Our customers are at the center of everything we do. We’re dedicated to making sure every interaction with the Postal Service is a positive experience. Americans depend on us to provide reliable, dependable and economical products and services, and we’re delivering on that promise in new and exciting ways.
Informed Visibility – The Postal Service is committed to providing customers with more information about their mail and packages, from the moment we receive them to the time we deliver them 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, near 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, it will add new value to mail, providing customers with long-needed, near 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 FY2016, we expanded the IV application by providing internal reports, tools and visualizations to Operations. These tools help monitor scan compliance and manage service performance. We also began development of mail inventory and predictive workloads, which will provide Operations with greater insight into managing workloads and resources. Additionally, we began piloting the new mail tracking and reporting application to support visibility for mailers in September 2016.
Informed Delivery – With the growth of digital and mobile communications, we have an opportunity to transform how consumers view mail and make it more accessible and convenient. We are testing Informed Delivery, which provides customers with a scanned image of the outside of letter-sized mailpieces that they will be receiving later that day. Customers have access to the images through an online dashboard via the MyUSPS platform on usps.com as well as through the MyUSPS application for smart phones, or they can opt to receive an email notification.
The Postal Service first tested Informed Delivery in Northern Virginia in 2014 and expanded it to areas of New York and Connecticut in 2015. A national launch is planned for spring 2017. As the test expands, new features will be implemented, including the ability to access interactive content associated with mail images. The insights and data gathered demonstrate that Informed Delivery notification service has a strong value.
USPS.com and the Postal Store – Our customers enthusiastically embrace the ease and convenience of online shipping and mailing through our website, usps.com. In FY2016, there were over 1.7 billion visits to usps.com — an increase of 11 percent compared to the prior year. With an average of 4 million daily visits to our site, our digital footprint continues to expand. As an e-commerce platform, usps.com generated just over $1 billion in revenue with more than 55 million purchase transactions, which represents more than 53 million unique users in the United States and worldwide.
Due to the significant increases in online traffic and revenue, a new web analytics platform was implemented in late FY2016. This new platform will help us measure and analyze website growth while providing important insights to help improve the customer experience. Data from the analytics platform will also be integrated into a new user experience testing tool. Both tools will provide usps.com the ability to conduct and analyze user experience testing to continually improve the website experience.
During FY2016, we focused on continued optimization to improve and align the customer experience across all digital touch points including mobile, desktop and retail kiosks. Our goal is to provide our 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.
A highlight of this effort was the development of a digital style guide to create consistency across all digital platforms. The style guide provides design and development teams with a standardized style, elements for a unified approach and consistent voice across the usps.com domain and other microsites for the Postal Service. This effort will help build our brand, save development time and money and provide a seamless customer experience.
We continue to expand and utilize the data that we receive from our customer feedback tools. We frequently update our customer satisfaction survey to ensure the questions being asked are relevant and provide actionable data. We also use a customer experience replay tool, which enables us to visualize customer activity on the site. During FY2016, we also developed page-level surveys to gather customer feedback for specific content areas and applications on the site. Customer responses from these tools helped us identify opportunities to improve the customer experience. Customer feedback helped us to update content on our website, such as enhancing our frequently asked questions section and Hold Mail Service on usps.com.
For FY2016, we led redesign efforts for Customer Registration, usps.com homepage and USPS Tracking as well as changing the user interface for Hold Mail Service. We conducted user experience reviews for our redesign efforts and used the recommendations that resulted from the reviews to ensure a “friction-free” user experience. The creative development work for many of these efforts was addressed in FY2016, with scheduled launch in FY2017.
Total revenue for the online Postal Store grew 4 percent in FY2016 compared to the previous year, with total revenue of more than $280 million. Significant enhancements were made to the Postal Store to improve the customer experience and grow revenue. In the second quarter, PayPal was implemented as an alternative payment option for online desktop and mobile Postal Store transactions, with almost $7.55 million in PayPal revenue and an estimated $450,000 savings as a result of reduced merchant credit card fees.
To improve the usps.com search functionality, changes were made in the third quarter of FY2016 to the existing online search function to help customers find relevant information, services and products more quickly and seamlessly. In FY2017, a new search feature will be added to the Postal Store to allow customers to quickly filter through relevant items, collectibles, shipping supplies and retail merchandise.
My USPS.com – My USPS.com is an online customer portal that aggregates information about a household’s mail and shipments, communicates delivery status and provides functionality to control delivery. It provides eligible residential customers with a single, comprehensive dashboard solution with the ability to track and manage incoming USPS domestic packages online. With the integration of Informed Delivery, the portal also serves as a way to navigate between package and mail views for customers enrolled in both services.
USPS Mobile – Mobile solutions are essential to providing information and real-time data for Postal Service customers. We offer a set of our most popular features on our mobile website (m.usps.com) as well as Android and iPhone mobile applications. Users are able to track packages, log on to My USPS, create Priority Mail shipping labels, buy stamps, calculate shipping prices, find USPS locations and ZIP Codes, schedule a pickup, hold mail and change an address — all from the convenience of their mobile phones. Over 55 million users accessed our mobile website in 2016. The Postal Service continues to enhance the mobile website to provide a seamless experience for our customers.
