communication and, in many cases, represent the only communication tool between companies and their customers. Bearing in mind that bills are documents that people read and pay attention to, integrating personalised, interesting messages with them is a natural step forward, enabled by modern technology and systems. According to US surveys, people tend to spend an average of 42.5 seconds looking at their bills.

‘Given that a Finnish teleoperator may send up to 20 million bills every year, bills as advertising media command a great attention span. In many cases, they are also the teleoperator’s or electricity company’s only contact with customers. Moreover, while municipal daycare service providers send monthly bills to their customers, they could also insert a message regarding, say, the daycare centre’s future events or summer holiday season’, says Erolainen.

March will see the piloting of the service provided via Itella Advoice’s web user interface. In future, companies will also be able to target their various messages more easily by e.g. gender and place of residence, using either their customer registers or Itella’s services.

‘It will be possible to attach customer communications to electronic bills, containing links to web sites pertaining to certain services or products. Since our customers have been actively involved in developing the service’s user interface, a variety of requirements including user friendliness have been taken into consideration’, states Pirjo Hannikainen, R&D Director, Itella Information Logistics.     

For further information, please contact:

Tuula Erolainen, Concept Manager
Itella Information Logistics
Tel. +358 (0)205 388 761,
tuula.erolainen@itella.com