(x-posted at The Little Teapot)
There are many problems with how the Postal Service is being treated by Congress, and the bottom line is that the best route to fiscal health of the service is for Congress to stop it, fix the regulatory problems, and either choose to truly allow the Postal Service to operate like a business (by removing rate regulation and all sorts of operating requirements and the ridiculous pension-funding requirement), or return to the Constitutionally-mandated government service the framers of the document intended.
Either way, though, the postal service seems stuck in its leitmotif, and has not been very creative about re-inventing itself for the 21st century. It declined to get involved in the internet when it could have defined its mission as facilitating communications for the public benefit. Similarly it has defined first-class mail as a prime mission for itself, when because of email and electronic billing such mailings are in rapid decline.
I'll skip over redefining the "core mission" of the Postal Service for now, even though that should be at the center of every business plan. I'm going to skip to tactics and gloss over this part for now, but I will make a couple of observations about what would be called "differentiators" for the postal service. What does it do now, as a "core competency", that competitors don't do? In other words, what levers does it have to achieve competitive advantage?
One: the post office comes to your house, literally, every day. They have the infrastructure and experience to physically deliver things, and to physically be present on your doorstep.
Two: they have trust and authority. They have the imprimatur of official business of the government and close on 230 years of tradition. They have, in a word, a brand, and it's an official brand.
Three: they have certain legal monopolies. The most essential of these is an exclusive right to first-class mail, and although that distinction may be waning given overnight delivery services, they still have a price advantage on non-urgent items. (The absolute worst thing they can do, by the way, is to deliberately slow service to save money; that will destroy their opportunity to claw back the market.)
Four: they have a vast array of retail locations, some would argue too vast, but in terms of bricks and mortar penetration, they're as broadly based as it's possible to be. Frequently the locations are located in the "civic center" of each locality, offering opportunities.
With those in mind, here are ten ideas for improving the business operations (again skipping over the model for now) of the postal service. I want to be clear here: this is not about whether to take the USPS "private" or return to being a regular government agency (although I do not think they can remain in limbo, as they are now); these are specific things that can be done to both help the bottom line and improve the public service mission set in the Constitution.
10 Ideas for the Postal Service
1. Change their business hours.
Why on earth does the post office still run 9-5 Monday through Friday (with some Saturday hours) at its retail locations? Because that's when government operates. This is insane. Working people can't and won't go to the post office. The USPS has to start staying open late or at least staggering their hours. Sunday hours. Evening hours. Close some mornings if you have to. You can't do business with a place if it doesn't have convenient operating hours.
2. Change delivery hours.
This is tied up with (3) below, but similarly, delivering mail during business hours is an old-business model. Admittedly Fedex and UPS and so forth emulate this, but it's because the vast majority of their transactions have one endpoint at a business and the other at either another business or 9 to 5 operation. Not so the post office; in terms of sheer numbers, the majority of their deliveries are to residential addresses. Are residents home when the mail arrives? Not usually - maybe for a quarter or less.
I suggest the following two innovations: (1) stagger delivery hours so the postal carrier is delivering mail during the dinner hour, at least a couple of times a week, up to 8 PM. (2) develop a "guaranteed delivery" window of a specific half hour period every day for a given address, instead of the "the mail usually gets here at such and such a time, but sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't and you as the customer are never informed". Alternatively, simply set up a satellite tracking system for the carrier for each route, so you could track them from the web to your door. This is easy and cheap to do; I can track buses in many municipalities, for free, on smart phone apps.
3. Sell their services door to door.
As retailers, the USPS is squandering its most unique feature -- that it shows up on your doorstep every day. With the change in (2) above, they could make themselves more available to consumers. And if you want to buy stamps, a box, ask questions about sending something, get something weighed (to deal with the requirements you can't send packages above a small weight limit, post-Unabomber, by simply putting them in the mailbox), or buy Service X from them, you can do so from your carrier. This would require redefining the carrier position from being a schlep who simply dumps stuff in your mailbox to being a door to door retail specialist. But carriers are required to pass the civil service test, so I think it very much in their capabilities to pivot.
