Post Office problems bring about now unavoidable changes to business practice

It seems a new world pattern is forming, more quickly than expected. One that we can’t ignore. It seems we are now not in a market where electronic marketing is not only more pervasive, not only more accessible, not only cheaper and faster, but that electronic business is the only, truly reliable mechanism under which we can actually do business now.

I am reminded of the early days of fax communications, at first it was unacceptable. Then fax became acceptable – by banks and now, just a few short years later though, fax is hardly used. In the ‘electronic world’ seismic shift comes often. We are fast to adapt. In the real world, these things are much slower. But, it seems that sadly, although probably at last we are truly seeing the turning point of a seismic shift that has been facing us for some time. There is a natural order to these things.

It revolves around our Postal Services. It has become conspicuously and now regularly unreliable. It can no longer be regarded as a failsafe method of important document delivery. The loss associated with errant mail is too high. Missed payments, late payments, payments never materialising, both inward and outward makes this the case.

Interestingly, resolution -i.e. when a payment is late/lost/missing is most often resolved in my experience, electronically by email and sometimes fax (we still have one of those machines). Payments are made electronically, copies of documents are scanned and forwarded. An email, like a fax was is now considered a legally acceptable document. Someone was actually served in the UK recently by Twitter…

Wow! This is a seismic shift, this is the reality of where we are now. Not based on what future technology will do, but based on what current technology – and human beings are doing already, today. We have to operate this way, we have no choice when we are let down by the traditional service providors. This is much bigger than simply that the online advertising sector is bigger than television. Although that is big.

Online services are now more effective in real world scenarios than multiple countrywide postal systems and 10s of thousands of people. I think we can forecast that the effect of the postal strike will help companies hasten their transition to online systems and more readily sign up for digital supplier services, whilst consumers will order for christmas early and do so online.

Meanwhile it becomes obvious that less of us will use the post office – how long to the demise of the printed Postcard? It is already online…