Meeting Customer Expectations in a Rapid-Fire Environment

Technology improves every year, and with those improvements, speed increases. We are becoming accustomed to getting results quickly, and we now expect near-immediate turnaround times for most requests we make. The postal industry is no exception to these expectations. We are working in a rapid-fire environment. Your customers expect you to process mailing jobs quickly, you expect the USPS to process those mailing jobs quickly, and the USPS expects you to provide them with the necessary elements to allow them to process your mailings quickly and efficiently.

What are these elements that the USPS expects from you? What makes postal employees’ jobs easier and allows them to get your mail out the door as quickly as possible? All of the answers lie in your postal software solutions. These solutions need to help you ensure that recipients’ addresses are accurate and that mailpieces are barcoded, arranged in a logical order and bundled together. BCC understands these needs, and is fully prepared to help you meet these goals.

So in an environment where you, your customers, and the USPS are in rapid-fire mode, what are we at BCC doing to respect that? We are working on enhancing our services, striving to create a true 24/7 environment with fast turnarounds, no matter what your request is. One step we have recently taken was to bring DSF^2® processing in-house. This move now allows us to offer list processing 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We also hope that it will mean faster turnaround times, and in fact many customers have noticed that their DSF² jobs are taking less time to process.

There is no guarantee that BCC’s services will complete processing of your jobs immediately, and our DSF² processing is no exception. However, I can guarantee you that we are working diligently to make this happen. We are exploring new Data Services packages that will allow us to offer faster turnaround times for all of our list processing solutions. Becoming a direct provider of DSF² is simply the first step in a move to make sure that we can help you meet your customers’ increasingly stringent expectations. We understand that while once upon a time a 24 hour turnaround was impressive, that now a 24 minute turnaround time is expected. It is our hope that someday in the not too distant future, we will be able to guarantee almost immediate turnaround times.

Speaking of working in a rapid-fire environment, the recent announcement by the USPS regarding the increased postage rates that will take effect on April 17 should be addressed. Big changes like this often carry the perceived risk of slowing down operations when implementation time arrives. What does this mean for BCC? We are already working on building these new rates into the Mail Manager software, and will thoroughly test every aspect of the software that will be affected by these changes. We will make sure that you receive these updates early enough that you will have the chance to test the software yourself as well. If you have any questions about the updates, our Customer Support representatives will, as always, be on hand to help. Making sure that this transition does not slow down your operations is one of our top priorities.

Your operations need to run quickly and smoothly. Timing is everything for mailings, whether they consist of marketing campaigns, invoices, or something else. Success, revenue and more hinge on mailings landing in a recipient’s hands within a given timeframe. We understand that your ability to ensure that mailings are received within this timeframe hinges on your postal software solutions. In this rapid-fire environment, we will ensure that BCC works with the USPS, industry associations, and our customers to continue to enhance our offerings, so that in the future you will see even more immediate results.

Chris Lien

President