Introducing SOLitrack Mail Tracking: End-to-End Visibility for Enhanced Customer Service

Hello. Today I’ll be discussing mail tracking using SOLitrack. Home delivery is more prominent now than ever, Between Amazon, grocery delivery and all the other online shopping services, you never even have to leave home. Expectations for visibility into the delivery process are also higher than ever. As you can see from this meme and likely personal experience, providing solid tracking information is a competitive differentiator. This is a fairly complicated topic, so I’m going to try to break it down as simply as possible. Let’s start by defining SOLitrack mail tracking.

SOLitrack mail tracking is an optional module that uses data from mail tracking services, which we will discuss later, to add delivery status to mail pieces within the SOLitrack dashboard. Mail tracking requires SOLitrack piece level tracking and SOLsearcher Enterprise. While Rubika is not required, it is recommended.

Here you can see a view of the SOLitrack mobile dashboard. The top list contains jobs. When you select a job that has piece level tracking enabled, you’ll see a list in the second pane with all of the pieces in the job. When you select a specific piece, you are then presented with piece level information, including mail tracking information in the bottom pane. Here is a larger view of the bottom pane so you can see the mail tracking information. You can see every one of the physical and logical touches made to the mail piece as reported by the U.S. Postal Service as it moves through their system. This information is a breadcrumb trail that allows you to identify not just whether the piece was delivered or returned, but where it got into trouble along the way. Included are datetime stamps, codes, descriptions and locations. Here is the same type of data in our thick client interface. We can see a number of piece states and their values, including return mail and mail delivered. SOLitrack already tracks pieces as soon as the index file is ingested. Mail tracking extends visibility all the way to the recipient’s mailbox. When customer service representatives receive queries about a specific communication, you can now have detailed information beyond, Uh, I know we mailed it. This can be used to provide positive proof that you have lived up to your responsibility to get pieces in the mail stream by providing proof of an initial scan. After that, it’s the responsibility of the United States Postal Service to get it to the recipient.

SOLitrack can provide reports in response to queries regarding delivery of specific pieces or groups of pieces. Just to be clear, the data provided here is not intended to provide detailed analytics concerning costs, deliverability, mailing efficiency, or to identify gaps in USPS performance. This information is available directly from the USPS and other mail tracking services through their dashboards. Those dashboards are optimized to help your postal experts determine whether you can improve your data or processes to reduce costs and improve overall deliverability of mail from your organization and whether they need to discuss quality of service with the U.S. Postal Service.

This shows a pretty standard high-level mail tracking workflow. The workflow for integration with mechanical presort vendors is different. We will cover that later. Here, the job is registered in SOLitrack and begins its journey. Typically, customers will index the job, then use Rubika to integrate with a postal sortation software like BCC or others. We receive the IMB from the postal processing software and add it to the index information. The job then runs through and completes its workflow. At that point, the mail tracking step is initiated. Mail tracking is accomplished by defining a mail tracking point in SOLitrack. Mail tracking systems provide a data feed to the result folder. The data feed contains tracking information about all of the pieces mailed by the mailer. SOLitrack identifies pieces using their intelligent mail barcode or IMB, and adds tracking information to the piece level information stored in SOLitrack. Note that the USPS does not know what SOLitrack job the piece was part of. There may be information in the feed about pieces not even processed by SOLitrack.

SOLitrack uses the IMB as a unique identifier to match tracking data to mail pieces. A quick side note here about IMBs. They’ve been around for a long time now and have enabled new services like tracking for every First Class mail piece in the system. Without getting into too much detail, they contain information about the type of service, the mailer, a unique piece ID, along with routing information, including zip code. An important note, the IMB is unique, but only for a period of time, not shorter than 45 days. They are reused after that, so pieces can only be reliably tracked for 45 days. This is not an issue as delivery time is usually within a week unless the piece gets lost along the way.

There are two distinctly different types of tracking points in SOLitrack. One is designed to be used with camera systems or barcode readers to ensure that every piece has been seen before moving to the next step in the process or completing the job. The other is mail tracking, which behaves differently. Mail tracking acts upon jobs that are already complete and really just matches up USPS tracking data to individual pieces populating piece level tracking information. There is no next step in mail tracking.

