What is accountable mail and what benefits can it bring your business?

Sometimes you just need to adjust your perspective. Prospective clients often ask if our digital mail system can handle their “accountable” mail. By that, they mean all the mail that arrives with tracking numbers – things like Fedex, UPS, USPS Priority Mail, and the like. The simple answer is “Yes, of course we handle accountable mail.” The better answer is that the right digital mail system makes 100% of your incoming mail “accountable,” and does so in beneficial ways most clients could only dream about.

Table of contents:

• What makes an accountable mail different?
• The benefits of this solution
• Why should you try accountable digital mail?

What makes an accountable mail different?

The thing about traditional “accountable” mail is that it isn’t accountable to your company, it’s accountable to the sender. It’s not accountable to your company because you don’t know what content is associated with the tracking number. Only the sender and the end-recipient know that — and with rare exception, no one accounts for it after the initial delivery. The bottom line is you’re able to confirm that the package was delivered, but you don’t know much else about it.

With the right accountable digital mail system, every piece of mail that comes in the door is scanned at the point of entry, and a unique tracking ID is applied to both the physical and digital copies of the content. Then, the system automatically builds an audit trail of everything that happens to the digital copy: when it was scanned, who it was sent to, when was it opened, forwarded, trashed or even (hopefully not) printed. In our system, we provide dedicated user interfaces to handle post-delivery, content-based sub-sorting of transactional mail within workgroups – and our audit trail includes all those actions as well.

The benefits of this solution

This is important because it makes your mail accountable in more ways than you’ve probably imagined — thereby making your business exponentially more manageable and efficient. How so? The audit trail lets you:

• Know who’s seen a document
• Determine what actions have been taken by whom and when
• Quantify the types and volumes of mail received by each department each day
• Dynamically assign the right amount of staff to each process
• Measure performance against a service level agreement (SLA)
• Calculate the efficiency of staff related to mail processing
• Find every piece of orphaned mail instantly
• Meet or exceed compliance requirements – automatically

In a world that has rapidly adopted digital assets that can easily be moved, managed and controlled, physical mail has, until now, proven to be stubbornly resistant to change — and it isn’t a small problem. As of 2016, there were still 27 BILLION pieces of B2B mail delivered annually. By definition, this doesn’t include the billions of pieces of reply mail generated by consumers who still send payments via check – but that’s a story for another day.

Everything you do is digital, why not your mail?