Saving Money and Time
We recently reached out to a number of our clients and asked them to tell their Towne Mailer story – from why they initially needed help with their mail processing to how our services have helped them improve and grow their own businesses.
This week, we spoke with Rose Elliott, the utility services supervisor for the City of Whitefish.
The Client: City of Whitefish, Montana
The Service They Needed: Mailing approximately 4,000 bills and notifications each month, sometimes with inserts and fliers included.
The Problem: The city was wasting time executing the tedious task of processing and mailing all of their bills, notifications, and fliers in-house. According to Rose Elliott, “We were having to fold, insert, and sort all of the mail ourselves. It was wasting time and money, and it was a task that no one looked forward to.”
The Solution:
Four years ago, the City of Whitefish realized that its employees were wasting valuable time on city mailings. Not only did these manual mailings take workers away from their regular tasks, it also slowed down the overall printing and mailing process: mail took days to go out and any mailing issues that surfaced had to be handled individually.
Finally, although she was leery of making a change, utility services supervisor Rose Elliott decided to outsource the mailing process and get it out of the hands of her valuable workers.
“It’s always scary to do something new, but once we started doing it, it has been very nice,” she said. “We’ve had a really good experience. Our bills are still printed and mailed right here in the state. We keep the workforce here. And the turnaround for the mail is very quick. Our recipients get it within a day.”
The lighter workload isn’t the only benefit Elliott has seen from using Towne Mailer’s services.
“It saves time and money. That’s the second benefit. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to in-house printing,” she said. “The third benefit is the software program they use. Because we send them to Towne Mailer online, we can actually view the documents before hitting submit. The program tells us when they are printing them and when the process is complete. We also receive reports that list what was mailed, bad addresses, and other information.”
Elliott was also surprised to find that using Towne Mailer was even solving other problems in her department. “We had one customer who said he never received his bill. We were able to look at our report and find his account number, confirming we had mailed the bill. We use the data in those reports a lot. Because [Whitefish] has a large number of out-of-county residents, the data is great for address corrections. It saves us a large amount of time and research.”
Elliott has no plans of going back to an in-house bill processing system. “I would absolutely recommend Towne Mailer to anyone looking to save time and money,” she said.
