Business Insight

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September 24, 2009

The impact of returned mail

By Cynthia Williams

This month, we interview Mike Cooper from Pitney Bowes Business Insight. Over the past year, Mike has met with organizations across the country, gaining first-hand insights on how returned mail can impact bottom line results.

Who should be concerned about return mail?
It's a problem that affects every organization. In the US, 2.5% of First-Class Mail is returned every month. In Canada, it can be as high as 4% - 5%. And we're talking about important customer communications, such as bills and checks.

It touches so many customers, why do these problems linger?
Most organizations we visit have traditionally looked at return mail from the perspective of the mail room. Mail is returned, corrected, resent. People calculate what it cost to resend mail then just assume it's a necessary cost of doing business. They assume that the mail room costs are the only impact.

But the impact goes beyond the mail room?
Absolutely. The bulk of the costs associated with returned mail are incurred outside the mailroom. The fact that returned mail impacts so many departments, though, can make it difficult to quantify. Five percent of incoming cash could be delayed for a month or longer, which has a huge impact on borrowing and cash flow. Call centers will spend $5 to $20 contacting customers by phone to follow-up on bills and checks that were never received. We've even uncovered insurance companies that were losing customers worth $500 sales because they simply lost contact with them. And these are just a few examples.

Given that it might take 40 days or more for the physical piece to actually be returned, it's a reoccurring problem, too. In many companies we've studied, nearly half of the returned mail had already been returned at least once before - but unless you make process changes, you just can't deal with the problem in a timely manner. In a large organization, the total cost or returned mail can quickly reach the mid-seven figures.

How can a company like Pitney Bowes Business Insight help?
With our expertise, we can investigate the problem of returned mail across departments and identify what improvements could provide the quickest financial gain for our clients. There are ways to shorten cycle times and reduce handling costs. These steps will lower the incidence of returned mail overall. After an investigation, we know enough to make specific process recommendations; and under our new business model, we will make those changes and guarantee our results.

What are some areas where improvements can be made?
First, you want to eliminate the physical handling of returned mail. It's slow, expensive and prone to error - so you need to understand which functions could be handled electronically. Secondly, the USPS offers a number of technologies that help organizations identify problems and deal with them sooner, and we help our clients leverage processes and technologies more effectively.

What advice would you give mailer today?
In many companies, the sheer size and scope of the returned mail problem can be daunting - and some use that as an excuse to avoid taking action. In actuality, given the budget pressures that everyone faces these days, the size and scope of this opportunity should be the reason why it should become a high priority initiative. Some companies have literally saved millions by addressing this head on.

If you are interested in learning more about how you can overcome the problems and costs associated with returned mail, contact your PBBI representative.

Posted by PBBI at 3:00 PM | Comments (0)

September 14, 2009

The Rx for healthy data

By Navin Sharma

Health care is certainly front and center in today's news. Without taking sides on the issues in Washington, I'd like to share some of the learning we've done at Pitney Bowes regarding health care - and how I think it relates to data and data quality.

Organizations - Pitney Bowes especially - define their employees as company assets; and they make major efforts to increase the value through productivity.

For example: Pitney Bowes makes a considerable investment in preventive healthcare for its employees, providing onsite monitoring and treatment for those with chronic conditions; and onsite care when employees are feeling under the weather. As a result, employees are better about getting the treatment they need: they start treatment sooner, and typically feel better sooner too. It's a win-win: employees benefit; and productivity improves.

Every corporate decision and operation has reliance on the underlying data. In other words, good quality data is as much an asset to the organization as a hard-working employee. It's time for businesses to recognize that data quality isn't a place to cut corners. In fact, by taking a page out of the healthcare book and performing good preventive maintenance on data and quick treatment when data-quality issues arise - data quality will be better, and productivity will increase.

A few weeks ago, we talked about how data governance is everybody's business. Just as employees stay healthier when it's easier to do so, we can expect that employees will do a better job of keeping data quality high if they recognize the value and find that its easy to do so. I think one of the challenges is to make the process of data governance meaningful and straightforward.

