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The Importance of Understanding our Customers
The South African Post Office's Strategic Plan 2008 to 2010 highlights the importance of focusing on increased customer satisfaction and proposes that the organization focus on developing offerings that suit the needs of its customer base.
There are five core themes to the strategy, and no fewer than three of them relate to the customer, namely customer intimacy, government partnerships and building a trusted brand.
The South African Post Office already knows a great deal about its major customers, those doing more than R10 million a year in revenue. Each has a dedicated key account consultant who is responsible to maintain and grow the account and look for new business. International trends have demonstrated that the South African Post Office has enormous scope to grow. Globally, a number of postal agencies have demonstrated the value of defining its CRM related objectives and moving the customer to the centre of their existence that drives all action. By learning from these experiences and adopting locally relevant practices, the South African Post Office will definitely position itself more closely with its customer needs and behaviours.
The Future
Increased competition and deregulation is a reality that the South African Post Office has prepared to embrace and respond to in all areas of the business, including the traditional hard copy services as well as substitutions. The South African Post Office has established a close relationship with its customers. Out of this closer relationship, the South African Post Office has identified a need for assisting its customers with below-the-line marketing campaigns such as direct mail and "knock-and-drop" as it is so much cheaper than above-the-line advertising.
Direct mail, for instance, has been a key growth area for postal services around the globe, and a dedicated marketing unit has been established to grow that business locally.
Another customer growth area is the knock-and-drop business, currently done largely by private companies delivering promotional pamphlets to houses. The South African Post Office already had the infrastructure in place to do this for a more reasonable cost. "These business drivers present huge opportunities for us to pull back more of the mail business. We can do it more efficiently because we already have the postman going there."
While the majority of our revenue is derived from business, the average resident is just as important as a customer segment even though the revenue generated from the average individual is far less. It is impressive to note that the South African Post Office has over the past year alone created 2.3 million new postal addresses.
Many residents in rural areas that lack physical addresses have been allocated with addresses using GPS (geo-positioning system) readings. What has laid the platform for these alternative revenue sources, is the emergence of a high-performance culture within the South African Post Office. "The leadership of this organisation has inculcated a culture of staff ownership of the business end of their individual functions within it. From this has evolved performance and understanding of how their role contributes to the ultimate group objectives."
Derick Foster, the General Manager of Sales would like to forsee a day, for instance, when the key account manager's job will revolve around relationship building with a view to selling in volume as part of their sales and marketing activity. "We need to get that close to our business customers, forge close relationships and understand the drivers of their business to better serve them. We want to provide the right channels to the right customer segments for the products and services that they require. If we hit the right notes by personalising the offerings we provide, then we can really get down to growing both our customer's business as well as our own.
Derick Foster
GM: Sales
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