Capita Employee Solutions

Capita Employee Solutions (CES) offer employers employee solutions to their end clients including pension administration, pension consultancy, data tracing, employee benefits and HR services. Dealing with high volumes of mailing packs, they outsource the printing of over 4 million packs to Capita Intelligent Communications (CIC), but still retained in house print and mailroom functions.

Due to GDPR compliance and internal costs of maintaining, servicing and managing end user license agreements, CES considered re-evaluating its current cost and governance model by also outsourcing their internal printing.

Whilst considering this move, the UK was hit with the COVID19 pandemic resulting in governmental guidelines restricting staff from working onsite at offices throughout the UK. This had a severe impact on CES as there was a continued requirement to post correspondence to pension scheme members whilst maintaining legislative SLA's.

The pandemic made outsourcing a priority, one which CIC could support by introducing our hybrid mail solution and enabling remote teams to continue sending consistently branded customer communications

The solution

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, CES were mailing out 800,000+ letters from their various UK offices, which was both labour intensive and expensive. They wanted to introduce efficiencies whilst increasing consistency and control over customer communications. To do this, they looked to outsource their in-house printing, freeing up space and resources currently dedicated to mailroom operations.

The decision to outsource was brought forward when CES staff had to start working remotely. Without access to offices, staff had no way of printing and despatching those documents previously sent. CIC were able to offer a hybrid mail solution, which would allow CES staff to continue sending the customer documents remotely.

CIC was challenged to implement this solution to 21 individual teams, across four sites, within a six week period. Working collaboratively with CES, we identified the different set ups of each team, the varying letter types/stationery that were being used and the different postage class requirements.

Collaboratively, we were able to understand the needs and risks presented to CES and successfully deliver within the required budget and timescales.

The hybrid mail solution encompasses:

• 59 x letterhead variations
• 24 x onsert variations
• 4 x business sites
• 21 x teams
• 452 x users

CES staff can now print individual letters from a predetermined set of templates, customisable with specific customer information. These are then uploaded to an approval portal which ensures the users print request has been authorised by their manager. Once approved, the documents are securely transferred to Capita where they are consolidated into optimised batches for print production and postal discounts.

Management Information reports provide full visibility of what has been despatched and to whom, as well as who sent each communication. Through this CES can monitor for example postage classes  used on correspondence, ensuring there is consistency across users and templates. In turn this provides a significant cost saving.