It costs more than $36 billion per year for businesses to distribute their 57 billion pieces of transactional mail. That accounts for approximately 2 to 3 percent of their revenue, said Forrester Research and Zumbox, one of the companies proposing a new model for enabling paper suppression, along with doxo, Pitney Bowes and others.
Mailers across industries have tried with varying degrees of forcefulness to get their customers to go paperless, communications service providers among them. It could be mailers were expecting too much because they concentrated on their own billing and payment relationship with their customers. But no single mailer stands alone when the average online bill payer has 22 different logins to as many accounts in order to access or pay their bills online – 22!
The new models focus on cutting the billers’ costs and solving the consumers’ larger problem of organizing their lives as they navigate the waters between the new, still evolving digital age and their old habits and patterns for dealing with the painful monthly bill paying process.
Record keeping appears to be the hardest habit to break, as people cite needing paper records of their transactions as the number one reason for not suppressing paper bills. Consumers don’t trust their billers to store the records or make them available conveniently and cheaply if needed. Consumers also use the paper records as convenient reminders to pay bills. And they are already tiring of the current digital process that requires a different login for all the companies they need to transact with.
As it turns out, while billers, banks and consolidators were busy trying to disintermediate each other in order to get the consumer to come to their websites, they should have been trying to disintermediate the USPS itself.
The new models do just that. Zumbox, for instance, first launched its all-digital alternative to the traditional postal system in February of 2009. It gave every street address in the U.S. the potential for a digital mailbox. Zumbox takes the electronic feed meant for the printer and then documents it and presents it in digital format the same way it would appear in a consumer’s mailbox.
Zumbox overcomes consumers’ primary objection about record keeping by promising that digital postal mail from transactional, financial and government mailers will be stored centrally and securely online for every U.S. household forever for free.
