Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software

Managing Consent in the Data Management Process

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Balancing Customer Privacy with Communications

Business success depends largely on creating and delivering effective communications, including those containing sensitive personal information.

With today’s privacy regulations and risks of fraud, a growing number of industries — insurance, healthcare, financial and government — are required to obtain written consent before updating customer data.

Risks of Not Gaining Consent

While gaining this consent may add another step to your business processes, not doing so could be costly:

  • Lost postal discounts
  • Re-mailing costs
  • Undeliverable mail costs
  • Increased use of customer service resources

What Should You Consider?

In order to balance your customers’ privacy and your company’s communications, consider:

  • How mailing decisions can be made on a piece–by–piece basis to maximize customer privacy and improve delivery of time-critical information
  • How to minimize print and mail costs
  • How to implement a defined and auditable process that’s compliant with governing regulatory agencies
  • How all of the above can be achieved without incurring large costs to redesign internal processes

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Automated Consent Process

The functional flow of the Consent Application

Group 1 has combined several technologies to provide an automated and compliant customer information update process within high-production environments.

This Consent Application solution is part of our CCM portfolio, and includes four key steps:

  1. Data extraction and enrichment
  2. Enhanced document production — when consent is not required
  3. Enhanced document production — when consent is required
  4. Customer delivery and consent update

Step 1: Data Extraction & Enrichment
Data extraction and enrichment process flow

The first step of the Consent Application involves referencing either the document production print file — such as AFP or Metacode — or an external data file to extract name and address information.

External files can also be used to make logic decisions based on defined business rules. For example, customers who call with a change of address may still require written consent. The Consent Application can process the update and/or trigger a consent notification.

The extracted customer contact information then passes through a variety of address quality steps — such as CODE-1 Plus®, Finalist® and USPS® CASS Certified™ solutions — to ensure the highest deliverability, as well as qualify the mailing for postal discounts.

CASS Certified Processing

Customer records that have been processed by CASS Certified software can fall into three categories:

  1. The address is standardized and good — the address passes to the next step in the process
  2. The address is fixed — depending on business rules and the nature of the correction, these records may be handled as requiring consent and flagged
  3. The address is incorrect and cannot be fixed. These “exceptions” can be written to a text file and passed for disposition or to the call center for resolution
Exception Processing

“Exception” addresses can also be run through a second application — such as FineTune Data™ or GeoStan™; — to append/augment the address information.

Generally these second processes provide a 10–15 percent lift over the initial coding percentages. Addresses fixed during the secondary process can be flagged for consent or other special treatment.

Move Update Processing

During the final phase of step 1, all customer records with valid addresses are passed to VeriMove™ — which matches the customer information against the USPS NCOALink™ database — for Move Update compliance.

This process yields three types of results:

  1. No move found, name and address are good — process document “as is”
  2. Move found, new address available — generally these require consent and are flagged
  3. Either new address not available or can’t find definite change

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Step 2: Enhanced Document Production — No Consent
The functional flow of the Consent Application

Upon return of successfully validated addresses not requiring consent, StreamWeaver® returns the addresses to the document files and can:

  • Apply POSTNET barcodes based on ZIP + 4® information for better delivery and tracking in the USPS
  • Apply 4-State and/or 2D barcodes for enhanced tracking and delivery
  • Re-format documents — adding logos and pie charts, changing remittance PO boxes, etc.
  • Consolidate documents going to the same household
  • Produce barcodes for intelligent inserters
  • Sort, sequence and package to optimize printing, inserter operation, postage and ad banners
  • Apply other business rules processing, statistics collections and reporting

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For customer documents requiring consent, StreamWeaver can process them in a variety of ways based on your company’s consent policy — including:

  • Generate a file and send to the center to contact customers for recorded verbal consent
  • Generate a specialized mail piece with the new address and/or old address, and send to the customer requesting their written consent
  • Create of a tracking number or encrypted barcode to collect consent responses
  • Send or withhold a customer document pending customer response
Presort Processing

StreamWeaver then prepares the “jobs” for presorting, either by MailStream Plus® — Group 1 Software’s PAVE certified presort application — or other presort software to attain the highest postal discounts possible (may range between 2 to 9.5 cents per mail piece).

Distribution & Archival

Finally, StreamWeaver documents and optimizes the “job” to maximize efficiency of printing and inserter hardware, and the mail pieces are generated and sent.

All customer documents and responses are indexed and archived for easy referencing and retrieval for customer service and auditing purposes within the e2™ Vault, Group 1’s high performance data and document repository.

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Step 4: Customer Delivery & Consent Update
Customer delivery and consent update process flow

Customer Call Center

Customers receiving consent communications can provide consent verification with their tracking number through:

  • Web acknowledgement
  • Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system (1-800 #)
  • Returning an executed consent form
Automated Inbound Tracking of Consent Forms

When written consent is required and the customer returns the mail piece, these documents can be “read” via barcode technology to trigger updating of customer information. Originals of these approval letters can be kept within the e2 Vault to meet proof of consent requirements.

Finally, if the original document was withheld pending consent, the document can now be released to production.

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Now that you've read the summary, Download the full white paper PDF.