SEAT Pagine Gialle, a knowledge-based company

For 80 years, SEAT Pagine Gialle has been offering consumers and businesses ways to make themselves known and let people find them. Since its inception, the long history of SEAT Pagine Gialle has been characterised by constant investments in innovation and an ongoing and steadfast search for excellence, in its core business products such as the print directories, and in its technologically advanced solutions, such as online services. In the 1990s, SEAT was the first directory publishing company in the world to develop its own search engine. With the recent introduction of PagineGialle Visual, it is standing on the cutting edge of web 2.0. SEAT's capacity to innovate is based on solid and deep roots: thanks to this capacity, today the company is present in every household and in every business operating in Italy with its print, voice and online services.

Forging relations

Operating in five European countries, SEAT Pagine Gialle is a large multimedia platform which provides tens of millions of users with detailed information and sophisticated search instruments, and 600,000 advertisers with access to a wide range of advertising and communications options, guaranteeing high visibility and quality.

Past and present challenges

The complexity and dynamism of the markets were and remain an added stimulus to innovation for SEAT. The needs of a user base in the process of constant change and those of a diversity of customers — large banks, public administrations, B2B companies, mass-market distribution companies, tourism, and neighbourhood businesses — have encouraged the company to seek out and introduce new "made-to-measure" tools for the needs of each market.
The objective is to maintain the "virtuous cycle" as efficient as possible, summed up by the equation
"product = satisfaction = use = results". Against this backdrop, the more traditional directories, such as PagineBianche and PagineGialle, exist in a context of ongoing innovation, with new features and improvements introduced with every new edition.

Knowledge society

Today, creating innovation does not only mean adopting advanced information technology solutions: the propensity to innovate emerges, is cultivated and is reinforced in the values and the culture of the company, in the ability to use technology as a lever to bring about change, without forgetting that the "difference" in the quality of a company lies principally in those who work there.
From this perspective, SEAT is also an excellent example of what is defined today as a "knowledge-based company" where the most advanced technologies are available to the skills and creativity of the people and the combination of these factors represents the key element to competing and to attracting and retaining customers.
A knowledge-based company is one that can produce and use knowledge on a large scale.
The cornerstone of any knowledge-based company is its human resources, since these are the people who generate new knowledge with their creativity, skills and motivation. With this objective in mind, SEAT has established its own Corporate University which in 2006 supplied some 90,000 hours of sales and managerial training to its employees and representatives.

With its products, SEAT not only forges relations for the economy, but is also, and most importantly, a factor in innovation, a centre of creativity and a leading light in the progress of our society.