Does your print and mail vendor excel at compliance, security, accuracy, and quality? These are the four pillars in transactional communications. While you may think all providers are the same, there are some key differentiators that some just don’t have.
If you’ve been outsourcing these mailings for years or months, you should be comparing options to ensure you get the best of the best. You can with this handy checklist.
Print and Mail Vendors Checklist: Compliance, Security, Accuracy, and Quality
In assessing print and mail companies, there are four areas to compare. Let’s review the must-haves a preferred provider should have.
Compliance Must Be More Than Surface
Lots of vendors emphasize their compliance standards. They promote their adherence to regulations, such as HIPAA or FISMA. That’s the bare minimum. Most don’t enhance their programs beyond this. One certification differentiator is SOCI & II. These are advanced control frameworks that focus on security, availability, processing integrity, privacy, and confidentiality regarding data.
To go beyond the surface of compliance, a vendor must integrate it into every process. Organizations can do this in many ways. One is by following Lean Manufacturing best practices and auditing workflows regularly to identify any issues immediately and resolve them.
You can be even more confident in their compliance when they have staff dedicated to it. The companies that live and breathe it have a Compliance Officer and team. Their sole responsibility is to improve and enhance compliance-related initiatives. They also keep up to date on changes.
Security Should Be Proactive, Not Reactive
What sinks security principles in companies? Much of the time, it’s because they are always reacting to threats rather than being proactive about cybersecurity. There are inherent risks with handling PII (personally identifiable information) or PHI (protected health information), but you can minimize them with the right strategies.
A print and mail vendor serious about security has a portfolio of initiatives behind it, which align with compliance measures. When comparing options, look for these things:
- Using encryption when data is in transit or at rest
- Secure file transmission and processing channels
- Full disk encryption
- Network segmentation
- Multi-factor authentication
- Advanced firewalls and IPS (Intrusion Protection System)
- Continuous performance of penetration testing and vulnerability scanning
- Layers of security across the entire organization
In addition to data security, the production facility needs robust physical defenses. There should be cameras monitoring the work 24-7, controlled access, and secure perimeters.
The threat landscape keeps evolving, and you need a provider that’s adapting in real time. Those vendors still operating on cybersecurity best practices from years ago put your company at risk.
Accuracy Must Be a Priority
Accuracy ties together with compliance and security. All these principles build on each other and share similar attributes. It would be challenging to be proficient in one and not the other.
So, what does accuracy in transactional communications mean? It describes the rate at which mis-mailings occur. If the wrong person receives a transactional letter, your company could be exposed to liability.
Is it possible to be 100% accurate? Nothing is perfect, but you can get pretty close with the right environment.
Some specific strategies can enhance accuracy. Lean Manufacturing and its tenets support accuracy because of the continuous auditing of workflows. Then, there’s a technology piece of intelligent insertion.
Intelligent insertion involves scanning 2D barcodes found on each piece of paper in the mailing. When scanned, the inserter knows which pages to fold into each envelope. An additional camera captures the insertion. There’s also monitoring across the entire lifecycle of production.
This setup works beautifully when followed. It has allowed PCI Group to achieve an industry-leading 99.9999% accuracy rating.
Quality Assurance Eclipses Quality Control
There’s a big difference between QA (quality assurance) and QC (quality control). The former uses an auditing process to review all workflows to find any deviations. When discovered, the process gets an upgrade. QC looks at the product after manufacturing with no recourse to fix it or understand the root cause.
QA allows for a culture of continuous improvement, strengthening processes so that they are reliable and consistent across production. It’s another critical component in comparing print and mail vendors.
Crafting Your Checklist
Within each of these four pillars, you now know what to look for and investigate. If your current provider is coming up short, you’re at risk. You can’t eliminate it, but you can be in the best position to minimize it.
Want to do a comparison against PCI Group? Request a no-cost discovery consultation today.
