Category: Mailing

Following lockdown, many postal and delivery companies struggled to keep up with demand. Not only did they have staff off who may be ill, shielding or isolating but they also had an increase in work load due to the shops being closed and more people ordering online.

For businesses like Amazon, their orders went through the roof and they struggled initially to keep up. They had to prioritise the products that they felt were essentials to ensure that people got them when they needed.

Some retailers simply could not keep up and delays started to drag out in to weeks rather than days.

Over the last couple of months though, more and more of these retailers seem to be catching up and therefore have been able to resume more of a normal service. If ordering online it is still worth reading any information which refers to delivery times as not all retailers are back up to full capacity.

This may be something we have to live with for a while yet, but hopefully over time delivery companies and postal systems will flex to cope with demands as and when they are needed to.

When ordering online, it is easy for the seller to make a mistake and dispatch the wrong parcel to you. This can be very frustrating and even cause you issues in your work life it the item was needed for your job. If for example you are an electrician and have orders some parts for a house rewire, if they don’t turn up on time or the wrong items are sent, this may mean that you have to cancel the job and potentially lose out on a days pay.

If you do find that you have received the wrong parcel then the first thing to do is to get in to with the company that dispatched it. They may be able to arrange for delivery of the new one for the same day if not the next day. If this has caused you loss of earnings or you had to pay postage fees, it is always worth asking if they would be able to refund them or pay you some sort of compensation.

At the moment, due to Covid-19, postage is still taking a little longer than normal and you need to allow extra time. If you are in desperate need of the item then you need to ensure that you select the right delivery such as guaranteed next day.

If you are a debt recovery business then you will understand the importance of contact with your contacts. You need to be able to keep in touch with them on a regular basis and often need to send out mass mails to get your contacts to get in touch.

With debt recovery, the aim is to get money off the debtor as quickly as possible. Research has shown that the more communication you have with a debtor the more likely they are to pay.

Sometimes trying to do mass mailouts in house can be tricky and you may find that you do not have enough staff to handle the work load. You may also not have the right equipment, i.e. printers that are capable of printing out that many letters quickly or a franking machine to send them out through the post afterwards. Using a third party company for your printing may be the perfect solution. If the mailout contains sensitive data such as names, addresses emails etc then you will need to ensure that when you pass the data over to the third party to print for you, it is done in an extremely secure way.

You only have to look back about fifty years to the 1970s to find a time when letter writing was an essential part of daily life. People would write to loved ones who lived in different towns or countries or write to a company to order goods. This was obviously before computers and smartphones were in every home and emailing and instant messaging were the stuff of dreams, but is letter writing really a thing of the past or does it have a place in our lives currently?

We are all used to letters arriving through the post, usually bills and advertising literature however the excitement of receiving a handwritten letter or invitation to an event through the door cannot be disputed. Children especially enjoy tearing open an envelop to find out what lies within so fostering pen pal links with other children is a great way to encourage children to write for a purpose. These links can be easily set up between children from different schools in various locations in the world and can be related to a range of curriculum areas.

Sales of upmarket stationery goods such as fountain pens and notepaper has increased in recent years indicating the rise in popularity of letter writing amongst the population.

In these days of online fraud and ever present scams it is important to protect our identity as much as possible. There are programmes available that will ensure that your online activity is protected bur what about our privacy when it comes to mail? How can we make it harder for someone to steal our information such as bank details, credit card account numbers and other personal information?

One essential piece of equipment that every home should have is a shredder. These can be purchased quite cheaply if you want a basic model but for a bit extra a cross shredder is probably a better option as it shreds your documents completely. If you do not have many paper copies of documents delivered to your home through the postal system a pair of shredding scissors is a good solution to this problem.

The main principles to remember when you are trying to protect yourself from identity theft is to make sure you do not put anything that has your personal details on in the household rubbish or the paper recycling bin as there have been cases of thieves going through people’s rubbish looking for an opportunity to steal their personal information and gain access to their accounts.