The utility industry sends millions of communications to customers every year. These operations can become expensive and cumbersome because of the volume and regulatory requirements. Many organizations are shifting to outsourcing via statement printing and mailing services to alleviate these strains.
Putting this work in the hands of professionals delivers many benefits for utility companies. If you’re considering this option, keep reading to learn everything you need to know.
Statement Printing and Mailing Services for Utility: 5 Things to Know
Outsourcing statements for your customers isn’t the same as doing so for promotional jobs. These documents contain PII (personally identifiable information) and other confidential data. As a result, they fall into the transactional category. Thus, you’ll need to evaluate solutions from this lens.
Because of the type of communication, there are specific attributes that a potential partner must have. The key points to keep in mind include those related to efficiency, compliance, security, quality, and accuracy.
Outsourcing Statements Should Improve Efficiency
Utility mailings are at least a monthly job with many tasks to get from data to printing to mailing. In-house operations are often inefficient, requiring a lot of time and manual work. That comes with hard and soft costs.
To achieve greater efficiency, your provider should implement practical automation within its workflows. It begins with the transmission of data, which automatically gets securely processed and returned to you for confirmation on counts.
The process continues with more automation built upon standard works, which are all the steps necessary for a workflow to be complete.
Automated mail services also involve:
- The ability to print dynamically on each invoice
- Intelligent insertion technology to ensure the correct pages fold into the right envelope
- Presorting and postal optimization
- Address hygiene tools to eliminate duplicates and correct bad addresses
- These are must-haves for automation to deliver true efficiency, leading to lower costs and better-performing operations.
Utility Statement Jobs Should Be Compliance-Centric
You have regulatory obligations when sending statements to your customers. Remaining compliant includes lots of oversight and the need to pivot should the rules change. It may be a pain point of your current processes.
Transactional print and mail companies only produce transactional communications. Thus, everything they do has a compliance-centric influence. They take great care and develop strategic initiatives to ensure data remains private and mis-mailings don’t occur.
Your print and mail partner should comply with all applicable laws and have controls built into workflows that optimize compliance.
Security in Utility Statement Printing and Mailing Services Must Be a Priority
Security goes hand in hand with compliance. Your security measures align with regulations and other best practices. A provider must prioritize this to minimize the risk of customer data breaches.
Utility statement security must involve protecting the data and the physical. Encryption should cover data while in transit or at rest. Transmission should occur via SFTP (secure file transfer protocol), and networks should have safeguards like advanced firewalls and an IPS (intrusion protection system). Additionally, companies that adopt a multi-tiered architecture can segment traffic to keep PII even more secure.
In terms of physical security, only those who need access should have it. Key cards, door alarms, security cameras, and gated perimeters should all be in place. There should also be protocols for destroying physical documents via shredding.
A partner that has these security measures offers peace of mind.
Consistent Quality Drives Excellence in Outsourcing Utility Bills
Quality has a dual meaning in statement printing and mailing services. First, your documents should appear professional, using your brand colors and design. You’ll be able to evaluate this in the proofs generated. High-speed, advanced commercial inkjet printers reliably provide consistent quality.
The second part of quality ties to Lean Manufacturing. This philosophy focuses on a QA (quality assurance) model versus QC (quality control). QA bakes quality into the process by leveraging standard works. Continuous auditing of these roots out process anomalies that operators can then amend. A QC environment looks for mistakes after the job is complete, leaving no route to mitigating it.
Accuracy Can Improve with Statement Printing and Mailing
Accuracy intertwines with all these components. Without it, you can’t be efficient, compliant, secure, or quality-focused. Complex equipment and processes must be part of the workflow to achieve the highest level of accuracy.
The best approach involves using intelligent insertion backed by barcode scanning. Each document has a unique barcode that defines the addressee and grouping. Based on this, inserters fold the appropriate documents into the correct envelope. Another camera takes an image of the inserted envelope to validate the process.
By combining people, processes, and technology, we’ve attained a 99.9999% accuracy rating.
Improve Workflows and Remove Burdens with Utility Statement Printing and Mailing Services
Efficiency, compliance, security, quality, and accuracy are all parts of our ecosystem. We serve numerous utility companies, delivering customer communications on time and according to their preferences. We can do the same for you!
Learn more about utility transactional printing solutions today.
