Maximizing Efficiency: The Case for Outsourcing Your Utility Bill Management

With all of the challenges facing you every day, it’s a smart move to outsource your utility bills. With the right company as your partner, important resources like people, time, and money can be freed up to deal with mission-critical tasks and emergencies. You’ll gain peace of mind, knowing that bill outsourcing is being handled by professional and reliable experts dedicated to serving you with the best printing and mailing services for your customer communications.

Utility service providers of all kinds need to streamline their billing and collections processes and enhance their customer engagement. Through outsourcing, cost-saving and other benefits can be achieved by these types of utility companies:

Think of all the billing-related reasons you communicate with your customers. For example:

Outsourcing your printing and mailing of these messages saves resources that you can instead devote to your core competencies. As a result, your customers will experience timely, seamless, and engaging service every step of the way, and build their trust in your brand.  

Outsourcing utility bills to a trusted partner with the right printing and mailing expertise brings substantial benefits to your company and its customers. Knowledge and experience at every touchpoint helps to develop and enhance how your end users – your customers – see and value your company and its services. 

Here are some of the many benefits of utility bill outsourcing:

Reducing costs is always an advantage to your operations. An in-plant’s total cost of printing (TCOP) includes many factors, such as equipment and software acquisition and maintenance, consumables such as paper and ink, labor and training, regulation compliance, etc. Add to that costs for mail management, including folding and inserting, sorting, addressing, and postage. Outsourcing to an experienced provider lets you take advantage of their economies of scale to lower the per piece cost for your utility bills. Also, presorting mail at an outsourcing facility optimizes postage rates, especially when drop shipping to a USPS location. 

Customers depend on receiving and paying invoices in a timely manner. An outsourced vendor can print at scale, eliminating any obstacles in your billing process. And their in-house document folding and inserting capabilities get your bills sorted and prepared for entry to the postal system, including drop shipping for even faster delivery to customers.

Ensuring that your most basic customer information is accurate and current is vital. With the resources of a print and mailing partner, USPS tools such as CASS and National Change of Address (NCOA) are used to verify and update customer addresses before every mail campaign enters the USPS system, resulting in far fewer undeliverables.

According to some surveys, many consumers prefer to receive paper statements, bills, and other communications through the mail. Transactional mail provides a backup of customer records, is more accessible than internet service in many situations, and can be synchronized with digital messaging and triggers using an automated platform specifically customized to your needs by an industry-leading printing and mailing provider. Also, experience in high-quality, accurate, and accessible mailpiece design engages consumers and makes bill-paying easier.  

Recovery from system failures or disasters is critical to your business. By outsourcing, your data is reliably protected and billing continues uninterrupted. Their investments and expertise in hardware, software, and Storage Area Network (SAN) systems ensure that data can be quickly replicated through reliable recovery options.  

With a traditional in-plant, production capacity may be limited, which also affects how jobs are scheduled. Outsourcing utility bills to a print and mail provider that produces larger quantities every day at scale is more efficient and cost-effective. 

Transactional mail includes marketing messages alongside utility bills. An experienced print and mail provider can create these communications to engage and educate customers, draw attention to special promotions, and elevate your brand. A current USPS promotion (good through 2024) offers a 3-4% postage discount on transactional mail campaigns that use variable data and color components, furthering your marketing strategy.

Meet consumer expectations by printing and mailing bills that provide actionable intelligence on their utility activities. With simple, easy-to-understand graphics and charts that utilize historical data, customers can feel more peace of mind about usage and costs, among other concerns.

Utility bills and the information they contain may be regulated (depending on the industry) at the federal and state levels. Processing confidential information is best when it’s handled by companies with the expertise and dedication to data privacy that customers require.

Utility bill outsourcing involves entrusting your customer’s data and a crucial process to a third party. So it’s important to work with a company that has the right expertise, flexibility to meet your needs, and the scale to make bill processing affordable for your utility and a seamless, relevant, and positive brand experience for your customers.

Here at mailing.com, we stand on our knowledge and experience in mail piece design, data management, high-quality printing, and reliable, affordable, and fast mailing to deliver exceptional results for utility companies. With our help, you can create direct mail for utility billing that serves the needs of your company as well as supports your customer service efforts.

Reach out to our team to talk about how we can work together on your utility billing mail campaigns!