Costa Rica Post transforming nation with modern addresses

Costa Rica’s Post is now almost halfway through a complete transformation of the address system within the Central American country. The national postal operator has had to deal with a “folkloric” state of affairs in which letters and parcels are sent to individuals bearing a set of directions for delivery staff to follow, rather than a modern formula of building numbers, street names and zip codes.

Costa Rica Post delivers around 28 million postal items each year, depending on post office boxes for much of its deliveries. Because of the lack of a proper address system faces a high rate of returns – around 17% of items – it has a very poor customer satisfaction rate.

The absence of proper addresses has also meant a complete inability to automate mail sorting and processing systems, leading to large delays, high costs and inefficiency.

Geovanni Campos, postal distribution director at Costa Rica Post (Correos de Costa Rica) said the lack of an address system has been costing the national economy $720m a year, in a country with just 4.4 million inhabitants.

But, he said after five years’ work on a $4.8m address development plan, his company had now completed addressing for around 452,000 of the country’s 1m addresses, covering an area in which 70% of mail volumes are delivered.

“We are in the presence of a cultural change – not only for the mail staff, but for all the citizens,” Campos said.

It is not just about assigning each household and business with a new number and creating entirely new zip codes for the country’s provinces, cantons and districts – it has also involved detailed cartographic surveys to identify and classify individual streets and buildings across the country.

Roads, streets and avenues have been given a brand new numbering system – and new street signs installed bearing the new street numbers, many of which are being funded by local municipalities by selling corporate sponsorships.

Marketing

As well as improving service quality, the new address system is expected to pave the way for Costa Rica Post to provide new direct mail services and improve e-commerce deliveries.

Campos said the work Costa Rica Post was carrying out would provide the “ideal platform” for making use of the mail service for marketing purposes.

The postal distribution director at Costa Rica Post was speaking last week at the World Mail and Express Americas conference in Mexico City. At the same conference, consultant Bernard Markowicz spoke of the importance of good validated addresses for direct marketing, which he said was at an “embryonic stage” in Latin America.

Carlos Modesto Guzman, the director general of Instituto Postal Dominicano also spoke of his company’s work to improve the use of addresses in the Dominican Republic.

The campaign involves the development of zip codes to improve the efficiency of postal processing and delivery.
“A lot of money is wasted because addresses are not being well written,” he explained. “It’s not just a problem for the public sector, but also for the private sector – it affects everybody.”