Services

Printing business critical documents such as invoices, statements and letters is a core element of PHD Mail. It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve been doing successfully for over 20 years.

We take your mail & billing data and create specific and client unique documents in a professional, efficient and secure environment.

We will re-design your documents to make them work harder and better for you. We’ll also help you turn your bills and statements in to marketing tools by using designated “white space management” (blank areas on bills etc.) to carry customer specific messages which can change to suit your company needs.

We will ensure 100% accuracy and security of each and every mailing, utilising the latest OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) technologies and we will send you Management Information System reports to suit your requirements. We’ll also send you reports based on all aspects of the SLA, again meeting your needs.

Where we can, and where you want us to, we can group not only files of a similar kind, e.g. invoices, but we will also group different files for the same customer together. For example, we can group a statement and an invoice in to the same envelope where specific parameters are met, address, account number etc. This helps to reduce postage costs as a single envelope can be sent instead of 2, and it also reduces processing costs so you benefit twice.

You might require exception rules applying to some of your customer’s mail. Here for example, you might want all mail for certain branches being sent to the head office; or you might want some invoices printing but returning to you. Whatever exceptions you require, we’ll work with you to meet your requests.

Because this is what we do for a living, you’d expect to see some cost benefits. You’d be right! Our clients have enjoyed real savings of up to 30% on document processing alone; and there’s even more to be had! We will manage all stock and stationery purchasing on your behalf so you take full advantage of PHD Mail’s bulk purchasing power. We will supply all stationery, both cut sheet and continuous, all envelopes and any inserts, leaflets and booklets you may want to include.

And we haven’t even talked about postage yet! Using our Downstream Access partner, Whistl, we’ve reduced our clients annual postage bills by an average of 20%! Please click here to calculate your postage……..

At PHD Mail we are absolutely dedicated to helping our clients, both new and existing, to get the best possible postage prices. We work very closely with the UK’s two biggest postal authorities, Royal Mail and Whistl, to ensure every possible discount is made available to you.

Before a single item has been posted we will work with you and Royal Mail to ensure your address lists are up to date, accurate and fully postcoded. We will make sure that your clients addresses comply with Royal Mail’s Cleanmail® and Mailsort® service guidelines. What’s more, we will do this free of charge!

Once we’ve done this and we’ve started to print your business critical letters, bills, invoices or statements, and they are ready to be posted, we will use our own PHD Mail postage account to give you further benefits. By utilising Whistl’s DownStream Access service, PremierSort2 – a definite 2 day delivery service – we will dramatically reduce your postage bills. Depending on your annual mailing volume, PHD Mail can save you on average, a very substantial 20%.

We invest in the latest technology so you don’t have to. Our latest piece of kit is a Letter Sorting Machine that allows us to consolidate the mailings of our clients that don’t individually reach the required volume level to qualify for Royal Mail’s Mailsort® discount service. By consolidating mailings from various clients, we can ensure the minimum Mailsort® volumes are achieved and this allows us to pass on discounts to clients.

The method of communicating with your customers is evolving; traditional print and mail is increasingly being replaced by electronic delivery. The e-billing of documents negates the postage element of delivery which can be over 70% of the cost of the production and delivery of a bill or letter. In addition to cost saving, there are speed and traceability benefits as well.

PHD can provide e-billing in a number of ways, pushing via email, retrieving through a customised portal or full integration for retrieval through your own customer intranet. Our e-billing service can work side by side with the traditional print and mail to help facilitate the transition to electronic delivery.

In addition to e-billing PHD is able to offer archive retrieval services through a portal for all documents produced, which can be accessed for producing copy documents in printed form or emailing to a customer etc. This facility is used by a number of credit control departments and can also link documents such as printed invoices against scanned proof of deliveries in order to help reduce the effort of query management.

Hybrid Mail from PHD. Fast. Secure. Easy.

• Prepare your letters on your PC and we securely print and post remotely for you.
• Saving your business money and time, from wherever you are located.
• Save time
• Save money
• Access anywhere

What is Hybrid Mail?

• Hybrid Mail is a secure and cost-effective digital mail service.
• It enables you to send physical mail (e.g. invoice, statement, letter, advertising etc.) directly from your desktop or laptop computer.
• All you need is access to the internet, so the service can be used whilst working from home or from the office.
• With ePOD, the Hybrid Mail system from PHD Mail, you do not need access to a printer, paper or envelopes, as we print and mail the documents on your behalf.
• Users simply prepare the documents locally as per normal, upload them directly to the ePOD portal, add letterheads or attachments, proof and submit.
• We do the rest.

