Does the Post Office even know what to do with customers?

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This is Money Blog
December 09, 2010

Does the Post Office even know what to do with customers?

The Post Office is apparently on the verge of losing a critical £20m contract to process benefit cheques.

Ministers are thinking of handing the work to shops that use PayPoint, a system accessed through a swipe card or barcoded bill.

Hundreds of thousands of people without a bank account (meaning the most vulnerable pensioners, disabled and unemployed) would have to stop visiting a local post office to cash benefit cheques, track down their nearest shop with PayPoint and work out how to use the new system.

The point behind inconveniencing all these people is unclear.

I’m wondering if the government has an actual strategy for the Post Office. It was only a couple of weeks back that it announced RBS and NatWest banking services would now be available over Post Office counters.

It was also pushing for more official form-printing, pension, and job-seeking services to be available, not to mention hailing a new DIY parcel and letter-weighing service.
So the plan is to get people using Post Offices more by offering new services? Except a longstanding job they already do will be moved to the shop around the corner - if people are lucky, and it’s not across town, or in the next village over?

This makes as much sense as the Post Office closure programme presided over by the last government.

It was woefully unsupportive of rural branches that perhaps weren’t teeming with customers all the time but were still vital centres of their communities. And then it allowed lots of town and city Post Offices that were constantly crammed with people to be shut down as well.

There was always a queue to the door and a half-hour wait at my local, small sub-post office - but it still closed. Now everyone in the area has to go to the main branch, which was already overburdened. It’s virtually unusable unless you can spare an entire hour, or get there ‘off-peak’ meaning mid-afternoon when you’re supposed to be at work.

In desperation, I now go to a large Post Office much further away but which operates an Argos-style ticket queuing system. (Although that is probably an insult to Argos, which does tend to get you processed and out the door minus your cash as fast as possible.)

A member of staff is stationed beside the (inevitable) queue for the ticket machine, advising people on which (vaguely-worded) option is closest to the service they need, then herding them off towards the right bank of screens to wait (interminably) for their number to flash up. Effectively, you end up queuing two times over for about the same total time as you would anyway.

It’s no wonder the Post Office is struggling. The government can’t even decide whether it wants to attract customers or send them off somewhere else. And the decimated branch network we’re left with after all the closures can’t cope efficiently with existing customers anyway.