The Birmingham-based business said that as of last Monday (1 March), its customers now have full visibility available throughout the data, print, production and delivery lifecycle.

Each individual mail piece is uniquely identifiable throughout all of the production processes and then once scanned in the mail network, allowing for tracking in real time.

Reporting dashboards are accessible to customers through the new RightTrack software, which Bakergoodchild has designed and developed in-house.

According to managing director Paul Brough, this platform appends Royal Mail’s item level MailMark data, providing the date and time the item was machine processed by Royal Mail, to the Bakergoodchild audit trail.

He said the system gives an accurate picture of how much mail will be delivered and when, giving customers access to the fully auditable journey.

It also allows access to regulatory compliant reports to provide audit trails of individual communications, which Bakergoodchild said was particularly useful for debt recovery or other communications that require mandatory notice periods.

But the company said the biggest benefit of the system is its ability to automatically trigger additional personalised communications, like an SMS or email, by using the tracking data available from each mailing pack.

Brough told Printweek: “I’ve been crying out for some time to access the MailMark data directly rather than through the Royal Mail portal.

“We’ve always wanted to not just provide that obvious visibility to our customer when Royal Mail has got hold of the pack, to tell them their mail piece will be delivered the next day.

“It’s taking that last trigger of the process – because there are events being recorded all the way throughout the factory when it’s printed, and going through the machines etc – and seeing what we can do with that and how we can enhance what our customer’s customers experience.

“For example, with that event in real-time we could then trigger an SMS to you to say ‘look out for our exciting offer which will be on your doorstep tomorrow morning’ – we’re using that to drive an SMS, an email or another communication to customers.

“And we could take it one step further than that and provide information around the predicted number of calls to a call centre, for example. So if a customer knows when they send 10,000 mail packs out they will get 'X' amount of calls when those hit the doorstep, we can tell them when they are going to hit the doorsteps [so they know how many calls to expect that day].”

He added: “What we intend to do with this, as we develop it further, is pull in external datasets to provide the customer with more meaningful information – when that mail piece is going to drop and what the effects of that mail piece dropping are.”

Brough said customers can either be provided with login details to RightTrack to access the data themselves via a web portal, or they can ask Bakergoodchild’s client services team to access it on their behalf.

“One of the other things that we’re already talking to a couple of interested parties about is licensing the RightTrack software so that those parties can use the benefits themselves,” he added.

Bakergoodchild has recently invested more than £2m in a raft of new equipment as part of its 2021 Growth Strategy.

The company also recently acquired Aldridge, Walsall-based Send DM, which Brough said would help to support its customers from a business continuity and disaster recovery point of view.