Pitney Bowes service aims to cut return mail costs in US
Pitney Bowes has launched a new return mail management service in the United States, which it claims could cut the cost of dealing with undelivered mail by up to 70%. As any as 1.4bn pieces of USPS First-Class Mail does not get delivered each year, which is a particular problem for finance, insurance and healthcare companies as well as utilities and government mailers.
Pitney Bowes said return mail can cost companies $3 per piece in operational costs, including postage and printing, handling, research and re-mailing – adding up to potentially $4.2bn in costs for industry to absorb.
Mailers can also incur penalties from the USPS for items that do not match current customer addresses.
The company’s newly-launched Enterprise Return Mail Service uses a combination of automated scanning and manual processes to capture data from physical mail pieces before correcting as many as 60% to 80% of the incorrect addresses.
On the new service, clients pay a transactional per-item price for pieces that are corrected and remailed, receiving the data on the address corrections made.
Thanks to the automated nature of the service, the time it takes to have an undelivered item back in the mail stream can be cut from weeks to just a few days, Pitney Bowes says.
Jeff Stangle, director of solutions for mailstream consulting at Pitney Bowes Management Services, Inc., told Post&Parcel that the key to the accuracy of the new system is using multiple sources to find and validate changes of address.
He said the service takes a “waterfall approach” to clean up incorrect addresses using postal hygiene software, validating data against information gathered by credit bureaus (though not credit scoring information), as well as magazine subscription data, social security data and USPS change of address data.
Corrected addresses are then put back through the hygiene software to provide further confidence in the updated details.
Stangle said: “We were finding in our research that people working only using one or two sources of information go out and mail the item are finding it is still coming back. In some cases, those systems turn a bad address into an even worse address.”
Information from the Enterprise Return Mail Services is fed back to the clients to allow them to update their address databases, and identify if alternate addresses are also returning mail as undelivered.
“They are not going to pay for that service unless we have provided them with an updated address,” Stangle said.
