Product Visibility — The Postal Service is committed to providing customers with more information about their mail and packages, from the moment we receive it to the time we deliver it to homes and businesses. We’re focused on using technology to provide real-time visibility for our products as they move through the postal system. One of the technologies we’re investing in is Informed Visibility (IV). This solution will provide comprehensive, real-time, data-driven service performance measurement and diagnostics, mail inventory and predictive workloads, and end-to-end tracking and reporting for all mail. For the Postal Service, it means access to valuable business and operational intelligence to help make us more efficient in what we do. IV also will help reduce our operational costs and lay the foundation for enterprise analytics.
For our customers, IV will help the Postal Service provide consistent, reliable and predictable service. In addition, IV will add new value to mail, providing customers with long-needed, real-time mail visibility, tracking and performance metrics necessary to help them plan their mailings, measure success of each mailing campaign and efficiently staff their operations.
In a step toward making the IV solution a reality, the Postal Service in FY2015 implemented internal service performance measurement sampling through our new Mobile Delivery Devices (MDDs). Carriers use MDDs to scan live mailpieces at selected collection and delivery points. This data provides valuable insight into the first and last mile for postal operations. It also helps us reduce reliance on external support for service performance measurement — we can do that ourselves.
Informed Delivery — In today’s world, people want information sooner rather than later — and want to be able to get it wherever they are. They expect to manage their lives away from home and on their smartphones. Why not manage their mail the same way? The Postal Service is testing a service called Informed Delivery. It provides mobile users with an email — complete with a scanned image of the front of each of their hardcopy mailpieces — as an advance notice of the mail they’ll be receiving at home later that day. In FY2015, the service expanded to about 9,000 users in Northern Virginia, with more signing up every day. The insights and data gathered demonstrate a strong value for this digital service. As the test expands into the New York City metro area, new features will be implemented, including the ability to access interactive content associated with mail images.
Usps.com and the Postal Store — Our customers enthusiastically embrace the ease and convenience of online shipping and mailing through our website, usps.com. Traffic to our site continued to grow in FY2015, with an average of 3 million daily visits — an increase of more than 22 percent compared to the prior year. As an e-commerce platform, usps.com. generated just over $1 billion in revenue with more than 50 million purchase transactions, which represents more than 425 million unique users in the United States and worldwide.
FY2015 kicked off with the successful launch of a streamlined and simplified usps.com that reduced the number of static pages from 300 to 50. Optimization of the site continued throughout the year with a focus on improving and aligning the customer experience across all digital touch points, including mobile, desktop and retail kiosks. The goal is providing customers with a state-of-the-art e-commerce experience while growing revenue, strengthening our brand, increasing customer satisfaction and decreasing call volume to our Customer Care Centers.
Each month, we conducted user experience reviews of many of the over 30 applications on usps.com. Many of the recommendations resulting from the reviews were implemented. We also began developing an application style guide to ensure a consistent user experience across the site and assist development teams as they update and create new applications.
A robust set of analytic tools is now tracking user behavior across the entire site and within each application. This helps us measure and analyze growth as well as provide insights to help improve the customer experience. It also makes adding and removing specific marketing and campaign measurement tools quick and easy. A new customer satisfaction survey also was introduced on the site in FY2015, and includes a separate survey for the mobile experience. Customer feedback is available immediately, enabling the Postal Service to identify trends and any issues that need to be addressed. Also, a standardized iconography library was created for the site, mobile app and retail kiosks that will also be used on signage, printed materials and shipping supplies to ensure a consistent brand experience.
Search engine optimization is another focal point. Through ongoing analysis of customer search patterns, content has been optimized to shorten customers’ journeys from search to completed task. In addition, redesign work is underway to make the user experience “friction-free” on several applications, including customer registration, MyUSPS.com and PO Boxes Online.
In FY2015, the Postal Service began migration to an upgraded e-commerce platform for usps.com and the Postal Store. This will improve reliability, provide more dynamic content management tools and enable us to add more robust features and functionality. These upgrades will make it easier to:
Updates and enhancements made to the site during FY2015 included:
MyUSPS.com — MyUSPS.com, which is part of usps.com, is an online dashboard that gives customers instant visibility to all packages addressed to their residence without entering tracking numbers. Launched in fall 2014, MyUSPS.com has 5.3 million registered users. Customers can select how they receive updates (texts or email), direct where a package should be left (back door, at the neighbor’s house), and reschedule delivery of a missed package on a more convenient day. Enhancements to MyUSPS.com enable us to aggregate information about a household’s mail and shipments, communicate delivery status and provide functionality to control delivery through options like USPS Package Intercept.
USPS Mobile — Mobile solutions are essential to providing information and real-time data for Postal Service customers. The Postal Service’s mobile website provides on-the-go access to tracking information, Post Office locations, ZIP Code information and more. It gets over 200,000 visits each day — and this number is growing. To meet the demands of an increasingly mobile-connected nation, the Postal Service in FY2015 enhanced the mobile website to streamline navigation and update its design to provide a seamless experience for our customers.
