Managing Resources While Boosting ROI From The IMB
By Tim Adams
President, Time Customer Service, Inc.
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Note: This article was first published in Mail Magazine's CEO Perspectives issue (November/December 2009). Time Customer Service is a subsidiary of Time Inc. Time Inc.’s 115 magazine titles are read each month by 145 million adults and its websites attract 27 million unique visitors. We are the primary data processing and mail distribution operation within Time Inc. We’re responsible for the delivery of over 1 billion pieces of mail each year. Clearly mail is critical to our business, and it’s also the source of our greatest expense. Dedicating Resources To Full Service IMB & OneCode ACS Our annual ACS fees run into the high six figures making the promise of free, Full Service ACS extremely attractive. It wasn’t a difficult decision to dedicate resources to the IMB effort because the payback was to be significant, and we expected to start seeing those savings in May 2009. However, keeping up with the USPS is turning out to be a real challenge. Full Service IMB has been one hurdle after another and the USPS is still working out several issues. The requirements for Full Service are significant and continue to evolve -- consider eDocumentation, eDropship, ePayment, Seamless Acceptance and Postal One. These are adding to our development costs and delaying the availability of free ACS. Since May we’ve lost six months of savings that we were counting on to materialize. You might compare our original resource requirements estimate for IMB and free ACS to a 5K Walk-a-Thon -- but now it’s more like an Ironman Triathlon.
The Risk In Shuffling Resources We run a pretty tight ship, and like everyone these days, we’re trying to do more with less. More work and limited resources means that our most important decisions involve choosing which projects are going to be delayed or dropped. If we make bad decisions about resource allocations, we could be setting the stage for bigger problems down the road. We’re not going to delay our efforts on Full Service IMB, so other important projects will be affected. We expect that many of you are facing the same dilemma. Address Quality -- Delay, Drop, Or Outsource? We are keenly focused on address quality and we take advantage of every tool at our disposal. We have a number of active projects designed to improve the quality and deliverability of our addresses, and our work in address quality is one of the very last things from which we would pull resources. When it comes to address quality we have long seen the economic payback of doing more than just the bare minimum. For example, some mailers may think of free ACS as being a perfect reason to discontinue NCOALink processing but that would be a mistake. Our analyses clearly show the significant value of correcting our addresses before and after mailing. We will continue to use NCOALink along with Full Service ACS and other tools to keep up with moving subscribers and prospects. If you are short on resources to support a robust address quality program, you should consider developing a partnership with someone like TCS. A partner that is large, experienced, and has a significant volume of their own mail, would be a strong candidate should you choose to outsource a good portion of your address hygiene needs. Deriving Additional Value From Full Service IMB We take advantage of every address hygiene tool available, and that includes AEC and AEC II. In fact, we think AEC and AEC II are excellent tools for correcting inaccurate addresses. It’s a shame that so few mailers take advantage of these services. We would love to see the USPS include an AEC II option as part of the Full Service IMB. With such an option, any undeliverable or deficient addresses would be automatically forwarded to AEC II for analysis and correction. The Mailer ID and Serial Number would be returned along with the results thus enabling the mailer to make corrections prior to the next mailing. Such an option would help to further reduce UAA mail. Move Update We’ve always supported the efforts of the Postal Service, and in particularPMG Jack Potter, to reduce the volume of Undeliverable-As-Addressed mail. UAA mail adds significantly to the cost of handling mail, and those costs are eventually factored into the Postal rates. We’re not interested in subsidizing mailers that are inattentive to the accuracy of their mailing addresses, so we fully support the Move Update program. It’s apparent that some mailers will continue to ignore the issues unless they are put in the position of losing their discounts or paying the Move Update Assessment fee. In fact, we are a full service (48 month) NCOALink licensee and a DSF2 licensee, so in addition to being one of the country’s largest mailers, we’re able to share our depth of expertise with our many clients, both End-Users and Resellers. We have a proprietary TCOA database that is updated monthly with changes of address even before they appear on the USPS COA database. We make TCOA and other address hygiene services available to our NCOALink clients.Whobetter than one of the country’s largest mailers to help other mailers get the best possible addresses? The Future As a result of our intense focus on address quality, we are able to DPV confirm over 99% of our subscriber addresses. The new economic realities combined with the potential for higher rates and non-delivery of deficient addresses demand that we do everything we can to ensure that our mail is delivered. Fortunately, we’ve had this focus for many years, and we will continue in our efforts to achieve 100% delivery of our mail while at the same time efficiently managing our resources and maximizing the potential in IMB. (To learn more about Time Customer Service, call 818-878-6443 .)
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