Trends in Print and Mail

With the current pandemic, there’s been a renewed call for more states to offer voting by mail. Not as an exception to voting in person, but as the preferred method for elections. There are already five states that conduct elections entirely by mail: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah. 21 other states allow voting by mail for certain elections. Expansion of voting by mail seems to be a natural progression.

Election authorities must take action to ensure integrity and visibility throughout the process. That includes a high-integrity production system for printing and mailing, plus using the US Postal Service (USPS) Informed Platform for mailing and receiving ballots.

Production inkjet presses. File-managed processing with job and piece level tracking. Seamless acceptance for full-service Intelligent Mail barcode mailings. Artificial intelligence extracting information from inbound paper documents.

Implementing just one of those solutions is a challenge. Taking advantage of the capabilities of those technologies requires transforming digital and production workflows. In most cases, print and mail professionals will need to venture far outside their comfort zones.

It seems that every day, there’s a news story about hackers stealing customer information from a computer system. Most publicized cases involve large companies being hacked for credit card information and passwords for millions of people. Small companies are hacked too, but those stories don’t seem to grab as much attention.

Physical mail is fairly secure and is protected by federal laws enforced by the US Postal Service Inspection Service (USPIS). With a heritage that traces back to Benjamin Franklin, the USPIS aggressively pursues criminals who use the mail to attach or defraud victims. Companies and individuals put great trust in a sealed envelope marked “First-Class Mail”.

In the past, creating transactional mail documents was performed by companies using internal systems. Printers were directly attached to the mainframe computer system. The mail services department was in the same building, if not in the same room. There were tight controls from data to print to insert to delivery to the post office.

Just in time to approve the 2019 postal rate increase, the Senate confirmed two members of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) Board of Governors. One of the new governor’s term expired in December, other nominees didn’t even receive a hearing, so the administration will have to resubmit their names in 2019. Postal Legislation is still mired down in subcommittees of both houses.

After one White House report caused an uproar by recommending privatizing the USPS, the long-delayed Task Force report side-stepped that option while providing few other ideas. The Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) has taken no action on their own proposed changes to the rate-making process.

When a company decides to outsource customer communications to a service provider, that doesn’t mean the work is done. The vendor must be monitored and managed to ensure that they’re meeting the standards negotiated in the contract. Savvy customers take managing their vendors to the next step – by conducting periodic audits for quality control, best practices, and compliance with postal and industry regulations.

In January 2018, Aetna settled a lawsuit for $17 million over a data breach. In March 2018, a class-action lawsuit was filed against CVS, Fiserv and other parties for a similar data breach. The cases are related – the privacy compromises occurred because personal health information (PHI) could be seen through the window of the envelopes used for mailing notices to people with HIV.