Billing & OSS World, Washington, D.C. — The black hole of the United States Postal Service is not theoretical. Nor is the revenue lost over its event horizon due to the uncertainties and duplication created by the unknown variables of mail-delivery status.
Kevin Conti, director of mailing solutions at Pitney Bowes Business Insight, delivered his own message Wednesday at the Billing & OSS World Conference & Expo about eliminating that black hole. And it was free of the uncertainty of messages delivered by the USPS. His message was unambiguous: Billers are wasting too much time, money and resources on redundant, inaccurate and unknown factors regarding the disposition of a piece of mail.
Historically, billers lack the visibility to determine the delivery rate of mail without intelligent bar coding and even then there are challenges and limits. However, the new USPS barcode – to which compliance will be required by May of 2011 –contains a unique ID, which can be used for tracking not only the destiny of a piece of mail, but potentially all the customer, destination and other relevant data associated with it.
“Knowing when a mail piece was being delivered can solve a lot of business problems for you,” Conti said.
Even basic information, such as whether or not a returned piece of mail is being rejected for the first time or the fifth can save billers huge sums of money. In some cases, Conti said, rather than returning or re-processing a piece of mail, its importance may warrant a disposition of the piece (throwing it away rather than re-processing.)
It also is helpful to understand not just the disposition of a piece of mail, but the history and characteristics of the payer so that billers can develop patterns of behavior that will allow them to treat different customers differently.
Knowing this information can help billers (or service providers) know their users better — or at all. It can help billers predict daily payment values with inbound remit visibility and analyze the payment patterns of the less disciplined user. Barcodes now allow customers to get status updates on, say, their customer status, the complete customer record in cycle, present method, premier method account status and history.
In too many cases, billers know within one to two days that a piece of mail is undelivered, but they seldom know why.
“This leads to a very high recidivism rate,” Conti said. “Fifty-one percent of returned mail has been returned before. Without this insight they miss a lot of actionable intelligence that can help them eliminate the cost of re-handling this mail.
This insight also would allow the biller to identify patterns in a customers’ payment behavior. Not knowing if a payment is on its way or whether or not a bill was every actually received can lead to a high instance in pre-mature disconnection, which costs $25 to $75 to reconnect. Fifteen percent of these can be eliminated, Conti said.
“Customer service has a lot of blind spots,” Conti said. And not using the intelligent barcode can lead to multiple re-printing, redundant mailing and other unnecessary processing.
However, he cautioned that billers can’t rely on the postal service to make the intelligent barcode do all it is capable of doing. By itself, the code simply tracks the mail piece. It is up to the biller to assign usable customer data to the bill or other mail piece.