Time for NZ Post to move on from delivering paper bills daily

BY LANCE WIGGS

New Zealand Post launched a new site this week, called Lasoo, which seems at first glance to be a pointless race toward the empty space on the internet that Ferrit once tried to own.

However, unlike Telecom's Ferrit debacle, the Lasoo site appears to be relatively cost-free, simply an extension of lasoo.com.au, which has entered New Zealand with the assistance of NZ Post.

The sites in each country take brochures and turn them into online advertisements, but you cannot actually buy any products. This somewhat competes with the traditional NZ Post business of delivering brochures to physical mailboxes, but is fairly useless for most people. Yet NZ Post is wise to take a piece of the action to hedge against the decline of posting junk mail.

Somewhat more cleverly, NZ Post also just released an iPhone application that lets people send postcards using their own photos. The application itself is very rough, and does not let people send lower resolution photos transferred across to our iPhones or iPads. This photo quality issue prevented me from sending my first postcard for 15 years or so.

Regardless, it is good to see that NZ Post is trying new things, while not taking too many resources away from their core business.

The core business of NZ Post is to deliver my bills, each and every day, along with some junk mail that slips through the filters.

It's an archaic notion, this delivering of daily mail, and it is well beyond time that we accept the new modes of communication have changed, forever, our requirements for home delivery and the economics of daily delivery.

So why can we not just admit the problem, and, as many moot, reduce the number of deliveries to homes to two or three a week?

We really don't need those bills, and besides they are increasingly delivered via email.

Plucky Powershop.co.nz is demonstrating that an electricity utility can operate without ever sending paper to customers, and so isn't it about time that other utilities and banks followed?

The core business of subsidiary (with DHL) CourierPost, as far as I can tell, is delivering yellow notices informing me that my parcel will be at their depot later.

There is a huge opportunity for CourierPost to get better at actually delivering parcels, and this is by using the very technology that is destroying the mail side of the business.

Today we are contactable in an increasing multitude of ways, and many of them are free. So when an item is allocated to or loaded on to a truck for final delivery, why not automatically send customers an email, text, tweet or Facebook message letting them know the estimated time of delivery?

Why not even allow those customers to send a reply, advising whether to skip the delivery as nobody is home, to reschedule for later in the day or even to change the destination?

It might seem like a complex system, but with today's dynamic scheduling software and GPS systems, and the combined DHL and NZ Post muscle, there seems to be no excuse to leave yellow "sorry" cards.

Doing all of this may cost a little more each day, but it also means significantly less handling of parcels, and that means cost savings. For both businesses, why not make it easier for customers to send packages and mail? One simple way to do this is to ask the increasingly underused mail carriers to pick up as well as deliver, treating our letterboxes as in and out boxes.

Mail carriers can pick up smaller items and courier the larger ones.

Freightways demonstrates its understanding of the home-to- home market opportunity through their PassTheParcel initiative with Trade Me.

Freightways is even sending out free courier bags, and aims to take a good piece of this market from CourierPost. I suspect it is a strong competitor.

NZ Post is a great institution, and one that deserves to survive into the future as a robust venture. The decline in letter volumes is somewhat made up for by the increase in parcels from e-commerce, but that business is under pressure. It's time to move on from daily service for letters, and it's well beyond time to increase the service levels for package delivery.

Lance Wiggs is founder of PowerKiwi, retailer of Flowerpower and other products on Powershop.