Digital Return Mail Solution Can Deliver Savings

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 27.1 million Americans moved last year. If even a small percentage of them did not submit a change of address, that creates a big problem for companies that send mail. Processing returned mail is costly and time-consuming — and it can lead to dissatisfied customers. And if you’re sending legally required notifications or time-sensitive information, it can actually put your business at risk.

Part of the mailroom automation process, a digital return mail solution can help you overcome these obstacles while further enabling your digital transformation journey. This is especially important for industries like insurance, legal services, banking and health care — which still process large volumes of paper-based client communications.

If your company is struggling to manage returned mail, here are four reasons to consider a digital return mail solution for your company:

1. Increase efficiency and realize immediate savings
   Manual return mail processes are very labor intensive. Your staff must manually update your company records to make sure customers’ addresses are correct for future communications. This labor intensive process can potentially lead to inadvertent errors. That means you could be wasting postage sending mail to the wrong address again and again. In addition, if you’re using high-value, highly paid employees for data entry, you’re not making the best use of your people. Digital return mail services leverage automation to process returned mail efficiently and help ensure that your records are up to date.
2. Boost customer satisfaction
   Customers become frustrated when they don’t receive important correspondence from you in a timely manner. This includes invoices, payments, account renewals or other valuable information about their account. If you are slow or inefficient in updating addresses, it could negatively impact your relationships with your customers. Digital return mail services automatically log and process returned mail rapidly, helping to ensure that your customers receive timely communications in any circumstance. Implementing a digital return mail system is also an ideal way to start transitioning your customers to digital communications — a win for both you and them.
3. Help ensure regulatory compliance
   Communications of any kind are important to your business and your customers. But when those communications involve legal, regulatory or compliance requirements, your business can be at risk if you fail to meet your obligations. Compliance violations can cost you thousands or even millions of dollars in fines, and you could even face suspension of your business activities. With digital return mail services, you can log, correct and reprocess returned mail quickly and accurately to meet regulatory requirements and avoid unnecessary risk.
4. Take an effective first step in your transformation journey
   As companies in every industry begin their journey toward digital transformation, implementing digital return mail services can be a simple and effective first step. Once you have a platform in place, such as the Canon Intelligent Automation Suite (CIAS), you can easily build on that foundation by adding robotic process automation and other features that streamline your workflows and improve your bottom line.

Canon Return Mail Automation leverages Canon’s intelligent automation to offer fast and accurate returned mail processing in a model that’s just right for your company. For example, your returned mail can be redirected to a Canon business processing center, where we extract the name, address and other pertinent information for updating your mailing lists. Or you can digitize the entire return mail system and manage it onsite inside your mailroom. Canon provides a cloud-based digital platform so you can scan mail, automatically extracting and updating each customer’s name, address and account number for future outgoing mail.

By using Canon Return Mail Automation, you can be more efficient, reduce costs and free up staff to work on higher-value activities while ensuring that your customers hear from you in a timely manner. In a real-life example, an insurance company received 140,000 pieces of returned mail last year. Properly processing that volume of returned mail represented a big demand on staff. By implementing Canon Return Mail Services, the company expects to realize a savings of more than $61,000 annually — and it was able to reallocate one highly skilled and highly paid employee to other responsibilities that support the company’s core business.

When you’re ready to adopt digital return mail services, it’s crucial to find the right partner to guide you through this digital transition. Canon has more than 40 years of experience in managing mailroom operations of all kinds and offers a wide range of digital mailroom and digital intake services.

We take a holistic approach to implementation that leverages assisted automation, working with you to ensure that your employees are engaged in the solution, your process matches your needs and the technology is seamless. We begin with a business value assessment to understand your journey and help you make an informed decision, and we work with you every step of the way to help you get the greatest value from your investment.

Canon Return Mail Automation closes the loop on returned mail and provides a cost-effective solution for return mail processing. Learn more about how Canon Return Mail Automation, and our entire suite of solutions for managing mail, can help you transform your business.