Still Manually Handling Return Mail?
Still Manually Handling Return Mail?
We keep hearing people relay their struggles with returned mail. The scene they describe is all too common… Rooms littered with stacks of this low priority mail taking up precious floor space. Tubs of returned mail accumulate as they wait for the payments that take precedence in processing. Operators get to it when they can, but never seem to get caught up. And they’re not alone, this scenario plays out at companies of all sizes.
Without an adequate solution in place, the process for handling returned mail can be almost completely manual and increasingly difficult. Significant time and effort are required for opening envelopes and extracting contents, manually researching account numbers, entering data changes directly into mainframe screens, remembering business rules to handle things accurately, and physically moving paper around to customer service and other departments for follow-up activities.
Addressing so many steps without automation leaves room for any number of human errors which can compound the initial reason the mail was returned. The associated costs are exorbitant and hard for organizations to accurately quantify given all the hoops to jump through.
This is a significant paper problem for First Class Mail as remittance mail is the largest single segment of First-Class Mail, tallying approximately 55 billion pieces annually. In the United States, of the 6.6 billion total pieces of Undeliverable as Addressed (UAA) mail, 550 million pieces were classified as single-piece First Class.
Even at only 1% of the total volume, 550 million pieces are a huge burden for billers. As the USPS Office of Inspector General (OIG) measured, how can billers minimize the $20 billion in annual expense for returned mail?
Mavro has the answer
Our revolutionary one-touch imaging solution was purpose-built to maximize your scanning and software investment for envelopes, documents and payments. One-touch processing technology allows operators to handle physical paper only once and potentially eliminate envelope contents extraction.
Expanded data collection automation/validation helps to quickly and more accurately output return mail data. Operations can then interact with other departments more efficiently by leveraging use of images in the Mavro archive and automated reporting functions.
MavBridge™ software has key capabilities that can build on remittance and document imaging workflows to optimize return mail activities:
- Paper bills mailed in windowed envelopes can be imaged and classified without extracting the contents.
- The yellow Nixie label from the USPS can be read with high confidence using Mavro’s OCR algorithms to automate collection of the return reason and forwarding address.
- Additional image-based data completion can be configured for addressing your specific business rules for updating impacted account.
All in all, the added capability to handle return mail greatly optimizes scanning capacity during slower scanning times and increases the return on investment from the MavBridge™ software.