Tag: Europe

Post Office still needs to deliver improved services;Analysis

Posted by | May 14, 2007 | |

The Post Office is said to be the best known brand in the UK after Coca-Cola. It is also the country’s biggest retail chain. But it is also an organisation that loses a million items of its customers’ business per week; delivers a service at midday – when most recipients have gone to work; does not take credit cards; offers bureaux de change without computer access to exchange rates; and one that many people only visit because they have to.

The Post Office has, by any measure, much to do to catch up with the rest of the world.

And there is little time in which to do it. Postcomm, the regulator, has insisted that competition should dawn, despite the efforts of the Post Office and the Government to resist the substantial reduction of the monopoly that is sought by the European Union.

Postcomm made clear this week that a cut of the monopoly is not the only route to competition. Rival businesses will soon be able to win licences for parts of the Post Office business. The power to grant those licences begins in March when the Post Office becomes a plc, albeit one entirely owned by the Government, and the postal consumers’ group gains greater powers.

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Hundreds of post offices to shut in Scotland

Posted by | May 14, 2007 | |

Hundreds of post offices across Scotland are set to be closed as part of government plans to be announced this week.

AlistairDarling, the Trade and Industry Secretary, will reveal the response to a consultation on closures which campaigners believe will spell the end for as many as 800 branches in Scotland. Pensioners’ groups and rural communities have been outraged by the programme they fearwill cut off many people from vital services.

However, the government insists the network is losing millions of pounds every week and is impossible to sustain. Around 2500 post offices are understood to be closing out of a total of 14,000 in the UK but with a high proportion in Scotland. Between one-quarter and one-third of all closures are believed to be north of the border.

Figures from consumer group Postwatch show the number of post offices in Britain has fallen from 18,393 in 1999 to 14,376 in 2005.

Last June there were 1676 post offices in Scotland – 1117 in rural areas and 559 in urban areas.

Mr Darling has said many remote post offices which do not meet the criteria will be allowed to remain open but hundreds are still expected to close.

New criteria over how far away people should be expected to live from their nearest post office will change and the closures are expected by hit urban as well as rural areas.

Under the new rules, 95per cent of the urban population will be within one mile of a post office and in rural areas 95per cent should be within three miles and in remote areas 95per cent within six miles.

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Italy's post office aims for 2 mln mobile customers in Vodafone virtual link-up

Posted by | May 14, 2007 | |

Poste Italiana is aiming for 2 mln mobile telephone customers from its recent virtual mobile network deal with Vodafone Group PLC, said post CEO Massimo Sarmi.

In an interview with La Repubblica, Sarmi said studies predict that there will be 20 mln new mobile users in the next five years in Italy.

‘We plan to gain 10 pct of these new users. Let’s say we count on gaining 2 mln new users. With 2 mln users our mobile phone operation will be in profit. So it is sensible move,’ he said.

In April, Vodafone and Poste Italiana announced a virtual mobile operator deal, giving Poste Italiana access to Vodafone’s mobile network.

Sarmi said he hopes to launch the mobile service by Christmas.

Poste Italiana sees scope to link up its mobile customers with electronic payment cards, for which the post has 9 mln customers, allowing customers to make payments using their mobile phones, he said.

‘We are working a lot around the question of micro-payments with the mobile phone, with our mobile phone naturally,’ he said.

Mobile phones can be filled up with 200 or 500 euro of credit, which can then be spent in retail outlets, he said, citing Japanese experience.

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German postal workers protest market opening

Posted by | May 14, 2007 | |

Some 30,000 German postal workers protested in Berlin on Monday against the planned opening of the country’s postal services market to competition on January 1, 2008.

The Deutsche Post workers came from across the country to protest against opening the local market, a year before the planned liberalisation of the entire European postal market.

A spokeswoman for Germany’s Ver.di trade union, Cornelia Hass, said it was demanding that the German market be opened at the same time as those in the rest of the continent.

Ver.di has warned that doing so earlier could lead to the loss of jobs.
Deutsche Post holds a monopoly on the delivery of letters weighing less than 50 grammes.

After earlier waves of postal liberalisation in 1997 and 2002, the markets for the delivery of packages and letters weighing more than that are already open to competition.

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Parcelforce Worldwide extends its parcel redelivery service using advanced self-service technologies from Eckoh

Posted by | May 14, 2007 | |

Parcelforce Worldwide has significantly extended the scope of its contract with BT and Eckoh, one of Europe’s leading providers of outsourced automated solutions, with a series of innovative enhancements to its parcel redelivery service.

The new and enhanced service builds upon the automated speech recognition solution for redeliveries developed by Eckoh and BT and implemented by Parcelforce Worldwide earlier this year.

The extended redeliveries service will see Eckoh take responsibility for Parcelforce Worldwide’s entire end-to-end redeliveries support service, which includes management of the front end web interface, as well as co-ordinating customer instructions with Parcelforce Worldwide’s delivery depots and customer contact centres. With further developments planned for later this year, customers will soon have the convenience of making payments for additional service options, such as requesting a redelivery on a Saturday or to a different address, using a fully automated telephone based payment system.

The fully hosted service will provide a high level of consistency across all contact channels, whether web or telephone based. The overall solution utilises Eckoh’s extensive speech recognition expertise and self-service technology platform, but also leverages Eckoh’s substantial web design and deployment heritage, which now forms an integral part of the enhanced solution.

Eckoh expects to manage in excess of 1 million calls on behalf of Parcelforce Worldwide during 2007.

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