Sometime this month take a stroll through the back of your mail center. Somewhere stashed out of sight you might notice stacks of mail trays filled with returned mail. It’s a condition I obs

The Postal Service’s financial woes are well known. The problems are complex, but some say postal banking could be a new revenue stream that helps the USPS out of its money problems

As organizations devote more resources to developing electronic messaging, I’ve been thinking about what would happen if print wasn’t part of the customer communications landscape. Some...

A popular buzzword in the printing industry is “convergence,” which describes efforts by printing companies to expand into areas adjacent to their traditional product lines. Print companie

If nothing’s wrong with your print and mail operation, why should you change it? We’ve all probably suffered through painful experiences when attempts to improve a process resulted in disr

What is the impact to your organization if an average transactional document, such as a bill, gets damaged during the inserting operation in your print and mail facility? How much could such a

Companies in the printing and mailing business have a problem. To potential clients, organizations like these all look the same. Customers expect anyone they entrust with their transactional

Over the last couple of years, analysts and vendors have written much about workflow systems. Software vendors refer to these solutions as dashboards or integration platforms. This is software

Unless you are truly “off the grid,” you’re living in a tech world with the rest of us. You’ve probably got personal experience with online banking, shopping, ride sharing, social...

I’ve been attending industry events and conferences lately, covering various aspects of the document industry, including transactional print, commercial print, and mailing. While the

Everyone has a different idea about the impact of undelivered mail. Most times, the estimates are way too low. The cost of paper, ink, and wasted postage is just the start, so I prefer to look a

Print and mail operations use tracking systems like automated document factory (ADF) software to monitor and record work as it processes through the shop. These systems are particularly importan

The owners of business communications used to be the IT department. Statements and bills, notices, policies, welcome kits, etc. were all generated by buttoned-down software applications managed

When should you buy new inserting equipment? That’s an excellent question. Don’t automatically assume new inserters are the best solution for problems you might have in the mail cen

Print and mail operations everywhere hear about paperless conversion from their internal or external clients. On the surface, this idea sounds like an easy decision for businesses issuing transa

Will you need to add employees to your operation this year? As industry veterans start to “age out” and retire, many document operations executives face the challenge of replacing experience

It seems most of the emphasis in customer experience these days is on websites, social media, online shopping, and internet customer portals. Those all play important parts in the overall custom

Websites are still important marketing tools, so have you looked at yours recently? An unscientific audit of random print/mail service provider websites by this author revealed plenty of improvement o

Data mining sounds geeky and complicated, but document service providers can use information extracted from their clients’ print image files to improve messaging, lower costs, or make document

Print and mail service providers may believe hackers aren’t interested in the customer data they use to create and distribute documents. Compared to financial institutions and healthcare provi