Introduction To Letter Service

Collect!'s Letter Service feature gives your company the benefit of reducing your letter costs significantly when you outsource your letters. Letter Service is intended to help you automate the processing of large batches of debtor notices and simple debtor letters. For instance, you may have 10,000 First Notices to print. Letter Service can handle this easily!

One significant bonus of Collect!'s Letter Service function is its complete transparency to the operator using Collect! A letter may be printed on demand as needed, or sent to the Letter Service if queued for the daily letter batch.

Using the Letter Service feature requires that you first make an agreement with your Letter Service supplier to accept an ASCII file for processing. Collect! will supply all the information in this file so that they can produce and mail your notices according to your contract with them.

For information about letter services we have listed a few below.

Focus1

Voice: 313 - 937 - 1511
www.focus1data.com

Diversified Data and Communications Inc.

10811 Northend
Ferndale, Michigan 48220
Toll-Free: 1-800-356-8561
Tel: 248-399-0715
Fax: 248-399-0298
www.divdat.com

Dantom Systems, Inc.

Voice: 248 - 888 - 7455
Fax: 248 - 888 - 7459
www.dantomsystems.com

These suppliers are familiar with Collect! as many of our users send them files. If you tell them that you are generating your files with Collect! they will know exactly what they need from you so that you can set up your service with them quickly and easily.

Once you have your agreement settled, the next step is to supply your provider with a test file. Most professional letter service providers will be aware that Collect! supplies the information in an ASCII text file following the standard 'Ontario' Letter Service format. Also, if you require NCOA (National Change of Address) services, the file Collect! generates for you complies with NCOA industry standards.

If your supplier requires a different format, Collect! can produce the data in a customizable, comma-separated format instead of 'Ontario' format. This gives Collect! the ability to satisfy the majority of letter service providers' requirements.

Besides processing large batches of letters and notices, Collect! also enables you to submit a request for your letter service provider to perform an NCOA check on a debtor prior to printing the letter. If a different, or correct, address is located, they can send you a file matching our documented NCOA Import format and Collect! can update your database with any changes.

Before you begin to use Letter Service in Collect! it is necessary to be familiar with printing a letter for a debtor, then to learn how to print a batch of letters. Learning how Collect! works with batch printing will help, if you need to modify the letter templates or prepare contact plans to further automate the process.

If you can guarantee that you will never need to manually print your Letter Service letters, then setting up letter templates can be simplified, improving the speed with which the output file is produced.

It is a good idea to print the help documentation about Letter Service and show it to your Letter Service provider's representative. This should help them understand how Collect! prepares the data for them so that they can perform their services for you.

Letter Service letter batches can also be scheduled using Collect!'s Scheduler. Please refer to Letter Service in Scheduler for details.

See Also

- Letter Service Topics
- NCOA Topics