Do you know the difference between Informed Delivery and Informed Visibility? How about Informed Delivery and Expected Delivery? Here’s a look at four new USPS features and services and what you should know about them.
Expected Delivery
What it is: A feature that provides customers with a two-hour estimated delivery window for some packages
Who uses it: Residential customers
How it works: USPS is testing Expected Delivery (ExD) in several ZIP Codes. During the test, customers can use several methods to set their desired notification preferences and access the expected delivery window information. Customers can sign up for texts or emails, or they can track packages via a usps.com account.
Where you can learn more: Link reported on ExD last year.
Informed Delivery
What it is: A feature that provides eligible residential consumers with digital previews of their incoming mail
Who uses it: Residential consumers
How it works: Users who sign up for Informed Delivery receive images of the outside of the letter-sized mailpieces that will arrive soon in their household’s physical mailbox. These images can be viewed via email notifications, or they can be accessed on an online dashboard.
Where you can learn more: The Informed Delivery pages on Blue and LiteBlue
Informed Facility
What it is: A content delivery platform that rapidly provides information throughout the Postal Service
Who uses it: USPS employees
How it works: Informed Facility brings multiple information sources into a central location. The platform is currently being field tested with 26 sites displaying 79 dashboards.
Where you can learn more: The Informed Facility Blue page
Informed Visibility
What it is: An advanced analytics platform that supports business mailers’ campaigns
Who uses it: Business mailers and USPS employees
How it works: Informed Visibility shows the physical movement of letters and flats in near real-time. The platform centralizes information from more than 35,000 postal facilities, 82 different postal systems, and more than 6,300 pieces of mail processing equipment, as well as scanning and geo-coordinate delivery data. Informed Visibility has both internal and external components. The internal application provides service performance measurement and diagnostics information as well as mail inventory and predictive workload information for employees. The external application — currently being tested — provides mail tracking and reporting capabilities for mailers.
Where you can learn more: The RIBBS site, PostalPro and the Blue page