4. Localize their products.
There's a range of things you can do when you have a door to door sales staff, particularly if you view it as a point to point service and not a centralized system. Allowing sublocal delivery is one: for instance, schools sending home things for parents, returning library books, meals on wheels deliveries, or other community services. If we want to jump the shark to commercial tie-ins -- and why not, since the postal service lives on circular advertising right now - partnering up with local businesses for delivery of items and even service recommendations is a logical next step. Maybe it will be more efficient for your local grocery chain to run its own shop at home delivery service, but if you need a couple of screws from the hardware store and you don't want to make a special trip, why not get a point to point delivery? Pizza? Insulin or prescriptions? Who knows. If you expand the concept of metered mail and allow each local PO to pick and choose some "extra" services based on what works for it locally, and if that involves installing a fridge to keep medicines cold or an oven to keep the cheesteaks hot, let them figure it out. Don't get stuck on the one-service-fits-all-nationwide model.
5. Provide authority in new media.
Other postal unions in other countries have done this so this is a dull no-brainer. Provide authoritative delivery confirmation and identity confirmation for electronic communications.
What's the biggest problem you have with your email? Spam? Volume control? When you send an important message via email, do you ever want definitive confirmation the recipient got it? Email and e communications (including SMS and the like) are capable of having delivery confirmation, but only is it reliable in a closed system with airtight security. (Hence the continuing survival of Blackberry in the smartphone market, since their network offers this kind of point to point service within enterprises and governments.) There's a big swath of legal instruments that are not sent electronically because you have to have a "paper trail", and you can't notarize an email.
Why not? The post office has one thing nobody else has going for it, and that's the authority of officialdom. It's the only entity in a really good position to say "this communication has been officially received". This requires something called a public-key infrastructure, and some investment in highest-quality electronic security engineering, but it's quite doable.
6. Provide customer-centric filtering services.
What the heck does this mean? Well, I have to go to third parties right now to cut down on junk mail. To control my mailing lists electronically, I can at least send "unsubscribe" messages and mark messages as span. For physical mail, the USPS should be doing the same thing. Make it so you get the mail you want, and nothing else. Charge for it, by all means (like a paywall vs. an advertising-supported site), but be comprehensive about it. The point of delivery is another opportunity. Perhaps I'd like to receive something but not have the sender know my delivery address. (See "addressing" below for the mechanism here.) There are lots of reasons for doing this, from witness protection relocation and domestic abuse protection to wanting to get sensitive materials in the mail. Currently if you want to do this, you basically have to get a post box, which is inconvenient because it requires you go to another spot to physically collect your mail. If the postal service could filter mail by sender according to where you wanted to receive it (home, work, other) they could suck up a good portion of the PO box business and provide a new service to consumers.
7. Offer email for life.
We have a wild-west system as far as getting email addresses. You can get a "permanent" email address by maintaining this yourself through a paid provider, and either getting the mail at that address or having it forwarded to your "real" email address. But let's face it, most of us have changed email addresses, often fairly frequently, as services come and go.
If you were issued a user-friendly, unique email address for life, for free, by the USPS, it could solve the problem of addressing and inbox destinations while providing a hook for the official-verifiable email communications. If we wanted to get Congress involved, it could be made a federal offense to abuse this email address (for instance, spam) as well as making it impossible to send to an email-address-for-life without verification of the identity of the sender (see above). How do you monetize such a thing? The same way the post office does now: you have to put a stamp on something to guarantee it will be sent to a given address. (You can do it for free now by driving there yourself and walking up to the recipient's door, eh? You pay for convenience.) Issue the email address free, leave it to the user to register the delivery address, charge for the privilege of sending to it for commercial mail, everybody comes out ahead.
