Driving the Customer Away

The Postal Service has many problems not of its own making. What it doesn't need are postal employees creating new ones that could drive its largest customers away. Mary Ann Bennett provides a detailed illustration of how that is happening today.

In her article, Ms. Bennett details how postal inspectors are using data gained from the introduction of the Intelligent Mail Barcode (IMB) to identify mailers associated with mail that did not meet standards even though the mailers had followed all proper procedures to ensure that mailing lists were updated to include the most recent move updates provided by the Postal Service.

She noted that mailers targeted are initial adopters of the IMB. The IMB allows the inspectors to identify the sender of the mail. Late adopters of the IMB are not at risk because the Inspection Service cannot find them. Given that the problems with move update exists for both early and late adopters of IMB, the IMB makes finding problems with mailings as easy for the Inspection Service as shooting fish in a barrel.

Unfortunately for the Postal Service, the Inspection Service's actions ruins any effort the Postal Service makes to improve its relations with its largest mailers as it tries to make a major shift in addressing and barcoding requirements. Once they were investigated and fined by the inspection service, the mailers, which Ms. Bennett wrote about, redoubled their efforts to shift their communications from mail to electronic delivery. The net effect of the Inspection Service's efforts was a loss in business and revenue far greater than the revenue recovered in their audits.

In many ways, the situation that Ms. Bennett describes, reminds me of the problems in customer service that led to the bankruptcy of the Converse company. In the 1960's and early 1970's, Converse was the dominant athletic shoe company in the United States with two of the biggest names in shoes, Chuck Taylors, and Jack Purcells. Converse was the official shoe of the NBA and many colleges. Converse lost its position in that period for a number of reasons. Most importantly its key customers, stores that sold its shoes, found the company difficult to deal with and its upstart rivals Adidas and in particular Nike easy to work with.

A survey comparing every factor affecting customer satisfaction, including payment terms, easy of sale, attentiveness of the sales rep, return policies, shipping speed, order accuracy consistently showed that Converse made the retailers life more miserable than its competitors. Over time, shoe stores decided that value of sales from stocking Converse shoes was not worth the hassle of dealing with the Converse company. Converse sales dropped, it lost its lucrative relationship with the NBA and eventually went bankrupt. In bankruptcy, Converse was bought by Nike, the upstart that beat it by offering a competitive product that retailers wanted because of superior customer service.

The Postal Service needs to take a serious look at what its Postal Inspectors are doing. Otherwise, it could end up like Converse, bankrupt and looking for a buyer.