Study on consumers’ postal practices and socio-economic needs in terms of the quality and provision of the priority postal service

Practice Area: Competition & Antitrust | Public Policy
Client: ARCEP and DGCIS of Ministry of Economiy, Finance and Industry
Published: June, 2011
Tagged: EC/EEA quantitative analysis report stakeholder surveys and consultations

The study focuses on the postal practices and needs of households and businesses, especially SMEs. The first part of the study examines the extent to which the postal service is important to users, the users’ knowledge of postal products, their current postal practices, their sensitivity to the time it takes for a postal product to be delivered,  the substitution of postal mail with electronic communications, the users’ perception of the quality of various postal aspects and the users’ priorities in terms of different postal service aspects to improve.

This first part presents also information on the response of businesses to the full opening to competition of the postal market. The second part of the study presents information on a) the users’ judgment of the price-quality value of different postal products and b) various potential changes to the price and delivery time of a priority letter, the number of mail distribution days and the mail deposit deadline. Multi-criteria analysis is used to assess and rank a number of scenarios involving different combination of the potential changes.