Ricoh and Zumbox have joined forces in a unique alliance to empower mailers with a new, highly secure and cost-effective customer communication channel. By taking advantage of paper suppression opportunities for bills, statements and other transactional mail, mailers can achieve per-piece cost savings that can exceed 50 percent while at the same time, offering a user-friendly, bi-directional means of communicating with their customers, shorter time-to-payment and the ability to increase overall sustainability of the mail operation.

WhatTheyThink has been following developments in the digital mail revolution over the past few weeks, including an update on Zumbox , as well as an update from Pitney Bowes on its Volly offering . Previously, both Zumbox and Pitney Bowes have been focused on aggregating billers to ensure that digital mailbox contents reach sufficient critical mass to attract and retain consumers. This announcement adds a slightly different twist, with Ricoh leveraging its large production base in the transaction market to make it easy for billers to easily provide customers with digital billing alternatives.

"Our sales people will be talking about this option with our customers," said Don Dew, ADF Solutions Manager, Ricoh Production Print Solutions (RPPS)*, "and we will have services available to help them implement the Zumbox connection, as well as value-added services adjacent to it, such as Precision Marketing solutions like Transpromo."

Zumbox has established digital mailboxes for all 120 million U.S. households. Transactional production operations who choose to implement the Zumbox connection will be able to send a copy of every bill, along with a document properties file, to its respective Zumbox for the consumer to receive it securely online right at the point of prepress, while at the same time bills will be printed as usual.  For consumers who opt into receiving their bills or statements through Zumbox and eliminating paper statements, those statements will be suppressed in the printing process in the next billing cycles.

"With Zumbox's unique approach to getting consumers signed up," added Dew, "those consumers who participate are basically opting out of printed delivery rather than opting in to having mail sent to their Zumbox digital mailbox. Because we manage this so late in the process, it is virtually an on/off switch to suppress print, not a complex IT process that is a burden on the biller's IT staff. Their role will be to ensure that the external data exchange and opening of the port to Zumbox is within their security practices and policies.  The goal is to not disturb any legacy processes, which makes Zumbox even more attractive."

Ricoh has received high marks from both IDC and Gartner for its Automated Document Factory (ADF) solutions – a key enabler of the Zumbox technology.  A 2010 IDC study foud that 68% of respondents receive their ADF solutions from InfoPrint Solutions (now part of Ricoh).¹ And InfoPrint Solutions' ADF Workflow received the highest possible rating, "Strong Positive," from Gartner in its "2008 MarketScope for Automated Document Factory 2.0 Software." Pete Basiliere of Gartner said, "By reducing software investment costs, InfoPrint Solutions' Managed Automated Document Factory Services, the first cloud-based ADF 2.0 offering, will enable firms to implement a comprehensive ADF."

IDC's Holly Muscolino adds, "Not only will [InfoPrint Managed Automated Document Factory (ADF) Services] allow InfoPrint's current and prospective customers to leverage the benefits afforded by a Cloud offering, but it will also enable InfoPrint to expand down market and bring a sophisticated offering to a previously underserved clientele."

Dew commented, "Customers have been asking for years, 'how are we going to participate in multichannel?' Zumbox fits beautifully with our workflow and position in the mailing environment, and it makes perfect sense for us to offer to our customers from a single-source provider perspective."

When asked about the whole issue of whether or how Zumbox users have actually opted in to having their bills sent there, Dew explained, "That's where we have to question ourselves as to how the system is different than giving billers permission to send something to our 'physical' address. We can enable a security dialog to pop up the first time the user accesses a new document so you definitely validate that you have their permission – and the right user.  Actually, it is much harder to steal something out of a Zumbox than a person's physical mailbox."

When a user signs up for Zumbox by responding to the giveaway or by other means, they are asked to provide their home address as well as to establish a login. A Zumbox verification code will show up in their physical mailbox that must be used in conjunction with the username and password that has been established in order to access the mail. This makes the process more secure than physical mail.

Dew indicates that although there are no beta sites identified yet for this integration, there are a number of companies who are interested. Ricoh will be showing this integration at Graph Expo.

Relative to the impact digital mail will have on the already-stressed USPS, Dew commented, "The First Class mail declines that have been forecasted over the next 10 years don't appear to take into consideration a disruptive technology like Zumbox."

Why does Dew think this approach will be successful?  "In my view," he says, "Zumbox matches the workflow of the homeowner and how they interface with their physical mailbox better than other offerings on the market.  You can behave the way you do with your transactional mail, only online. One of the challenges of electronic presentment and payment has been that you have to visit a unique place and create a separate workflow for every company you do business with.  That's why I think Zumbox is a massively disruptive technology."

*Ricoh Production Print Solutions (RPPS) is a strategic business unit within the Ricoh Family Group of Companies which includes InfoPrint Solutions Company and other Ricoh production print organizations.

¹ Intelligent Mail and ADF Adoption Trends by Print Volume and Vertical Industry, February 2010, IDC Report 221835