Unique Solutions | LetterStream Blog

COVID-19 Update May 2020

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Thanks to all of you for supporting and remaining loyal to us during COVID-19. It’s been a number of weeks since we’ve given you an update so we thought we’d pass along our current status.

As an essential business, as defined at both the states and federal level, we are still open and operating, and, aside from suspending our Express Letter job type, there has been practically no negative impacts on our speed of service or quality.

I have to express our overwhelming appreciation to our team for reacting positively to a great many restrictions that we imposed on them, like canceling their free gym memberships, closing down our breakroom, getting rid of shared food, and breaking up comfortable workgroups by spreading workers around the clock. We have been blown away by our team’s flexibility and commitment to us and to you our customers.

Going forward, as the country attempts to get back to some level of normalcy we are working on our next phase of operating, taking into account both state and federal guidelines and recommendations. The Governor of Arizona recently announced that we are in Phase One of his reopening strategy. Group gatherings are to be limited to 10 or fewer people and social distancing is still to be observed. Phase Two is likely to occur at the end of the month if all state metrics are trending in the right direction.

In Phase One we will continue to practice social distancing, equipment, and workplace disinfecting and frequent hand washings. Our breakroom and common areas will remain closed and essential employees are encouraged to wear masks. Non-essential employees will continue to work from home and meetings will be handled via conference calls, zoom meetings, and the like.

When the Governor declares Phase Two, we will cautiously work to remove some obstacles to productivity all the while continuing to embrace appropriate methods of cleaning and disinfecting. In Phase Two we anticipate reintroducing non-essential employees into the building in a limited capacity and may receive an occasional prospective client for a company tour.

Keep in mind we remain highly vigilant for the health and safety of our employees, customers, and those in our community and will always choose safety over convenience or profit. This period calls for fluid decision making that is the best interest of all. All that to say, our plans may change but know that we are striving to be the best possible us, so we can do our best for you. Thank you one and all!

Welcome Ashlee, our New Customer Service Manager

Ashlee

Hold on, hold on, before you panic at this headline, Mike hasn’t left the LetterStream team. He is now our Director of Customer Experience. We figured that Mike could get a promotion if he could find someone just as awesome in customer service as he is. That said, we didn’t think Mike would ever get a promotion. Enter Ashlee. We aren’t sure how Mike did it, but he actually found someone who can bring help and joy to customers as well as he can. Ashlee has been with us a few months now, so some of you have already experienced her good nature, knowledge of our systems and overwhelming desire to help people out.

Ashlee has some 5-star training from Marriott hotels and resorts and has supported many different clients in an earlier payroll processing career. These experiences are quite helpful to her on the job, but nothing can compare to the enthusiasm that she has to be a part of our team and her tremendous desire to support all of our customers.

Next time you call in, be sure and say “Hello and Welcome” to Ashlee.

Do You Have A Backup Facility For Your Mailing Operations?

Critical Mail Backup

While most of our customers choose to outsource their entire outbound mail operations to LetterStream, there are some that are unable to reassign staff or who are hesitant to return leased equipment due to financial burdens that might be incurred.

Whatever the reason not to outsource completely, we have a solution in keeping with our mission of being the best mail solutions partner. We have created a hot backup mailing facility program to allow businesses to keep their own mailing operations up and running, and increase their speed and reliability by using LetterStream when more mailing power is needed.

The program is simple to implement and is fairly inexpensive considering you have all the power of LetterStream print and mail operations at your finger tips. This includes a fleet of high speed printers, a mail preparation and inserting department, and barcode tracking of every mailing project. LetterStream is fast and accurate, and our prime location in Scottsdale, AZ protects us from most of the world’s natural disasters and extreme weather. So if your operations are down because of snow or ice or flood or earthquake… chances are we are still fully staffed and fully operational, and can get your mail out the door and on its way.

For our east coast friends, LetterStream being in the MST time zone results in a few extra hours each day to get your critical mail jobs out the door. We can handle a wide variety of business and transactional mail including letters and flats, checks and invoices, and certified and registered mail.

Contact us to learn more about how LetterStream can keep your mailing operations up-and-running, in any situation.

Innovations In Printing And Mailing

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I was flying out of town the other day and picked up a Popular Science magazine to read on the flight. I was happy to see the title was “100 Best Innovations of the Year” and wondered if any of our mailing innovations had made the list. There are a few different mailing innovations that we rolled out this year and I thought I might find one or two discussed in the magazine.

For instance, we have our innovative Return Mail Processing service where we can process our clients’ return mail. This is a good way to keep undeliverable mail from being returned to our customers. Instead, we get it. Then we flag all the addresses in our customer’s account that have been returned, showing the return date and the return reason from the USPS yellow sticker. In addition, reports can be run by user, date range, mail type and many other filters for the letters that were returned.

