Association for Postal Commerce
"Representing those who use or support the use of mail for Business Communication and Commerce"
"You will be able to enjoy only those postal rights you believe are worth defending."
INTENTIONAL OR NOT, THE USPS IS KILLING CONFIRM
The following is a commentary by Mark Mandell, Data-Mail, Inc. Director of Corporate Development & Strategic Planning. Mark also serves on the Board of Directors of the Association for Postal Commerce and is a member of its Executive Committee.
The Postal Service is killing Confirm™. Whether on purpose or by accident, the “intelligence” in the USPS Intelligent Mail program is going away, just as the program is getting off the ground.
Confirm is one of the smartest “value-added” services the Postal Service has introduced in the past 15 years. With it, customers can track their mail, get ahead of issues, level-load their call centers, redistribute inventory, and trigger further customer communications like outbound emails. The sky is the limit. That’s why we’re huge fans of Confirm. In fact, last year alone, we tracked nearly 1 billion pieces of mail on behalf of our customers.
Yet, instead of promoting the use of Confirm, the Postal Service is strangling it. Somehow the Postal Service neglected to tell mailers that by participating in the Basic and Full Service Intelligent Mail (IMb) programs, Confirm could cost a whole lot more.
What’s going on here is that the Postal Service is educating mailers to use their own Mailer ID on the mail for Basic and Full Service IMB. In fact with the USPS’s encouragement many mailers have obtained multiple MailerIDs. That’s not a bad idea: multiple MailerIDs provide an easy way to track pallets, trays, and even undeliverable mail by line of business, department and/or lettershop. In fact, it’s a great way to keep things organized, and to take advantage of the Basic and Full Service offerings from the USPS.
What’s not so intelligent is that the USPS has been encouraging the use of these MailerIDs without telling mailers about the new, hidden costs to use Confirm to track individual pieces. Actually, we were all led to believe by the USPS that data distribution would be a free benefit of participating in Full Service Intelligent Mail.
Now, however, mailers can no longer take advantage of third party Confirm offerings unless they pay $2500 per MailerID, per year to sign up as a “Non-Subscriber Delegate” so that their mail can be tracked by a third-party system, like our intelisent offering (www.intelisent.com). The effect is a dramatic cost increase for our customers, and of course, will result in a huge decline in Confirm usage. To make matters worse, the Postal Service quietly added this provision about Non-Subscriber Delegates in a change to its Confirm User Guide (Pub 197) in April. [See PostCom Bulletin 18-09, April 24, 2009.]
While Confirm data can be enormously valuable to users, it can be cumbersome to take advantage of if only presented as raw data. Many customers who use Confirm choose to use a third-party vendor, like intelisent and others in the marketplace, to capture, process, interpret and present the Confirm data. A mailer with 10 mailerIDs would have to pay an additional $25,000 per year to use a third party service like ours. A commingler who has 50 different MailIDs in a production run, which is not uncommon, would have to pay the USPS an additional $125,000 per year. Already, because of this price hike, we’ve seen many mailers drop Confirm.
Without a viable Confirm program there is little intelligence to Intelligent Mail. Confirm service provides “visibility” at the individual piece level which the Postal Service has touted as one of the benefits of the Full Service Intelligent Mail Barcode (IMb) program. Further, Confirm is an important marketing tool. Many companies use Confirm data to time their follow-up marketing efforts, such as launching an email reminder to customers because they know their ad mail campaign has been delivered.
Instead of Confirm breathing life into an otherwise declining media, the USPS has issued it a death sentence.
In a time when “growing” and “greening” the mailstream are central themes, it does not make sense to discourage the use of the Confirm program. Now we have to tell customers that neither Basic nor Full Service provides access to Confirm data, unless the mail owner uses one of our MailerIDs (which is not encouraged), or pays an additional $2,500 fee each to use one of their own.
It’s not an understatement to say the service provider industry is wary of the Postal Service’s intentions regarding Confirm changes. The USPS made a failed attempt to raise the subscription price for Platinum Service Providers from $25,000 per year to $250,000 in the most recent annual price adjustment. Thankfully, at the request of Confirm users, the Postal Regulatory Commission overruled this attempt.
These changes make Confirm less attractive to mailers, which makes no sense in an era of declining mail volumes and limited advertising dollars for many companies. We have heard Postal Service leadership talk about the importance of “partnership.” Here is a chance here to embrace partnership so we can work together to add value to the mail. Remember, we both aim to please a common customer, one that has many choices when it comes to marketing their message. Reduce the Confirm red tape, and keep its prices reasonable.
Without a viable Confirm program, there is less value to mail, which makes it a less attractive medium for our customers to use.
We hope that the current situation is an oversight or unintended consequence that can be quickly rectified by USPS management before Confirm is gone.