Memorandum submitted by Paul Saunders
I have spent most of the last 28 years
working in 15 Crown Post offices, 20 years of this as
a Branch Manager in seven offices. In this time we have lurched
from one priority to another, broadly in the cycle;
2. Reducing Customer Waiting Times.
As we have been through each of these stages
the other two areas have largely been forgotten. For the last
ten years or so the emphasis has increasingly been on generating
Sales, with concentration heavily placed upon the more profitable
of our products, like Credit Cards, Insurance Services, and Travel
Money. From reading the submissions to your Web Forum, and from
my own experience of serving over 300 customers a week, it
is obvious that these products are not required by the majority
of our customers. I'm afraid my working life is not very pleasurable
as I am continually exhorted to sell things to people that they
do not want. I do not complain—it is what I get paid for.
However, the huge amount of money, time, and resource directed
to this endeavour bothers me greatly. I hate seeing the waste.
I appreciate that this is a very difficult problem,
and I fully understand why the leaders of our organisation have
made a laudable attempt to make it profitable. However, it has
been obvious to me for at least the last two years that the current
strategy just isn't going to work. The sadness is that for some
reason they seem unwilling to acknowledge this and change direction.
We have been told for example of plans to press ahead with the
recruitment of a further 300 or so "Financial Service
Specialists", despite overwhelming evidence that this initiative
is not working. Most of my colleagues and I knew from the start
that this would not be a success—we simply do not have enough
customers for the products these people are supposed to sell.
Worse, these members of staff have to come from the resource within
the office, so they idly stand around watching four or five of
us serving a queue of up to forty people.
Inefficiency is rife, with managers and staff
regularly being sent all over the country on expensive "Workshops"
and Courses. We seem to have a Sales Manager for every possible
eventuality. Working practices in Crown Offices are uncoordinated,
and quite frankly, I am embarrassed to work there when I know
that customers are being made to wait much longer then they need
to.
Obviously my view is very much "from the bottom
up" but it does seem such a shame that the experience, views,
and knowledge of many people like me are not even sought. I suppose
that in a sense this has to be, everybody making contributions
in an ad-hoc way would just end in chaos.
28 February 2009
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