Ideally, companies sending household bills to customers would like to eliminate the mailman and rely instead solely on the Internet. That’s not happening fast enough for billers, though. So, companies that send transactional mail –household bills – to their customers are taking the first steps to prepare consumers for a paperless future. One way for the USPS to accomplish that is to create its own digital mailboxes.
In its September 9, 2015 USPS Office of Inspector General (OIG) report, the OIG warns the Postal Service to plan for a decline in transaction mail or face a loss of billions of dollars in revenue. Transactional mail comprises approximately $18.5 billion of the USPS’s annual revenue.
The report – Transactional Mail: Discussion Forum Recap – offers insight the OIG gained when it hosted a forum with representatives of companies that send and process billing. The forum participants said billers want to digitize their company’s entire billing process; save money by replacing hard copy bills with online bills, and they want to satisfy their customer’s desire to have more than one choice when it comes to paying their bills.
Simply put, customers want choices about everything they do. So, it should come as no surprise that even though people are willing and eager to pay online, they still want to receive the bill by mail! They like having a “paper reminder,” and they want to file a “real” bill in a drawer with other payments and important papers.
Fear not. The OIG tells us, “The Postal Service is not in imminent danger of transactional mail disappearing.” However, instead of waiting to react to a possible further decline in mail volume, the USPS should act quickly so it can create products that will be more valuable to the billers and to their postal customers. In fact, the report shows that it’s possible more people could be pushed into using online billing and payment options if the government relaxed its rules requiring customers be notified by mail of certain things (like advising homeowners of optional earthquake coverage). Other reasons that night drive people to the Internet: if they find it easier and less expensive to use devices like smartphones or tablets, or even if they feel the next hike in the price of stamps is just too expensive for their wallets.
As mentioned earlier, the OIG says the USPS could create its own digital mailboxes. That way the agency could save billions of dollars in potential lost revenue if paperless billing takes over. What’s a digital mailbox? A digital mailbox allows users to store bills, statements, and other important documents in a digital file cabinet. Private companies have been unsuccessful in creating their own such digital mailboxes because they don’t have the address of every home and business like the Postal Service does. “The agency already has the customer base to be successful,” the report says. “It’s better to make the products and services it offers more valuable to senders and recipients.”