Are you considering outsourcing your transactional communications? You can gain many benefits from doing so. Improve compliance, reduce costs, and boost accuracy, to name a few. However, you’ll need to do your research. Start with these letter printing and mailing services questions.
How Do You Define Transactional Print and Mail?
Begin your inquiries with the company by asking about their services and solutions for transactional documents. Transactional is much different than marketing communications. It contains PII (personally identifiable information) and/or PHI (protected health information).
As a result, multiple regulations may dictate the processes, especially around security and accuracy.
The kind of answer to expect should reflect details about how they manage compliance with these mailings, including equipment, technology, and workflows.
It should also reveal their capabilities in terms of types of mailings. Can they support certified mail? Do they offer a full scope of document types, such as statements, privacy notifications, or others that contain sensitive information?
Do They Have a Framework for Producing These Letters?
The most diligent of providers will have a foundation for their production. The best provides use Lean Manufacturing. This means they focus on defining and auditing processes to ensure accuracy and quality.
Lean Manufacturing standard works break every workflow into tasks to drive reliability and repeatability. It also ensures they identify waste and eliminate it.
What Are the Pillars of Their Compliance Program?
Transactional letter printing and mailing services must have built-in compliance. It needs to be part of every function across their organization.
You want to understand the specific things they do to meet compliance requirements, such as:
- Holding certificates in compliance with HIPAA, HITRUST, FISMA, PCI DSS, and others
- Secure file processing that leverages encryption
- Audit trails and reports
- Encryption of the data once in their system, whether it’s at rest or in motion
- Regularly audited workflows in line with Lean Manufacturing
- Accuracy controls like intelligent insertion, which scans barcodes on pages to tell the inserter which ones fold into each envelope
- A fully documented compliance program that includes a person or group who is a compliance expert
What Data Security Protocols Are in Place?
Transactional letter printing and mailing services must involve data security. From the moment the data flows to the provider, the process starts, and so does the protection of the data. It begins with secure file processing with encryption.
You also want to know about how they proactively thwart threats. Penetration testing and vulnerability scanning are critical to this. Additionally, using network segmentation reduces risk because it restricts communication between areas of the network.
Along with data security, their networks need safeguards, as well. Those include firewalls and IPS (Intrusion Prevention Systems).
How Do They Transition Your Operations?
If you’re going from in-house production to outsourcing, you want a seamless migration. The vendor you choose should have a documented onboarding program to achieve this.
Look for an organization that accounts for all these considerations:
- Current workflow assessment and recommendations for improvement
- Documenting a project plan that features all the tasks and responsible parties
- Defining task dependencies and contingencies should challenges occur
- Task work timelines and milestones
- Testing for data integrity, quality assurance, compliance, security, and accuracy
- Go live dates
- Continuous follow-up and review of production
Modernize with Letter Printing and Mailing Services from PCI Group
As one of the leaders in transactional print and mail, we have a blueprint that works. We’re happy to answer any of your questions and highlight how we manage security, compliance, quality, and accuracy.
Get started by scheduling a consultation with our experts.
