Providing your customers with compliant, accurate, high-quality statements is a business requirement. These documents have many rules governing how you print and mail them. They also have a lot of costs, and require advanced equipment, sophisticated workflows, and labor. With all these elements and complexity, many companies are evaluating their options to outsource their statement printing and mailing needs.
As a transactional print and mail company, we are an outsourcing partner to organizations all over the country in various industries. When we begin to have conversations with companies, they always have many questions, which we encourage.
If you’re on the path to transition from in-house to outsourcing, here’s a head start with some statement printing and mailing services FAQs.
How Does Outsourcing Statements Simplify Managing the Process?
With transactional statement printing and mailing, the workflows necessary to ensure compliance, accuracy, and quality are complex. There are many tasks involved in the production process. You also have to create an audit trail and track the mailings once they hit the mail stream. It’s a huge undertaking when it’s not your core competency.
When you work with professionals like PCI Group, we are process-oriented, using Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma to perfect them. We have hundreds of standard works that detail every aspect of the job. You don’t have to “train” us to produce your statements.
All that burden shifts from you to us, and we ensure you have visibility from the time you submit the data to the completion of the batch. You also can view the journey of statements through customer delivery.
It’s all part of trakPCI, a web-based business document management portal. It’s your “eyes” into our operations, enabling you to monitor, schedule, and control production.
How Does Outsourcing Statements Ensure Compliance?
You may think outsourcing increases your risk because it’s not happening within your ecosystem. While you have lots of protocols in place, you can expect that transactional print and mail companies have compliance in their DNA. It’s all we do, so there’s no aspect of the company across locations, departments, etc., they aren’t compliance-minded.
Compliance starts with having all the certifications of essential legislation and regulatory standards. That’s just our foundation. We also apply compliance rules practically across operations to strengthen accuracy, protect data (physically and digitally), and meet required timelines.
We improve accuracy with intelligent insertion technology and scanning 2D barcodes to ensure every statement goes into the correct envelope. As a result, we have an industry-leading accuracy rating of 99.9999%. We have robust data protection policies, including using encryption, multi-tiered architecture, IPS (intrusion prevention systems), and advanced firewalls.
When statements must arrive on time, we meet your SLAs (service level agreements) with careful management of our resources.
How Challenging Is Transitioning to an Outsourced Provider?
Any big change in operations takes time to implement. The concern that many have about this transition period is normal. Since we’ve helped many customers do this, we have a proven implementation process.
We start with an initial assessment of your current methods. Then, we define any gaps between the current desired state with recommendations from our experts on how to optimize. We build out implementation timelines, and you have dedicated resources throughout the process. There is frequent communication, lots of testing, and formal onboarding.
Are There Limitations on Statement Design or Formatting?
Our statement printing uses the White Paper Factory (WPF), which marries fully digitally composed files with in-line print production. With this approach, you get several opportunities to revamp your statements and create more engagement. You can use full color on any section of the statement and add things like graphs or images.
The best part about the WPF is the ability to insert dynamic content personalized for each addressee. It becomes another channel to communicate with and market to your customers on a document they’ll read. You can eliminate the need to pre-print templates and include inserts.
Are There Substantial Postage Savings?
Postage costs are one of the most common questions we get from companies. USPS continues to raise rates, and the only way to maximize savings is to have extremely high volumes.
Transactional printing companies have this, so we’re able to take advantage of presorting, the USPS Intelligent Mail® barcode (IMb) for automation, and commingling groups. We also use address scrubbing to reduce the amount of invalid or duplicate addresses.
In our initial assessment of your statement production, we’ll provide more postage optimization tips, like standardizing mail sizes and ensuring paper stock is the ideal weight.
Have More Questions About Statement Printing and Mailing Services?
These questions are a starting point for your journey from in-house to outsourcing. We welcome you to request a consultation to inquire about our processes and experience. You can also review all our statement printing and mailing services. Contact us today to start asking.