Our hybrid mail solution is designed to save your business money:

• Volume based postal discounts:
  • We send all customer volumes through a single mail account, so the best possible, volume related discounts are achieved. We then pass these discounts onto our customers.
• Secure & GDPR compliant:
  • PHD Mail have been operating for over 30 years. All documents sent via ePOD are processed in line with our accreditations: ISO27001, ISO14001, ISO9001. We are registered with the ICO.
• Easy to use web portal:
  • Our intuitive, user friendly portal can be used by anybody with access to the internet. No internal IT resources or additional print drivers are required.
• Real customer service:
  • Our ePOD team is here to help you use the system as efficiently as possible. We provide tailored training and support for all of our customers, at all times. You will not be on your own.

Save your business: time, money and hassle:

During this time of change and increased home-working, do your colleagues still need to go into the office to send out post?

Even small volumes of post need to be produced in a secure environment, so trips into the office are often still required.

Not with ePOD. ePOD allows you to send physical mail remotely through our dedicated print and mail operation.

Pay as you go pricing

We pride ourselves on a transparent, easy to understand pricing model. Get the same discounted rate irrespective of the volume of post you send. Pricing is agreed before you go live, so costs can be predicted and budgeted.

We also provide detailed management information on a user-by-user basis, so you can track and trace expenditure across departments and home-based teams.

You’re in good company

ePOD has saved our clients thousands of pounds, with some customers seeing savings of over 50%.

50% savings across multiple sectors, from healthcare, housing and breweries, through to public sector, builders merchants and finance.

HUGE time savings. Once your letters are produced, they can be uploaded to the ePOD system within 5 clicks.

Create a more focused workforce. ePOD gives your workforce time to focus on their jobs, rather than printing letters and stuffing envelopes.

FREE Mail Audit

Talk to our friendly ePOD team to arrange your FREE Mail Audit. We will help you to identify if / how ePOD could be used in your business and predict the savings available. No volume is too small and no commitment is necessary.

Call us on 01283 893722 and ask for more information.

We are dedicated to giving the best possible Business Critical Mail & Transactional Billing services to our clients. We are also committed to ensuring we have business tested solutions in place when there’s a change to normal, day-to-day production. To minimise any disruption to our service, we have a 2nd site situated just a few miles away from our main production site.

Our 2nd site situated in Stretton on the outskirts of Burton upon Trent, is a fully operational unit used on a daily basis for live work. Here, we continually update and back-up data from the main site to our duplicate servers and we also keep sufficient stationery, inserts and envelopes for all our clients, should an unexpected need arise.

Having a 2nd site is also extremely useful, not only as a DR contingency, but also when our clients require extra capacity, especially during busy periods. We can simply expand our production capacity to meet often very tight timescales.

Customer Confidence

It’s all well and good talking about DR and BC but how do we know it will work when an incident occurs? Simple; we test it regularly for all our clients. On a given date, we decamp; we move all our production from the main site to the 2nd site and complete a minimum of one full working day’s production. Only by doing this can we be totally confident that our robust planning and systems work.

So, should PHD Mail need extra capacity, we’ve got it close by. We know it works because we use it daily and, unlike some Disaster Recovery solutions, PHD Mail manage and control its own solution.

Another client driven service provided by PHD Mail is scanning. During a client review in 2007 a business critical need for documents to be scanned and linked was identified and, although back then it wasn’t a service PHD Mail provided, it was quickly acknowledged as a service we could and should provide. Scanning is now an integral part of our E-Solutions package offering clients an opportunity for documents such as Delivery Notes, Purchase Orders and Packing Notes etc. to be electronically linked to other documents such as Invoices or Statements.

We also provide a back office scanning service where previously archived paper documents can be taken in bulk, indexed, scanned and converted in to a PDF document for electronic archiving. Documents can be scanned up to A3 in size and can be simplex or duplex. Doing this provides much faster and easier access to archived documents and requires much less manual intervention and storage space.

So how does it work?

We can arrange for collection of documents or they can be couriered to us – we can arrange this too – at intervals to suit your requirements. All documents are then scanned following pre-determined criteria, for example:

• batch header
• invoice / account number etc

When all documents in a specific batch have been scanned, we upload the documents in a PDF format for you and / or your customers to view. Once the upload is complete, a reconciliation report including the following information will be forwarded to you:

• Date
• Customer
• Unique box ID
• Scanned batch number
• Number of scanned images
• Preparation & Scanning time
• Team member´s initials

Linking the Scanned Images

Where PHD Mail has received data and created either a printed document or an E-document, for example an invoice or a statement, it’s simple to create a link from these to the scanned document. Usually the documents will be linked by an account number or customer number for example, or by customer or account name. We can match by parameters to suit your requirements.

When you retrieve a document or group of documents from the archive, you’ll see a link that shows further documents are available and these can be opened with the primary document(s). You can also allow your customer’s access to linked documents, the choice is yours.