Very Clever: The Virginia Employment Commission preprints the return address of payment envelopes with their own address.
Not Clever: New York state Workers Comp Board tells me to mail my payment right away, but does not include the address to send it to. I have to call them to find out where to send my mail.
Appwerks.
on 23 Oct 08Nice: Every year we receive preprinted envelopes for our Federal quarterly tax returns and other business related correspondence.
Not so much: The state of Missouri business forms (taxes, etc.).
Their respective websites are not much better.
Nuovo Labs
on 23 Oct 08Where I’m from our DMV’s website doesn’t give you a receipt or even tell you it processed correctly when you hit submit on the online vehicle registration form. It just takes you back to the home page… Fail
Joel
on 23 Oct 08Sarah, to clarify, are they pre-printing both the address and return address with their own address?
How would this be helpful? I would rather have them preprint my address into the return address.
Am I missing something?
SH
on 23 Oct 08@Joel, it’s helpful because if there is something wrong with the mail, say no postage, it’s still delivered to the right place. Once I send something I don’t need it back, and re-delivering it to me just delays it being processed on time. They thought ahead and figured if it can’t be delivered correctly, it can be re-delivered to them.
Jason Pontius
on 23 Oct 08Not clever: The bank requires you to change your password every month, and you can never use the same one twice, and when you inevitably forget it and call them to reset it, they always reset it to 1234567.
Jared Goralnick
on 23 Oct 08Very Clever: You can order (and re-order for a small fee) your State of Maryland vehicle Registration card/license sticker online. And print out a temporary card until it arrives.
Not Clever: if you have to re-order your registration (because of mailing issues or who knows what), they only send the registration card for your dash, but not the sticker that goes on your license plate. You have to go to the DMV for that.
And in the mean time, they can ticket you if you’re parked in a public space.
zephyr
on 23 Oct 08@Jason, yeah there is often a big disconnect between Security’s lofty if misguided ambitions and Customer Care’s practices. I recently worked at a company that had huge problems with people forgetting their passwords. While the IT department got all obsessed over security measures, the call center kept handing out “12345” passwords, while users were not even required to change this lousy password and had to search for where to do this. This was a well-established e-commerce company.
Ryan Britton
on 23 Oct 08We actually have done this with the SASEs we include with all contract, invoice, and order form mailings since we started. We haven’t had it actually be needed yet though.
Brenton
on 23 Oct 08It sounds like a US state is aiding mail fraud. . .
Chad G
on 24 Oct 08Yeah, I second the mail fraud claim.
I think from now on, I’m just going to put the recipient’s address as the return address and stop using stamps altogether.
FREE POSTAGE!!!!
Ryan Britton
on 24 Oct 08It doesn’t work that way. The post office will hold the envelope until postage is paid. It just makes it more likely to get back to you in the event something occurs along the way, even if you have to pay additional postage.
Baby Rash
on 25 Oct 08I actually think that this is a fab idea!
This discussion is closed.