Another innovation is our USPS Registered Mail solution, which allows users to create and send Registered Mail on our website. If you send Registered Mail, you know that it is one of the most time-consuming and confusing types of mail that you could possibly send. True to LetterStream’s form, we make the process so easy you can create the registered letter–or hundreds of them–in around 2 minutes on our website. We keep track of the USPS tracking information and the signature cards in an orderly fashion on our website.

Some may say that our online Certified Mail process is the most innovative Certified Mail solution they’ve ever seen. We’d like to agree… but we’ve been processing Certified Mail this way for nearly 10 years, so it might not be an innovation of this year.

We’ll, I’ve skimmed the 100 Best Innovations article, and unfortunately I could not find the name LetterStream. But that’s ok, our customers repeatedly give us the honor of being great innovators in the mailing business, and they are the ones we want to please.

If you want to learn more about our mail innovations, check out our website, explore our blog or pick up the phone and call us.

Send Mail Magically With The LetterStream API

LetterStream API Solution

Ever wish for an even faster way to send out USPS First-Class and Certified Mail?

Our website already saves countless hours of tedious work involved with sending mail, but you might be sending so much mail that you need an even faster way.

If so, the LetterStream API might be the solution you need. It allows you to automatically send thousands of pieces of mail instantly through a behind-the-scenes connection to LetterStream computer systems. Most APIs require programmers to implement them, and ours is no different in that regard, but some of our clients have implemented it in just a few days.

Our API is being used by many different types of companies, including software companies, collection agencies, billing companies, etc. and even individuals who need to send a lot of mail quickly. It has access to many of the mailing products available on our website including postcards, first-class letters, invoices, statements, newsletters, checks and certified mail.

You can advertise your partnership with LetterStream or keep it quiet and price the mailings to your customer however you see fit; because with the API your users and customers can send real mail without even knowing about LetterStream.

To learn more, click here to get detailed information about our API, or simply contact us to get started.

World’s Longest Receipt?

USPS post office receipt

When we returned from the Post Office the other day, we thought we might have set the world record for the longest receipt. After all, the cash register receipt was 48 feet and 8 inches long! Turns out we were a little short. The longest receipt is well documented online at 57 feet and 6 inches.

Why did we have such a long receipt? Sometimes we print and mail rather unique jobs for our customers, and if that means generating a receipt at the local post office that’s nearly 50 feet long, so be it. In this case we were mailing certified mail flats that necessitated a trip to the post office due to something special we were doing for our client.

If you find yourself pondering how you are going to get your next certified mail project out the door, keep LetterStream in mind. We have a lot of fast, automated processes for mailing certified letters.

And if we don’t already have an automated solution for your complex mailing, you might just be the opportunity we need to get a real world record receipt!

Thanks to the team and our friends at the local post office for making the magic happen when complex mailings arise.

How Can I Look Up a Zip Code?

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If you are trying to find the correct zip code for an address, the United States Postal Service (USPS) website has a quick and easy tool that you can use for free.

However, if you are trying to find the correct postal zip code for multiple addresses in a list, you might want to review our address correction tools. In addition to assigning zip codes to multiple records at a time, our address correction software will fix misspelled city names and improper state abbreviations, as well as standardize the street directions and road names.

If you really want to clean up a mailing list, you might consider using our advanced address list correction tool, which will provide the address someone has moved to (provided they have filled out a change of address card online or at the post office).

Visit LetterStream.com to send first-class and Certified Mail utilizing our advanced address correction tools.

Certified Mail by the Thousands!

Certified Mail Job

We were contacted the other day to help one of our customers with a fairly large Certified Mail job.

It wasn’t our largest USPS Certified Mail project, but with more than 23,000 certified letters, it was still a lot of certified letters (see actual picture).

In addition to printing, folding and inserting the certified mail for our client, we also licensed a cobranded version of our website so their clients could log in and check the status and retrieve signatures of any piece of mail.

The job went out quickly and easily and provided everyone involved complete USPS tracking information as well as electronic signatures, matched with the mail piece.

Big or small, whether you’ve got a single certified letter or thousands, our automated processes will make it easy.

A Unique Scanning Solution for Sending Certified Mail

Fax

We must admit, we like creating unique solutions for our customers.

A recent solution involved a client who was working with physical documents that needed to be re-mailed to individuals. Their documents were stamped with recording dates and were coming back from the county recorder’s office. These officially recorded documents needed to be mailed via Certified Mail to their clients and the task represented more work than they wanted to take on.

Our unique solution? We allowed them to create a cover sheet with the recipients’ address on it and then scan the document to us via their copier/scanner. Our software automatically received the document, read the address on the cover page and created the mailing. It worked well!