How postal service innovates with new technologies

Use the mail and parcels model to your advantage while the postal service works to improve its services using modern technologies.

How postal service innovates with new technologies
Use the mail and parcels model to your advantage. Photo by Markus Spiske / Unsplash

The postal service has not vanished; rather, technical advancements in recent years, particularly during the pandemic, have resulted in a transition and adaption to these developments. Postal courier services were maintained for many years, and stamps were required as payment for shipping.

Because of the social separation that the health crisis indicated, the populace began to connect intensely through various digital media: email, instant messaging (WhatsApp), and even Facebook and Instagram, which gradually adapted old mail to new technology.

The classic epistolary interchange was one of the first contemporary forms of long-distance interpersonal contact. However, the adoption of more rapid, quick, and efficient technology resulted in a decrease in the use of handwritten letters. They are presently mostly used for the delivery of advertising and official communications.

According to Statista, an international statistics portal with over one million statistics, papers, and dossiers on more than 170 industries in 50 countries, the globe has around 4.147 billion e-mail users, a figure that is expected to rise to 4.594 billion by 2025.

According to this company's Number of e-mail users worldwide 2017-2025 research, the number of global e-mail users reached 3.718 billion in 2020, with approximately 306 billion messages sent and received per day globally. In three years, this quantity is likely to rise to more than 376 billion.

According to government figures from 2021, Correos de México handled an estimated 345 million pieces. Mail was delivered by 2,659 routes and 7,345 letter carriers, as well as 3,714 motorbikes, 1,631 bicycles, and 647 vehicles from its 7,254 offices.

This agency was able to capitalize and hop on the innovation bandwagon. E-commerce has introduced a new means of purchasing and distributing things, revitalizing the postal and parcel business model.

Ordinary mail continues to exist, even though the majority of our personal and professional communications are now done electronically, as do online retailers, which have set a new norm for postal service offices with shipments. In the face of tremendous technological advancement, the traditional postal service must evolve and adapt.

One of the primary responsibilities of the government postal service is parcel delivery, which entails the transportation of commodities, household goods, food, and personal items; this is one of the duties that technology will not be able to replace.

Correspondence delivery is a declining activity, a work that has been replaced by e-mail and instant messaging, which allow people to receive papers and epistolary exchanges nearly instantly at the national and international level, to one person or a group of individuals at the same time.

The postal service as it currently exists will be kept because it was one of the sources of long-distance communication, with the sole negative being the delivery, which is still archaic.

The traditional mail is a magnificent medium of tremendous value to humanity; it was one of the earliest tools used to communicate between families and governments, and it has even contributed to peace. We would not be who we are now if it did not exist.

Pollution from digital sources

In terms of electronic and instant messaging, humanity has no obstacles to communicating with others, even across borders, in interpersonal, commercial, business, and governmental sectors. The pandemic was a watershed moment in establishing the postal service's new objectives and charting its trajectory to continue with the goal of communicating through parcel delivery.

Technology enabled us to save paper and ink; nevertheless, with the digital issue, we began to become addicted to these digital issues, because we save information from more than five years ago that we no longer need, and we produce digital pollution in some way.

It is essential to form good habits to preserve healthy and effective communication, as it was done through letters, and formal epistolary exchange where we tried not to use bad words, and to use good spelling and legible handwriting. Now, with e-mail, we do not strive to garigolize the initial letter of a sentence; that is part of the change and we have to adapt to it.

Commemoration

Every year on October 9, World Post Day commemorates the anniversary of the founding of the Universal Postal Union in 1874 in Bern, Switzerland. The UPU (Universal Postal Union) Congress in Tokyo, Japan, declared it in 1969.

Since then, more than 150 countries have celebrated this day in various ways: some workplaces present or promote new products and services, while others recognize their employees' achievements.

The commemoration's goal is to increase awareness of the postal sector's importance in everyday life and its contribution to nations' social and economic growth. Given some of the trends that are fundamentally transforming our world, it is critical to recall the importance postal services play in our societies at all times.