Integrity has increased the diversity of its Clarity hybrid mail offering to enable customers to include reply paid envelopes and a scanning service to deliver responses into the cloud.
The Clarity Response service has been developed following requests from customers who want a means to managing data from a questionnaire or changes to terms and conditions that have to be logged digitally. Standard hybrid mail offerings lack the versatility to insert reply envelopes at the mailing stage.
Integrity, says managing director Chris Walton, has come up with a way to do this. “During lockdowns hybrid mail has worked incredibly well for us. Many customers want to include a call to action, where filling in a form or agreeing to change in terms or conditions so customers have asked whether we could include a DRE which is not normally possible. Now, by partnering with Opex, we have found a solution to include the reply mechanism and to scan the filled in sheets directly into a database in the cloud.
“As soon as we do this, the customer is notified that there is a response waiting for him.”
A barcode printed on the sheet assigns the answers to the specific customer, say the resident of a housing association’s property. “We have developed this in-house and it has meant we are first to market with this as part of a hybrid mail offering. It is something that customers have been asking for,” says Walton.
And while Integrity invested in a scanner to handle this work, it has found that other customers want to send out digital mailings and have used the scanning facility as part of this. “It wasn’t what we planned to do,” he says.
The development is part of continuing investment at the Midsomer Norton business. In January its commercial print operation took delivery of a Hunkeler CS8 finishing line to run alongside the Hunkeler CS6 that was installed in 2019. This expands the company’s capacity to handle cut ad folded leaflets to a round 10 million a week. Lockdown has seen a rise in the volume of door drop leaflets, aided this year by Continental suppliers pulling out of the UK following Brexit.
“We have also started dealing with media agencies,” says sales director Andrew Law. “We can produce door drop work very efficiently and cost effectively. People don’t associate us with this type of work, but it shows we are starting to engage with a slightly different audience.”
The Gen 8 line increases both the capacity and versatility of the work it can handle with faster makeready and running speed.
Its installation in the commercial part of the vast factory site will be followed by a Böwe sortation system in the digital print and mailing area that Walton looks after. This arrives in May he says.
It is a shift from the Bluecrest technology on site and at the same time Böwe will take on responsibility for service and support for the Bluecrest machines was well as the new sortation device.
And then later this year Walton is planning investment in a Böwe Fusion, fast becoming a standard piece of technology for print and mail houses.