Join the conversation at http://ebs.pbbiblogs.com

Posted by PBBI at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)

September 8, 2009

When two worlds collide

By Steve Seabury

While the 2010 U.S. Census is still months away, a recent advance in data analytics demonstrates how amazing things can happen when customer and location intelligence comes together.

For years, real estate specialists and strategic planners have relied on spatial analysis to make decisions that required significant investments. The power of location intelligence proved invaluable on many fronts. The stability of neighborhood demographics enabled decision-makers to hone in on trends that could impact long-term profitability. The precise nature of geocoding provided for year-over-year consistency. Plus, the ability to visualize and map customers, prospects and competition against existing and planned sites let to key insights… insights that have enabled banks, retailers, utilities and many other industry executives to exceed expectations.

At the other end of the spectrum, marketers turned to household segmentation models. Robust demographic data at the household level could be used to create clusters—segments of consumers who shared similar lifestyles, characteristics and needs. This lifecycle approach made it easy to target the 'retired affluent', 'young families', 'single post-grads' and dozens of other key markets. And with records updated quarterly (or even more frequently), marketers could respond quickly to life events.

Now for the first time, these distinct approaches have been combined to deliver enhanced network performance management and customer analytics solutions. Using deeper, more precise demographic data, organizations can make more informed and timely decisions about critical real estate and marketing initiatives. These next generation demographic data tools incorporate advantages from both disciplines and can help organizations overcome today's top challenges, for example:

- Enables marketers and strategic planers to work from the same platform
- Compares changes in household make-up with neighborhood shifts to uncover pockets of opportunity
- Normalizes household data to block out the noise of short-term events to create more accurate projections
- Eliminates the need for ZIP Code targeting, which rarely reflect true neighborhood and lifecycle segments
- Links store network performance with customer relationship management strategies

Of course, creating the best of both worlds requires you to start with the best in both worlds. That's why Pitney Bowes Business Insight teamed up with the Gadberry Group and Acxiom Corporation and their PersonicX segmentation system.

These data sources compile consumer data from over 100 sources, including public records, the U.S. Census and self-reported data. Measurements for accuracy and completeness are part of a sophisticated multi-source build process where individual data attributes are compared across multiple providers. While mapping and analytic tools previously dealt with neighborhood and block-level data, these new tools drill down to race, ethnicity, gender, education, marital status, occupation, income and lifecycle on an individual household level.

In many ways, incorporating Gadberry and Acxiom data into PBBI predictive analytics models will enable organizations to bridge the gap between real estate decision-making and marketing strategy -- incorporating the best of both.

For more information on the newest technologies, visit http://go.pbinsight.com/household-derived-demographics.

Posted by PBBI at 3:15 PM | Comments (0)

September 2, 2009

Lenders contend with alphabet mandate

UDAP. Reg Z. DD. Regulation E.

Federal and state regulations are nothing new for financial services firms. This year, however, lenders must content with a series of sweeping changes that will impact nearly every customer communication, from applications and marketing materials to disclosures and monthly statements.

With compliance deadlines looming, operations heads are still dealing with budget cuts and the lack of staff resources they've been handed as a result of the economy--and now must come up with a cost-effective plan to implement substantial changes to document content.

To address consumer confusion, lenders will need to modify documents generated by a host of legacy and one-off applications, incorporate more variable content and do so in a systematic, automated way. Already, some market leaders have adopted best practices in document composition, implementing effective software solutions that make it easy to create, manage and deliver updated communications with greater control and flexibility.

Print stream engineering and on-demand document creation have become the new must-have capabilities for managers looking to step up the new compliance demands. With these tools, operations heads can handle changes in form design and content with word processing ease. These software technologies do not require coding changes to your underlying legacy systems--often one of the biggest obstacles to document changes--and provide a centralized mechanism for executing compliance mandates so output can easily be formatted to support both print and electronic channels.

To learn more about these regulatory changes, the documents affected and how banks are responding in the most cost-efficient manner visit the Pitney Bowes Business Insight Financial Services regulations resource center today.

Posted by PBBI at 10:45 AM | Comments (2)