From USO to ESO?
There has, over the last few weeks, more discussion on the USO – should we have one? what should be in and out? and who should it impact. The concept of a formal USO came out as a result of liberalisation of the postal operators, when suddenly the loose understanding of a Universal Service had to be codified to ensure that effective targeting could be applied and measured. The concept of the USO was born out of the need to provide households and businesses with a common and affordable standard of service in a time when post was the primary communications channel for most people and commerce.
Today we live in a very different world and the concept of a Universal Postal service is less important to daily life and it could be that we need to rethink the definitions based, not on the needs of the operator, but on the needs and values of the consumer and business customer.
Thinking about the concept of the USO however got me thinking about how we communicate today. The majority of communications in our current lives is electronic either through SMS (Text Messaging) or Email and increasingly we come to rely on these, as we did in the past for mail and postal services. I have noticed over the past few months particularly that the quality of service on the SMS networks is degrading quite alarmingly – whereas I used to be confident that a text message sent would be received within a 10 – 15 minute period by the recipient and therefore could be assured that it was read and acted upon almost immediately. This appears not to be the case and most text messages seem to be taking hours rather than minutes and some don’t even seem to be getting through at all. Email seems to be a little better but it is dependent on the ISP infrastructure and different providers seem to offer different levels of service, although these are never specified – and there are certainly no guarantees.
Massive growth on the number of SMS messages is predicted by a number of agencies and the consensus seems to be that the number of messages world-wide will more than double in the next 5 years to over 5.5 trillion messages per year – this is a period when postal mail volumes are predicted to fall by a similar amount. This would suggest some form of correlation between the two figures, however a number of studies have failed to prove that SMS is a replacement for mail – more likely it is a replacement for a telephone call based on the restrictions and supposed immediacy of the channel.
My proposal is that it is time to campaign for an Electronic Service Agreement (ESO) which would define parameters, as they are in the USO, for delivery times, price and reliability of service. Rather than defending the status quo of the USO and maybe tweaking some of the inclusions/definitions it would, in my opinion, be more fruitful to go on the attack and highlight the problems with the competitive channels rather than bemoaning the current, mostly excellent, postal service we enjoy in the UK today. This would, to some degree, level the playing field and more importantly bring to light the possible/probably failing of the alternate channels.
I would be interested in your thoughts and more importantly if this idea had some value who should lead the campaign and who should ‘own’ the ESO?
