Printing and mailing customer communications can be an expensive, time-consuming part of operations. When these are transactional in nature and contain sensitive information, the process becomes more complex. For those still running an in-house production, you should consider print and mail services for business.
By transitioning, you’ll achieve many benefits relating to costs, accuracy, compliance, and quality. Let’s review those and why it’s time to retire your implant.
What Are Print and Mail Services for Business in Transactional?
Print and mail services for businesses relating to transactional communications encompass all the tasks associated with producing and distributing them into the mail stream. It begins with a secure transfer of data to your transactional provider and ends with the ability to track mail pieces through delivery.
The services can involve any type of transactional print and mail, including:
- Statements
- Invoices
- Collection letters
- HIPAA communications
- Claim letters
- Policy renewals
Any communication that includes protected and confidential information subject to regulatory rules fits into this category.
What Services Are Included?
When outsourcing print and mail to a professional, you’ll want to evaluate what you get to ensure it meets your organization’s needs. These are the services our customers receive:
- Secure portals to transmit data that meets all regulatory requirements
- Confirmation of jobs and counts for verification
- The ability to track all jobs through a secure, web-based document management system
- Standard works for all the production processes required for your communications
- Dedicated onboarding and project management teams to support transitions with a proven strategy
- Layers of security to keep data safe and control physical access
- Postage optimization solutions, including address scrubbing, high-volume presorting, commingling, and using the USPS IMb (Intelligent Mail® Barcode) for sorting and stacking
- Real-time, on-demand reports that cover every aspect of the job
- Invoice and statement design services
- Proven expertise in outsourcing
These are the highlights and should be the minimum standards as you evaluate options.
Benefits of Print and Mail Outsourcing for Business
Transitioning from in-house operations to outsourcing offers many advantages, from decreasing costs to enhancing risk avoidance.
Cost Savings Across the Board
Eliminate capital expenditures of equipment and technology along with their maintenance expenses. Additionally, you’ll no longer have overhead and labor on your budget. Working with a print and mail provider, you also take advantage of their lower costs for paper, ink, and postage.
Accuracy Gets a Boost
Improve accuracy in your print and mail with an organization that has an advanced framework. Getting the right communication into the correct envelope is a fundamental and essential workflow, but it’s not always easy. It requires using intelligent insertion technology and high-speed cameras to track documents from production to USPS delivery.
Additionally, integrity cameras read 2D barcodes to ensure each piece of paper folds separately into the envelope. Another camera takes an image of the inserted envelope to verify the correct insertion.
With this framework, we’ve earned an industry-leading accuracy rate of 99.9999%.
Quality Is Consistent in a QA Culture
The quality of your print and mail has two components. First, there are the attributes of the printed materials. They should represent your brand and be able to use color effectively.
The second part is consistency in production. This comes from having a quality assurance (QA) culture that uses the principles of Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma. Every operator, shift, and location follows the over 270 standard works we have created to produce the highest quality critical communications. With QA, you bake quality into the process. It’s different than quality control (QC), which only measures errors after the fact.
To ensure quality remains reliable, we commence 40,000 standard audits annually, with an average grade of 99.89%.
Compliance Is Always a Priority
Meeting compliance requirements for print and mail services for business involves many elements. It includes the movement, storage, and usage of protected data in processes. Depending on the type of communication and industry, there may be other rules around timelines, communication content, and layouts.
Compliance is always top of mind when working with a transactional print and mail company. It’s an essential aspect of every piece of mail that runs through the system. When you outsource to a company with all the compliance certifications and dedicated compliance resources, you’ll be able to meet and exceed requirements.
Make the Transition to Print and Mail Services for Business with PCI Group
You can achieve all these benefits and retain control of your production when you work with our team. We have supported many companies, large and mid-sized, in moving from in-house to outsourcing. With a proven onboarding plan that includes assessments of the current state and recommendations for a future state, you’ll reap the advantages of cost savings, improved accuracy, stronger compliance, and reliable quality.
