One of the reasons for direct mail’s continued success is the customer experience it can provide. Recipients can relax over a coffee as they page through a new catalog, revisit mailings to review information they provide, or springboard to another channel to make a purchase—prompted by an unexpected offer. But that experience can be just as damaged as the mail pieces delivering them if the mailings or catalogs are crushed, torn, wrinkled, or worse, delivered to a neighbor never to be seen at all.
Helping companies to avoid that poor customer experience is one reason behind the launch of US Monitor’s latest service. The direct mail monitoring company is now offering a comprehensive mailing condition reporting service. On the surface, the service is straightforward: US Monitor provides information on such concerns as whether their mailings are received damaged, whether there are printing or addressing issues, and whether contents such as inserts are missing.
But it’s in how companies respond to what they learn that can help to improve not only their results, but also their customer experience, according to US Monitor President Paul Ercolino. He cites as an example a national catalog brand that worked with its printer to select different paper after finding out that the paper it was originally using was causing nearly a quarter of its catalogs (23%) to arrive in poor condition. That’s 23% of customers who may not have purchased because the catalogs were damaged, Ercolino points out.
Because US Monitor uses field agents as part of its service, customers can receive scanned images of the damaged pieces, or have the pieces returned to them.
