Some will be able to evoke a case of lèse-Marianne. At the beginning of next year, La Poste will propose to dispense with the stamp bearing the effigy of the Republic on mail envelopes. The principle is simple: you want to put a letter weighing less than 20 grams in a box but you don’t have a stamp and can’t go buy one (or don’t want to). From a telephone application, all you have to do is pay the price of the sticker and write in a pen the 8-character single-use code which will then be communicated to you.
According to Nathalie Collin, deputy general manager of the postal group and head of the “consumer and digital” branch, this new feature, which she presented on June 28, will illustrate the modern version of the expression “like a letter in the post”.
900,000 visitors per day at La Poste
Always more digital services, it is one of the axes of development of La Poste, which saw the frequentation of its offices drop, from 2 million people per day ten years ago, to 900,000 today. today. more or less, “This attendance is falling by 6 to 7% per year but there was a sharp drop of 25% during the Covid crisis”, notes Nathalie Collin, adding that some of these absentees at the counters, sometimes advised by La Poste agents, have got into the habit of carrying out a number of operations remotely. How many will come back? It is still an unknown, according to La Poste.
Anyway, the group will continue to restructure its network of physical points. The French are often moved by this: the number of post offices, in the strict sense of the term, has increased from 10,000 to 7,250 in twelve years. But the group affirms that the obligations imposed on it by the law on the universal postal service are respected. Namely that at least 90% of French people are not more than 5 km and less than 20 minutes by car from a postal contact point.
3.5 min wait on average at the counters
Because point of contact does not mean office! La Poste has set up 7,000 municipal agencies, often in premises such as town halls where several public services are offered. A way for mayors, according to Nathalie Collin, to also compensate for the drop in attendance at their “people’s houses”. The manager also recalls that the mayors have a right of veto on the possible abolition of an office in their municipality.
In addition to these agencies, La Poste has also developed 3,000 partnerships with private merchants, both in rural areas and in towns, where the main postal operations can be carried out.
The modernization of post offices will nevertheless be continued. According to Nathalie Collin, the objective is to renovate them all by 2027 and provide them with new IT tools. As for the average waiting time for users at the counter, it would have increased to 3.5 minutes. One of the group’s other commitments is to support the approximately 13 million users remote from digital technology, in particular with postal workers trained to identify vulnerable people at automatic machines to refer them to associations.