If your company still sends a large volume of invoices via mail, you likely know this is an operational challenge. It’s also getting more expensive. Ensuring these arrive to your customers securely and on time is imperative. If you’re tired of this model, you should consider invoice mailing services.
What Are Invoice Mailing Services?
Invoice mailing services describe using a third-party provider to print and deliver these documents. They take care of the entire process from data intake through tracking. It means you only need to prepare the invoices, and let professionals take care of the rest.
Evaluating Invoice Mailing Services
If you choose to outsource, you can reap many benefits, including cutting costs and improving accuracy. However, not every provider is the same, so here’s what you need to know before you select one.
Seek Out a Company Focused on Transactional Communications
Any commercial printer could print and mail letters for you, but you have to consider that invoices are in a special category. They are transactional mailings because they include PII (personally identifiable information), PHI (protected health information), or other sensitive information.
As a result, you have compliance obligations. Working with companies that don’t specialize in this could expose you to risk. They may lack processes, checks and balances that are critical.
Ask Questions About Their Compliance Programs
First and foremost, the provider should have a compliance program. This is more than complying with regulations. It should be a robust strategy to ensure there are no compliance gaps. Additionally, they should be able to adapt when changes to regulations occur.
The things that make a compliance program effective include:
- Dedicated staff, including a compliance officer
- Regular compliance auditing
- A compliance-focused culture
Compliance goes hand in hand with security.
Investigate Their Security Protocols
Data security isn’t optional in transactional print and mail. When you send a provider your data, you must be certain that it has secure processing. Additionally, they should have policies in place that account for data encryption while at rest and in motion.
They should also be agile in their cybersecurity defenses, using firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS), and network segmentation.
If they use a cloud to store data, what kind is it? Public or private? A private cloud delivers the greatest security.
Developing an offensive security posture also matters, so inquire about vulnerability scanning and penetration testing, too.
Identify How They Manage Accuracy
To be compliant, you must be accurate. Mis-mailings can trigger noncompliance complaints and cause reputational harm. So, how do you avoid this as much as possible?
It’s about the processes and technology. With intelligent insertion, accuracy strengthens. Here’s how it works:
- Each piece of paper has a 2D barcode.
- A camera scans that barcode.
- The information from the barcode flows to the inserter.
- The inserter folds the specific pages into the envelope.
- A second camera captures this for verification.
It seems simple, but it’s very sophisticated. Using intelligent insertion results in high accuracy rates. Our is 99.9999%!
Continuous review of the operations is also crucial for maintaining accuracy.
Understand Their Quality Approach
We’ve talked a lot about workflows and auditing them, and that’s fundamental to quality assurance (QA). A framework for this is Lean Manufacturing, specifically standard works. These are detailed documents of all the tasks that exist within a process. There’s an ongoing process of auditing to find anomalies and correct them.
Lean Manufacturing and QA are much better options than quality control (QC). QC only looks at post-production units to inspect, which doesn’t lead to correction.
Discuss Transitioning
If you are currently producing and mailing invoices in-house, you’ll need to transition to outsourcing. This can be an immense thing to undertake without the right support. Ideally, you’ll find a partner that is a migration expert and has a proven implementation and onboarding process.
Ask about this during consultations to understand what resources and plans they have. The process could be slow and painful if the vendor doesn’t have the experience.
Invoice Mailing Services with PCI Group
We’re a leader in transactional print and mail, including invoicing. We only produce these types of communications and have invested in people, processes, and technology. If you’re ready to shift invoice delivery, let’s talk. Contact us today for a no-cost consultation.
