Meridian Awards 2012

About EPOS Card Co., Ltd.

EPOS Card is a division of Japan's 13th largest Department Store Chain of Marui Group, where millions of shoppers hold the company's EPOS credit card. Marui is now reaching out to its card members with personalized, full-color marketing messages and promotions on their monthly statements. Each message is matched to individual purchasing patterns, and then inserted automatically within the system's high-speed work flow. Results: motivated customers, stronger relationship with its customers, and reduced printing and mailing costs.

Challenge

In 2007, the Japan's Financial Service Gov. Agency implemented the revision of interest rates law where the maximum limit of consumer cashing loan rate was changed from 29.2% to 18%. This revision of interest rates greatly influenced the credit card companies including EPOS. In 2007, EPOS began to search for a Transpromo billing solution to enhance personalized communication via its customer bills and statements to up sell and cross-sell to its existing valued card holders to be competitive in the market, and most of all to raise customer satisfaction and retain current customers as well as attract new ones. EPOS faced with a variety of business challenges such as the need to improve the quality of customer service, simplify the reprint process and differentiate themselves from the competition, EPOS selected and implemented Group l's CCM (transpromo) solution to enable the company to integrate and streamline its communication and business processes effectively.

By implementing Docl & e2 Vault, EPOS is able to incorporate full-color advertisements-customized advertisements and marketing messages which are relevant to the recipient into monthly bill statements, resulting in improved marketing effectiveness. The ability to control the design of bill statement in-house and display creativity has enabled EPOS to distinguish themselves from competition. The high-speed, high volume, high-performing repository also enabled them to present bill statements on the web allowing customers to access their bills at their convenience. This has helped to improve operational efficiency and quality of services delivered to their customers.

The Transpromo solution has enabled EPOS to build solid relationship with their customers, analize customer's purchasing habit and trend in a timely manner using existing customer data. The Transpromo solution not only helped EPOS reduce customer acqusition costs but also helped the company increase the share of shoppers and improve customer lifetime value.

Benefits

Enhanced bill statement reduces customers' call center inquiries and allow for targeted marketing. Following a six months development of integrating the CCM solution with its billing system, EPOS went into full operation in April 2008. The immediate benefits have been numurous with enhanced bill presentment achieving the following;

1. Transpromo billing statements inserted campaigns and coupons are sent to every EPOS card holders and members, EPOS business partners, divided into monthly, eight times depending on the terms of payment of customers.
2. Timely advertisement and notices of every season events.
3. By changing the bill's look and feel, the number of inquiries to call center declined significantly.
4. Enabled EPOS to send bill statements to customers without delay, less than 5 business days lead time.
5. At call center, customer rep corresponds to the re-print of statements by on-demand.
6. A highly valued customer which account for 20% of its 80% sales revenue, performs the enclosure of the excellent customer
7. Printing, distribution, and mailing cost savings total 30%.
8. Building the customer data that is accumulated by integrating the advertisement as original sales promotion know-how

The electronic retention of bills supported by e2 Valt has facilitated communication between customer service representatives at the call center. A major benefit is the reduction of call resolution time, helping to further raise customer satisfaction as bills can be replicated and viewed by the CSR agents to communicate better with customers.

Future goal for EPOS card will focus on reducing mailing costs and shifting to e-billing connecting to existing EPOS Net and Customer MY Page using Group1 's solution, and utilize the internet and OM to other medium which can help advertisements of clients to increase revenue.