Print/Mail Consultants Blog

From the Practical Stuff Newsletter – January 2013
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Recently we’ve started to get a lot of mail at my house that is addressed to Helen, the previous owner. The pieces are all properly addressed. They have First Class postage and valid IMb barcodes. Two things got my attention:

1. The variety of the mail. We’ve gotten pieces that look like legitimate checks, some seemingly important notifications, renewals, and advertisements.

2. This is a new phenomenon. Prior to now, we hardly ever got any of Helen’s mail.

I was a bit baffled until I started to think about when we bought the house. It was about four years ago. Then it started to make sense. Up until now, all the First Class mail that was addressed to the previous owner was probably getting forwarded to Helen’s new address because she filed an address change with the Postal Service when she moved.

Mailers that were corresponding with Helen were using the National Change of Address database (NCOA) to direct the mail pieces to her new address. But Helen’s NCOA record was purged after 48 months. With no forwarding order in the NCOA database anymore, the mailers are addressing the pieces according to the old address they have on file.

Therein lies the problem.

In my experience with mail centers almost all of them use an approved Move Update method to improve the deliverability of their outbound mail. But permanently modifying the source records with updated addresses rarely gets done. Changing the mailing files on the fly is a temporary solution.

Fixing address records permanently isn’t an easy problem to solve. Often the corporate databases that provide mailing addresses are far removed from the actual file that is used by document operations to print the mail pieces. The source data may not even be in a central location, with different departments all maintaining their own set of records. It is conceivable that the same customer may have different mailing addresses in different departmental files. Finding the right database to update could be difficult.

This gets even more complicated if the print and mail work is outsourced. The service provider may have the capability to identify the address changes but they frequently have no direct business relationship with the departmental owners of the data.

Common Move Update Compliance Methods
Mailers that use FASTforward© to change delivery addresses with optical mail sorting equipment also encounter barriers to updating source data. In-house sorting operations or presort service bureaus may or may not return usable updated address information that is applied by their machines. FASTforward© will be replaced by NCOALink MPE as of January 27, 2013 but the file updating issue will remain.

Address Change Service (ACS) is a post-mailing method of receiving change-of-address or information on undeliverable mail pieces. The USPS returns the data in electronic form to the mailer. The difficulty in dealing with ACS data is that by the time the address changes are received, the file that was used to create the mailing may no longer exist. It may have been a data extraction from a larger database. Sequence numbers or mailing piece ID numbers applied at the time of mailing may no longer be meaningful. Matching the ACS data back to main database could be difficult.

Mailing operations that use NCOALink to change addresses prior to printing probably have the best chance of getting source records updated since the address changes are discovered while the mailing list is still in the hands of document operations.

But using feedback from any Move Update method to change the source addresses is not something that mail operations has the authority to do. They don’t have the access. They may not even know where the data resides.

Impacts of Undeliverable Mail
Obviously, efforts to create and mail documents that will not reach the intended recipients are wasted. Money spent on materials, consumables, labor, and postage will never be recovered. Depending on the frequency of communications and the actions of both the intended recipient and the actual recipient, this could go on for a long time. The USPS will deliver the piece to the valid address on the envelope. If the residence is occupied, it will be up to the resident to return the mail piece so the sender can take corrective action. Some consumers may simply throw the mail in the trash.

The customer may notice that she is suddenly not receiving mail that has been successfully delivered to her new address for the last four years. A call to customer service can initiate a lengthy and expensive research project to determine the reason for the missing mail. In the case of checks, stop-payment orders and re-issuance might be required. In any case, the customer relationship is damaged.

Is There a Solution?
The best approach to prevent the problems stemming from expired NOCA records and subsequent mis-delivered mail is passing source files through NOCA on a regular basis and updating the records. As I have noted, this could be challenging given the disparity of customer databases in large organizations.

Document Operations is the department most qualified to take ownership of such a project. An outreach effort will be required, but could be well worth the time invested. As a bonus, establishing a channel of communication with multiple departments within an organization is almost always beneficial to corporate document operations managers.

As I write this, I realize that I filed my own change of address four years ago. If I am getting Helen’s mail, I wonder who might be getting mine.