Three hundred million to digitize Italian post. This is the figure that, according to the CEO of the group Francesco Caio, will be spent in the period 2015-2020 to bring the Post Office more and more into the twenty-first century and a world where digital is the master, to make a historic service such as the postal one modern, with all its branches also in the world of finance.
"In the last year and a half - declared the CEO of Poste during the meeting with the press on the subject of digital transformation, hosted this morning in Talent Garden Poste Italiane – we have worked hard on digital to offer customers ever easier, faster and more convenient services. It's an industrial path: we are redesigning processes from a customer-centred perspective and the business potential, from customer interaction in post offices to the financial and logistics component, is enormous”.
2.0, underlines Poste, is increasingly the future of the company: "We have fielded - continued Caio - heavy investments and acted on a change in the different ways of working, because among the impacts of digital there is also a strong change of business processes. It is no longer possible to hypothesize the creation of a service without bringing together different skills. Our results are encouraging, we have already taken important steps and we are determined to increase our efforts”
The goals
Poste Italiane has focused on digitization in all its core businesses, i.e. post and logistics, insurance and financial services, counting on the large numbers that the group can boast, both with respect to the adoption of tools launched on the market (17 million Postepay and 109 billions of managed insurance technical reserves) and with respect to a widespread physical presence (about 13 post offices, 7 ATMs).
Focusing on digital, as the group's strategic marketing manager Barbara Poggiali explains, means focusing on “multi-channel customers, the most loyal and most valuable ones. It's not just young people who use the Internet and mobile phones and there's a lot of room to conquer”.
"Digital transformation", adds Poggiali, "goes through innovative services to improve the customer experience, both in the consumer world and in the business segment". In any case, even if Poste Italiane aims to be a national digital champion, it is a "hybrid 2.0 model, because we have many traditional channels that we will continue to have and that we want to enhance".
A key commitment also for the division bancoposta, which with over 7 million account holders to accompany in the digital world and in the world of digital banking aims to create a multi-channel offer". According to the manager "the type of offer you have is not so important, but maintaining consistency between it and the service model".
Bancoposta's goal, he adds, recalling the leadership of the Postepay app on the Apple and Android stores, is "to accompany payments with additional services: we are not just an issuer of Postepay prepaid cards, but a company that manages a payment circuit through cards and manages collections through payment slips”.
The newness
Con la nuova Postepay app, and even more with theBancoPosta app, you can pay your bills and download them digitally, thus having the history of your domestic payments at any time. The new Postepay app also allows you to transfer money in real time, through your telephone directory. In the three months since its commissioning, the app has received 4 million downloads and allowed 100 transactions, with over 100 million euros transacted by apps.
In this way, a real-time money sending circuit can be created, up to 25 euros per day without commission. Beyond that amount, there will be a fixed commission of 1 euro, in a world of whatsapp model communities in which it will also be possible to split accounts with one's friends.
Utmost priority, of course, was given to safety, with a secret confirmation code and the possibility of confirming all digital transactions from the app in a simple and secure way with the Poste Id. You can check card operations from the web, app, ATM and call center, to change the usage limits at pos and Atm
There are also many discounts linked to Bancoposte cards, both to Postepay and to Bancoposta. There are about 30 physical stores and 22 online partners and a special app that offers geolocation, category search and discount reporting services.
However, as mentioned, digital innovation also concerns the physical part of the group: thepost office. Poste Italiane's goal is to offer a new experience, thanks to the digitization of post offices, with free Wi-Fi in 3 offices, a new touchscreen queue-breaker in 1.600 offices and, in general, an evolution towards digital to dematerialise paper.
The development of the Poste Italiane App also goes in this direction, an app which, unlike BancoPoste and PostePay, is dedicated to anyone. Through this app, you will have the post office in your pocket and the possibility of booking tickets by time slot, paying bulletins, sending registered mail, telegrams and letters, and tracking shipments. Since its launch, the app has been downloaded by 650 people.
Finally, we come to the chapter of dematerialisation in post offices, also from a green point of view. Poste Italiane aims to give up paper as much as possible, reducing prints to a minimum and optimizing space. The watchwords are: attention to customers, operational management of resources and enabling of new business processes.
