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At a specially arranged
customer forum, held on the eve of the World Mail & Express Asia
conference and exhibition in Singapore earlier this month, a number of
major mail users highlighted poor service quality, particularly in terms
of cross border mailings, as a significant factor affecting their
businesses.
The seminar, a first for the mail industry, not just in Asia but globally,
brought together a group of major mail customers including Readers Digest,
The Economist, Health & Science Inc., McGraw Hill, MLA International
Mailing, UNICEF and World Scientific, and represented a total annual spend
on mail of some US $66 million despatching some 125 million items, just
within the Asian region. A powerful voice indeed.
Robin Parr-Davies, Head of Research and Consultancy at Triangle Management
Services, the organisers of the event, reported the results to the main
conference. The response to the feedback session from the 185 delegates,
including leading global industry figures, was so positive that the
customer forum looks like becoming a fixture for all future Triangle World
Mail & Express conferences in Europe, Asia and the Americas.
Although the customers covered a wide range of issues in their debate,
including service quality, prices, service options, the mail value chain
and the impact of integration by some of the major mail operators on the
market, the discussion always returned to the issue of poor quality of
delivery service being supplied across the region.
Price was of course never far away from the debate, but it was
primarily expressed in terms of value for money, and, therefore, the
quality aspect was once again a key factor. Customers clearly stated that
the service providers should focus more on delivering the service as
advertised which, in many cases across the Asian region, it was not. Not
all Post Offices were guilty, however, and one or two, conference hosts
Singapore Post included, were capable of providing the appropriate service
levels and after sales service.
New product development and a wider range of service options appeared to
be a mainstay of the postal operators, but that was not the main issue for
the customers who time and again referred back to improved service quality
of the basic services as their key objective. Customers would prefer to
have some of the complexity brought about by an ever-increasing service
range to be simplified in favour of a service that delivered what it
promised!
Many customers felt that new services were being developed without any
prior discussion with the customer and indeed on occasions appeared not to
have been fully thought through. The main purpose it seemed for the
introduction of many new services, as perceived by the customers, was to
cut the providers operating costs and as a consequence the service
invariably suffered. Marketing strategies for many postal operators seemed
therefore to be operations led rather than fully customer researched so as
to satisfy customer identified needs.
So will the service providers in the Asian arena listen to their customer?
Only time will tell. But in the meantime the users having found a voice,
have agreed to continue to meet together to press collectively for
improvements in service quality.
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