8. Change their addressing system to one more personal and less geographically-biased. (The personal zip code.)
The USPS is stuck on a geographic model of the world. They see the world through the prism of your physical address. This is why you have to file vacation stops, mail forwarding if you move, send changes of address to the thousand and one people and businesses who transact with you, and have things like "residential" and "commercial" addresses associated with the business you do. Or APOs and FPOs, or PO Boxes.
This is expressed as follows:
John Smith
123 Main Street
Everytown, USA 12345
…if you're lucky and have a simple physical address.
Why not…
John Smith 1932907X2
(or whatever, you can omit the John Smith part, even).
Never change your address, because it's yours to keep no matter where you are. The post office already uses electronics to scan and route physical mail; having essentially a lookup system that matches a personal zip code to where you actually are and want things delivered saves a ton of effort.
Then you can decide by choosing online where you want mail to John Smith 1932907 to go to. And if you want to buy new addresses from the post office, you can do so - replacing the physical PO box with a virtual one.
9. Leverage communities.
How many stories about small post office closings have you read that emphasize how important the post office is to the sense of place and community of a small settlement? Pretty much all of them. Instead of killing this by closing small post offices, the USPS should leverage this by opening themselves up as a sort of omnipresent community center, or at least community communications hub. You do this by loosening up on rules about what the PO is and what it can offer. You can get a passport at the PO; why not register to vote, get your driver's license picture, buy tickets for the school play? Why isn't there a community bulletin board in every post office? A place to check business references or real estate records? Or whatever. This can be localized, again, if the service decentralizes management of its business concepts. All these things would bring MORE foot traffic to the physical PO, and spur local retail services. (For that matter, a few selected add-on services -- such as a coffee bar -- could be added to make it even more of a gathering place.) Add blood pressure screenings, blood drives, art exhibits, all the things that make a community and enhance community service.
Because the USPS employees are security-checked, civil servants, who are already in the position of being able to pick through our mail if they want to (but don't), they have a position of trust to leverage here. It's a way of connecting the penumbra of the large federal government to the real action of the community.
10. Be reactive and pro-active at the same time.
This veers into the "Mission Statement" of the postal service, which is very narrow and traditional at this point in being focussed on the physical delivery of certain types of objects on a daily basis. We've already seen that mission under decay as a lot of the business- and personal-business-oriented communications that the founders thought people had to have the government deliver reliably in order to foster commerce and thought have entered other media (notably the internet). Old media, such as newspapers, continue to belabor they're in the business of selling content. They're not. They're delivering content via a medium, and people are willing to pay for the medium. I pay for a newspaper subscription still because I prefer paper as my medium to an iPad, not because the information is any different from what I could get in other media.
The post office has a tangential mission problem: it is microfocussing on physical delivery, and not its more foundational mission, which was to foster communication securely and reliably. I don't have a cut and dried answer here for how to transform that mission, but surely it must be a combination of reacting to what consumers and citizens want (adapting with the times) and working harder at inventing the future (innovating).
There are lots of problems with our modern communications systems. Teenagers text and drive. Spam fills up your email inbox. You can't get a copy of your medical records sent to you directly. Businesses still have to fax things back and forth. You never know if your Congressman read your letter or some drone in her/his office or if it never got there at all. You'd like to be able to take back that message you sent.
Traditionally government has been involved in regulation as one of its primary means of setting rules for the marketplace. The postal service of course has its regulations, but it currently has the charge to also be self-supporting. At the same time it has the authority of government, it really cannot pass rules without legislation. If the true product is in fact a "governnment stamp" and all that that carries with it, there's a host of communications problems the Post Office is in a unique position to leverage if given some room and if they grow some vision. The weight of their numbers and volume is still significant enough, if they become more involved with research, technical standards development, and consensus-building, but only if they act as a neutral facilitator, not a regulator, and where necessary, as a service provider where monopoly power makes sense (for example, the one-true-authority on addresses and delivery and so forth.)