SOLitrack currently has pre-built support for three different tracking services. The United States Postal Service, IV-MTR, BCC Software’s Track-n-Trace and United Direct Solutions commingle reporting service. Let’s cover them now. The most important takeaway is that all of the tracking services get the same data from the same place, the United States Postal Service. Postal software vendors can provide a value added layer between the United States Postal Service and their customers, adding additional analytics and reporting. But they are using the same source data from the USPS at a mail piece level. Comminglers accept mail pieces from many different customers. They place them into mechanical presort machines to optimize them for presentment to the USPS. They basically do a bunch of work for the USPS and in turn they receive discounts on the mailing. Let’s start by talking about the USPS because it is the primary data source for all the others.

Informed visibility is the tracking platform for the United States Postal Service. It has many facets. You can learn about them if you’re interested by going to their website. Every First-Class mail piece is tracked by the USPS. As a recipient, this is part of the informed delivery you care about most. You can subscribe to and get daily emails letting you know what will be in your mailbox today. If you’re not using this service, you should be, it’s great. I love knowing what will be there before I check. It’s really, really handy, especially if you’re traveling for a few days. The email has information on letters and packages, also handy. This is the part of the system that mailers care most about. It provides tools that bulk mailers can use not only to track mail but to track financial information, USPS performance, and much more. It is an indispensable tool for mailers. The persons tasked with postal affairs at bulk mailers will know all about this tool. Most people in production line of business in other upstream areas have never heard of it. Access to this tool is limited to a very small number of people within an organization. I think primarily because the information is really only interesting to postal experts. That is why SOLitrack only carries a subset of this information that’s relevant for customer service reps, line of business and production staff. We’ve already discussed the USPS.

BCC has a service called Track-n-Trace that uses USPS data as input and has a rich set of reports providing detailed analytics that postal nerds will love. It also has an interface that allows SOLitrack to easily get our data directly from it rather than going directly to the USPS. Since the USPS is still involved, you could alternatively integrate with the USPS directly if you choose to go that way.

UDS takes your mail and the mail from other mailers and combines it together using a sorting machine. This is very similar to what the Post Office does when it receives non-presorted First Class mail. Because they perform this first level of presort and apply IMB barcodes to the pieces prior to dropping them in the mail stream, significant discounts are received and the mail usually will get to the recipient faster because of some of the sorting work is already done.

The data flow here is pretty straightforward. Someone at your organization with access to IV-MTR sets up a feed to drop data in a folder. Then SOLitrack gets the data, it scans through it looking for IMBs as piece identifiers. When it finds a match, it adds the delivery information to the piece. The process here is basically identical, except we are getting the feed from BCC instead of the USPS. United Direct Solutions, as I mentioned before, is a commingler. They combine work for many different mailers into a single mail run so that they can mail it themselves. So, they create the IMB and spray it on the mail piece. In that IMB they are identified as the mailer. Tracking mail can only be done by the mailer, who is in this case, United Direct Solutions. As a result, they use the USPS service to track their mailing and SOLitrack connects to their service to track not all the mail from UDS but just the pieces that are part of a specific job. While this process is different than the other two, it provides the same results.

Most of us in the print mail workflow area are not logistics experts. We are not aware of, nor do we really care about the intricacies of how the USPS routes mail internally within their systems. But it is likely that you do have somebody there who does care about this. Whoever that is, is already using tools from the USPS, BCC and others to do analytics to understand the contours of their mailings, how their distributed, areas and postal routing that can introduce delays and more. They are also keenly aware of the costs and what is being paid to the USPS for this service. Look at these people as the managers of the relationship with the USPS and your organization. Their needs are very different than yours. The interfaces that they use are as confusing to us as ours are to them. That is why they use the USPS, BCC and UDS dashboards directly. Also, those dashboards are free with the service, but are typically only available to a few people within the organization. And, these people are not SOLitrack users. SOLitrack provides access just to the information important to print production, management and customer service representatives. So, multiple specialized dashboards around mailing is really a good thing.

To wrap up, SOLitrack mail tracking is an optional module that uses data from mail tracking services to add delivery status to mail pieces within the SOLitrack dashboard. Mail tracking require SOLitrack piece level tracking and SSE to function. Rubika is not required, but again we recommend it. Mail tracking allows SOLitrack to extend visibility from before a piece is printed until it is delivered to the recipient.