The U.S. Postal Service said it would eliminate the signature waiver option for the Signature Confirmation service as of Feb. 1.
The announcement was published Friday in the Federal Register.
Signature Confirmation gives USPS customers information about the date and time a mail piece was delivered, if a delivery attempt was unsuccessful as well as the date and time of the attempt. A delivery record, including the recipient's signature, is maintained by the USPS and is available to the customer via fax, e-mail or mail upon request.
Signature Confirmation currently contains an option that lets the sender waive the signature requirement and accept the USPS delivery employee's signature and the date and time of delivery as proof of delivery. If a mailer selects the waiver option, the mailer is provided only with the date and time of delivery in the record.
The waiver was requested initially by Delivery Confirmation service mailers who agreed to participate in testing the Signature Confirmation service but did not want to inconvenience their customers by requiring them to sign for their items. Now that Signature Confirmation is fully implemented and widely recognized, the waiver feature is no longer needed, according to the filing.
Customers who do not need to obtain a signature, but wish to know the date and time that their mail piece was delivered, can use Delivery Confirmation.
The USPS proposed this rule in the Federal Register on Sept. 2 but received no comments in response.
Melissa Campanelli covers postal news, CRM and database marketing for DM News and DMNews.com. To keep up with the latest developments in these areas, subscribe to our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters by visiting www.dmnews.com/newsletters
