Australia Post recently released its annual results. Revenues from “regulated mail” – standard postage – are $1924 million and falling, and it made a loss of $148 million. “Non regulated parcels and retail” revenues were up 8.5% to $3073 million, returning a profit of $546 million. An important part of its future will be digital services provided to its commercial customers and Australian consumers.
A starting flurry in this new world is the soft launch of MailBox in November 2012 with a full launch to take place early in 2013. Australia Post has announced that several Australian banks, government departments and utilities will use the Digital MailBox. It will be free to all Australians. It will enable consumers to receive and pay bills, track and manage their relationships with their providers and store all of their important documents in one place. It’s accessed with one password, from any Internet enabled device, 24/7, from anywhere in the world.
Enter Digital Post Australia (DPA), a joint venture between Computershare Ltd, Fuji Xerox Document Management Solutions Pty Limited and Zumbox Inc.
Got that? It’s Digital Mailbox from Australia Post, and Digital Postbox from Digital Post Australia. You can see why Australia post is suing Digital Post Australia over the name. The first court action was dismissed, but Australia Post is pursuing the action.
At the launch of DPA’s Digital Postbox in early December, CEO Randy Dean ridiculed Australia Post’s launch. “Our competitor recently used its trusted and iconic brand to ‘formally launch’ what appears to be a ‘statement of interest’ for their Digital Mailbox Service. We felt Australians deserved to see what a functioning Digital Postbox looks like and how it operates.” Dean invited consumers to preview the service and activate their “secure and free” Digital Postbox.
Dean says Digital Postbox begins a new era of convenient online mail delivery. “Once the consumer’s Digital Postbox is activated, they won’t need to do anything else. Mail will be automatically delivered online and be available on virtually any web-connected device. Consumers can receive, store and manage important documents such as bills and account statements in a trusted and secure environment. Digital postal mail offers businesses an efficient and cost-effective customer channel that can be enabled using their existing business processes and partnerships and can deliver savings of up to 70% per mail item.”
“We have decades of experience in the secure digital processing, storage, management and printing for the largest and most security sensitive organizations in Australia including banks, government agencies and superannuation funds.
The two companies are now readying their products for market, attempting to pre-empt each other with various pre-releases and announcements. There is no love lost between the two, and their sniping and attempts to define themselves and each other are becoming more intense.
But this is not the only competition. Existing systems like BPay, increasingly sophisticated online banking and now the imminent boom in mobile payments systems are making the technology largely obsolete before it is even introduced.
The eventual winners in this digital environment will be those companies that have a strong customer culture – one in which customer insight and foresight will determine the best way to compete, where the future competition will come from, how future profit will be made.
Australia Post, as a government owned organization, still has a way to go to create and embed a customer culture that will enable it to compete profitably in the digital marketplace.
