EU postal operators failing to communicate
Swiss Post and Royal Mail have been praised for their regular news bulletins by Hellmail, the European postal industry news site.
Editor for Hellmail, Steve Lawson, said “Many Euro postal operators have been rather slow to market themselves and communicate in the wider context since Liberalisation began.” he said.
“Some postal operators have been quick to seize the opportunity to tell the rest of Europe what they’re doing, but sadly many produce little or no news output at all. Poland is poor with only news on postage stamps in English but it’s main news is wholly in Polish and for the rest of Europe that can be a real problem given the limited range of online translators. Spain too only publishes news in Spanish which can give rise to all kinds of problems in terms of translating.”
He said that some postal operators should be praised for their efforts. Swiss Post particularly, with a whole section devoted to media communications including an impressive image library. Royal Mail too has a dedicated press office with almost daily news.
“Oddly, Lithuania scores well in terms of news output, but France’s La Poste, Turkey, Slovakia and Slovenia fall far behind. Italy, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria rarely update their news, The Ukraine, Latvia and Luxembourg have no translation facility at all for news, and Romania stopped producing translated news altogether in 2007.”
Hellmail found that most web sites were reasonably easy to navigate except for Denmark & Greece which had a Flash into that was very difficult to get past. Swiss Post and Royal Mail scored the highest for news output, closely followed by DHL, Malta, and Russian Post.
“Clearly there is much room for improvement and we have emailed most of these operators asking them to look closer at the way they communicate. Obviously some European postal services are heavily tied into state ownership, and in some cases, political regimes, but even so, with Europe pushing for closer ties under postal liberalisation, some countries have simply failed to exploit the potential here. From our perspective, its so important that smaller European countries can be heard. We really do want to know what they’re about.” he said.
