Are you running into Mailer Scorecard issues that are costing you time and money? Are you looking for an easier way to verify the accuracy of the Mailer Scorecard results? Are you prepared for the increasing assessments and changing thresholds?
Yes, always a lot of questions and concerns surrounding the Mailer Scorecard…
The Postal Service™ has four key initiatives to streamline the acceptance, induction, and verification of commercial mailings that may result in a postage assessment: Full-Service Intelligent Mail, Move Update, eInduction, and Seamless Acceptance. Each of these initiatives evaluates mail quality and mail preparation against established thresholds. The Postal Service provides mailers with access to a mail quality tool, the Mailer Scorecard, which displays a dashboard view of the results of the letter and flat mailing activity within each of these initiatives over a calendar month.
Each month, the USPS® sends an invoice to the mailer or mail owner for any Mailer Scorecard thresholds they’ve exceeded. Our customers are sometimes surprised by invoices of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not only are there new costs associated with those USPS assessments, but mailers are investing significant effort to monitor the Mailer Scorecard and dispute inaccurate assessments. In addition, keeping track of the USPS changes to assessments and thresholds can be overwhelming and confusing.
Quadient Ignite can help, and you want to focus on three areas: prevention; resolution; and identification of root cause.
One of the easiest ways to save costs and avoid fees is by preventing errors. Ignite provides optional data validation checks when uploading Post Presort jobs to PostalOne!®. The most common Mailer Scorecard errors are checked, such as:
- By/For errors – job fails if the By/For information is missing or incomplete
- Invalid or missing MIDs – job fails if the Mail Owner ID is missing or invalid, or if the MID/CRID doesn’t match across relevant Mail.dat fields
- Invalid piece IMb STIDs – job fails if the Service Type ID in the Intelligent Mail Barcode is missing or is invalid for the Mail Class and Service Level
So what should you do if you receive an invoice, despite your efforts to prevent errors? First of all, don’t assume it is accurate. When you receive a Mailer Scorecard invoice from the USPS, there is minimal information about the job in question. The USPS provides the IMb but not job metrics. What this means is that without Ignite, you would have to manually search through and analyze all of your job data for the IMb. The burden is on you to find the IMb and associated metrics. With Ignite, you can quickly search single or batch IMbs and retrieve metrics for resolution.
With Ignite, you have maximum flexibility and usability to search the jobs in your post presorting database for either a list of IMB’s or a single IMB, while using your preferred search criteria. For example, you can search all jobs or only jobs modified within a specific number of days. In addition, we have provided useful PostalOne! filters based on the PostalOne! criteria that activates Mailer Scorecard activity. Not only can you search, but the tool will create a report of the results, including detailed data about each job. The report data can be used for spreadsheet type analysis but also as input to a process. Try it today, and give yourself the ammo to not only troubleshoot and improve your processes but to dispute USPS fees.
Often Mailer Scorecard issues can be an indication of gaps or issues throughout your mailing process, so it is important to identify the root cause of those issues. Our USPS experts help you maximize discounts and optimize your operations for full compliance. You can leverage our expertise to:
- Assess overall mailing strategy and identify optimization opportunities
- Review mailing job settings and recommend improvements
- Share best practices on interaction between presorting and postpresorting
- Walk through your end-to-end mailing process and create improvement roadmap
- Provide USPS® level audits to ensure compliance
- Prepare for changes or adoption of key USPS programs:
- Price changes
- Full Service
- eInduction
- Seamless Acceptance
- Move Update
- Informed Visibility
- Informed Delivery
- Parcel Compliance
Be prepared! We are here to help. To learn more about post presorting or Quadient Ignite, call us today at 800.553.6477 or email info@quadient.com.
