Why Some Mail Doesn’t Get Tracked
January 17, 2019   Dave Lewis

I’m afraid it maybe you… Since the dawn of the PLANET code, we have rarely seen 100% tracking of mail.  We post the percentage on every job.  Most letter size mailing jobs will track to 96 – 99%, but never quite 100%.  There’s nothing wrong with 96% tracking – it is still an excellent indicator of delivery, but where did the rest of that mail go?  It can be helpful to understand why 100% is so hard to hit. Visibility+^TM, our mail tracking service, also lets you view reports by First Scan, so you can see if a piece got any scans, and these are generally at much higher rates than Delivery Scans, typically over 99% for letters.  That’s handy for reassurance that all of the mail was mailed. So why don’t we always see mail scanned to delivery?  Here are the primary reasons:

• The mail piece had the wrong address on it. We see a lot of this.  We know you try, what with NCOA before every mailing, but still a few undeliverable slip by – 1% - 2% even after NCOA.  The mail piece is delivered and then gets “undelivered” when it goes to Address Change (PARS) processing.  When we see address change activity, we no longer consider the piece “delivered”.  If the piece is forwarded and ultimately delivered, we will show it as delivered however if there is no forwarding address the piece of mail is NOT delivered and will not have a delivery date.
• The mail didn’t get mailed. Spoilage or QC samples.  The Postal Service allows a certain tolerance when accepting mail.  USPS spoils some mail, too, but very little, and when they do, they’ll still deliver the tatters in a plastic bag, but you may not receive a delivery scan for that particular piece of mail.
• Incorrect or no eDoc. This is really more of an issue with flats.  We’ll track letters to delivery no matter if they’re Full-Service or not.  Full-service flats really rely on “assumed” scans, based on eDoc nesting, and they can’t assume if there’s no eDoc or it is incorrect.  Even on letters, mail with eDocs has a better story to tell as to how it traveled.
• Scanning bypassed. A sorting machine pulls a double, the data feed is interrupted.  This is pretty rare on letter-size mail, but it happens.  This is more likely on postcard self-mailers and oversize letters.
• Non-automated sites. Not every postal facility has automated sorting equipment, particularly for flats.  Flats will often bypass sortation equipment, so if we don’t get assumed scans flats can be very difficult to track.  Again, accurate eDocs are essential.

If you get no scans at all, there are two primary causes:  The barcode has an error (wrong MID, wrong STID, serial number out of assigned range), or the tracking job was never uploaded to SnailWorks.  Often, we can fix those by throwing them in the Way-Back machine, but not always.  We do magic where we can. If you or your customers are worried about scan rates for a particular job, please get in touch.  We live to solve these riddles!

Home