Customer communications encompass a wide variety of statements, documents, and letters. Some fall under the specialty category of being transactional, which involves regulations and rules. Companies often face challenges with these, from compliance concerns to exploding costs. In most cases, workflows aren’t streamlined, and efficiency is out of reach. That’s why so many organizations adopt print-to-mail services.
By transitioning to outsourcing, your business can achieve many benefits. This pivot has accelerated as companies seek ways to boost efficiency and reduce expenses. Not every vendor will be the right fit for your needs, so it’s critical to understand the potential advantages to determine if they can help you realize them.
Print-to-Mail Services Explained
Print-to-mail services describe all the tasks and processes from data creation to mail delivery. It covers the entire lifecycle of a customer communication. Print and mail houses that offer this manage all the workflows, providing you with a transparent view of every job.
When these letters or statements have confidential or sensitive information, the processes become more complex. Advanced technology and strategic initiatives like Lean Manufacturing are critical to compliance, security, accuracy, and quality.
When evaluating your options, you need to be sure that the provider supports you in attaining these benefits.
5 Benefits of Print-to-Mail Solutions
The advantages of this shift in operations span multiple areas, including costs, security, compliance, accuracy, and quality. Let’s look at each one.
A Move to Outsource Creates Savings
Increasing costs are the biggest burden to carry for in-house transactional print and mail. Several categories are all increasing, including:
- Materials: paper, ink, and toner
- Equipment and technology
- Labor
- Overhead: rent, utilities, security, etc.
- Postage
By outsourcing, you immediately remove some of these: equipment, technology, labor, and overhead. You can also see lower expenses for materials because providers can purchase in bulk. Postage rates can also decrease because of the high volume of letters they send.
You’ll be able to forecast your expenditures more accurately when it becomes a pure operating expense.
Enhanced Data Security Keeps Protected Information Safe
Safeguarding PII (personally identifiable information) and PHI (protected health information) is critical in transactional communications. This data is highly valuable to hackers, and they continuously improve their methods to breach systems.
While you have security controls in place, there may be gaps that you’re not aware of because it’s only a small function of your company. With professional printers in this space, data security is a priority, with layers of protection to create a formidable defense.
At a minimum, these should include:
- Advanced firewalls and IPS (Intrusion Prevention System)
- Network traffic segmentation
- Encryption of data at rest and in transit
- Secure file processing via SFTP (Secure File Transmission Protocol)
- Multi-factor authentication
- User-level security
- Process auditing
- Regular penetration testing and vulnerability assessments
- Special provisions for data security in alignment with regulations like HIPAA
These production facilities are secure by design, weaving initiatives and strategies into every workflow. You can have peace of mind when your partner elevates data security in these ways.
Compliance-Focused Providers Ensure Adherence
Regardless of your industry or type of mailing, if there is PII, PHI, or other confidential information, compliance is non-negotiable. For healthcare, you have HIPPA, but there are other regulations involved, including FISMA, PCI DSS, and more. There are industry-specific requirements for things like collection letters.
How do you know if a potential vendor is compliance-focused? It begins with verifying their certifications for compliance standards. Having these in place demonstrates that security controls are in place, but it’s not the end of the assessment.
Compliance-minded print and mail companies also have dedicated staff that manage and monitor compliance. Regulatory changes can happen at any time, and these experts are able to address them because of their expertise.
Another component is auditing processes to identify and root out any non-compliant activity. If providers aren’t monitoring these workflows, risk can rise. When they are present, you have another level of checks and balances.
No One’s More Accurate Than the Experts
Accuracy ties to compliance and is just as crucial. A single mis-mailing can result in negative consequences, from noncompliance allegations to reputational harm. Ensuring that each envelope contains the right documents can be challenging at high volumes. Doing this manually would be a huge undertaking and labor-intensive.
Transactional communication experts have automation that streamlines this by using intelligent insertion. Each piece of paper has a unique 2D barcode. When scanned, the inserter knows which pages to fold into an envelope. A second camera captures this action for validation.
It may seem simple, but it’s actually highly advanced and requires specialized equipment, technology, and refined processes. Very few have mastered this. While 100% perfection isn’t feasible, we’ve come extremely close with our 99.9999% accuracy rating.
Quality Increases with Print-to-Mail Services
Quality rounds out the list of benefits of outsourcing. It has two avenues of equal importance. Quality in terms of the end product means that the printing matches your branding and is repeatedly consistent. It’s much easier to achieve with high-speed inkjet printers.
The second part of quality is more complex. The approach of transactional printers that live by Lean Manufacturing is quality assurance over quality control. Here’s why that matters.
Quality control only detects a defect after the process. Then, you still have to investigate where the error occurred. You can only be reactive.
Quality assurance audits the process to identify gaps or issues. Then, the process gets reworked so it doesn’t happen again. It’s a proactive response. With this framework, continuous improvement is the objective so that workflows are reliable.
Print-to-Mail Services from PCI Group
You have much to gain from working with a professional print and mail company like PCI Group. There’s also much to lose in terms of reducing costs and risk. For over five decades, we’ve been committed to delivering the best solutions to customers built on the foundation of security, compliance, quality, and accuracy.
Let’s talk about your move to outsourcing today.
