The Postal Regulatory Commission has issued a new report entitled “Analysis of the Postal Service’s FY 2015 Annual Performance Report and FY 2016 Performance Plan.” The report finds that the Postal Service did not meet several of the performance goals that the Commission is required to review.
The Postal Service did not fulfill the goal of delivering “high-quality services” because of its poor performance on meeting service standards for delivery times, which the Postal Service blamed on bad weather and all the changes associated with consolidating mail processing plants. (For more on that, see this previous post and this OIG report.)
The Postal Service did not meet its performance goal of providing “excellent customer experiences,” as indicated by the Customer Insight survey, which showed that satisfaction targets were not met in several categories of customer service, such as receiving mail, point of sale experiences at the post office, wait time in line, and so on.
The Postal Service also did not meet its goal of ensuring a safe workplace because of increases in motor vehicle accidents, which the Postal Service explained were due to increased use of at-risk employees (primarily new PSEs) and expansion into Sunday delivery and grocery delivery (Amazon Fresh). (For more on that, see this previous post.)
The report also addresses the goal of an “engaged workforce,” but it does not find much to criticize because the Postal Service began using the Gallup Postal Pulse survey, which could not be readily compared to the survey used in years past. Unfortunately, the Commission did not take the extra step of asking to see the percentile rankings on each question in the survey. If it had, the Commissioners would have seen that on many questions the Postal Service ranked in the bottom 1 percentile of the Gallup database. (More on that in this previous post and this article on InsideSources, which filed a FOIA request to see the survey results.)
View the full PRC report here.
(Photo: Vehicle accident in Lake Havasu City, AZ, 12/29/15.)
