Ricoh Launches Industry-First Customer Marketing Suite for Utility Companies, Delivering Analytics with Proven ROI

Ricoh Production Print Solutions LLC (Ricoh), a leading provider of digital output solutions, announced the launch of its Customer Marketing Suite for Utility Companies, an industry-first offering of behavior-based predictive models designed to optimize marketing budgets and improve how utility companies communicate with their customers. This suite leverages the expertise Ricoh's professional services team has gained through its work with many of the world's leading utility companies including its award-winning implementation with the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP).

The Customer Marketing Suite for Utility Companies takes advantage of actual utility customer data from multiple development partners to create a standardized set of algorithms that allows utility marketers to target customers with the highest propensity to respond to various marketing communications. The Customer Marketing Suite for Utility Companies has solutions that address key initiatives for utilities including: electronic adoption, renewable energy adoption, equal pay, usage, late pays and attrition. This type of predictive modeling drives greater efficacy of the models, illustrates industry trends and illuminates best practices — all features marketers seek in their marketing communications. This elevates them beyond simple customer communications to more relevant and targeted marketing communications which then lowers expenses and improves response results.

With these models, utility companies can reduce the amount of "offer fatigue" consumers often feel from their service providers. Predictive modeling allows marketers to see who within their portfolio is not likely to engage with an offer, thus enabling the company to exclude those particular customers from receiving a message. With the ability to identify specific, receptive audiences, utility companies can develop campaigns that maximize results while optimizing their marketing budgets.

"Our Customer Marketing Suite for Utility Companies offering is a true industry-first, enabling utilities to optimize their communications budget and resources to meet their business goals. This service targets only those customers who are most likely to respond to a communication," said Mike Bryant, Worldwide Practice Leader — Strategy and Marketing Analytics, Ricoh. Through our experience with some of the world's largest utility companies, our forward-looking professional services team has developed this offering which truly utilizes a behavior-based predictive modeling system, increasing engagement and bottom line revenues. This is the first of many customized suites we plan to develop for our various customer segments."

The Customer Marketing Suite for Utility Companies allows marketers to select from three predictive modeling solutions.

Predictive Modeling: this is a behavior-based suite of predictive models designed to optimize marketing budgets and improve the value of customer communications. This suite offers utility marketers packages for:

• Risk Solutions: These types of solutions were developed to solve the common pain point for utilities including late payments and attrition. Optimizing data that may sit in other departments (such as billing or finance) can help more clearly and directly speak to a certain audience base — predictive modeling helps decipher which customer receives these communications
• Service Solutions: These can be considered traditional up-sell and cross-sell marketing techniques including offering renewable energy packages, providing energy initiative. Utilities would leverage insights to educate the customer, provide them with e-billing or equal pay options. Ricoh's predictive modeling algorithms to determine which customers should receive each or any of these services notices.
• Customer Segmentation: Our approach to segmentation allows utility marketers the unique opportunity to see a customer's risk potential as well as their potential to engage in more services with the utility. This enables the utility marketer the chance to tailor offers, customize incentives, select marketing channels and specific content to targeted segments based on their risk and service potential.

For more information about the Customer Marketing Suite for Utility Companies, please visit www.infoprint.com/internet/ipww.nsf/vwWebPublished/solss_customer-marketing-suite_en.

About Ricoh
Ricoh is a global technology company specializing in office imaging equipment, production print solutions, document management systems and IT services. Headquartered in Tokyo, Ricoh Group, operates in more than 200 countries and regions. For further information, please visit www.ricoh.com.