Postal Services in Ivory Coast: Projects and Vision for the Future of La Poste

Interview with Mamadou Konate, Chief Executive Officer of La Poste de Côte d’Ivoire

You are working on something really big right now. How is La Poste going to go from the traditional postal service to something more logistic? How are you going to set the wheels in motion on this project?

As the world changes, La Poste has to reinvent itself, in a way that traditional postal jobs evolve into logistic jobs. Logistics can be boosted by electronic commerce, which we ourselves carry out, and which all our partners carry out, through La Poste’s distribution platform. This requires younger employees, who are more results and ICT oriented, so that all e-commerce companies in Ivory Coast can rely on La Poste’s distribution platform, which is going to be significantly improved, because today, we are going to multiply the 50 or so vehicles we have by 10. We are going to span out across Abidjan and initiate an extension policy for our network throughout the country.

Today we have exactly 192 post offices, but our wish is to get as close to our clientele as possible, to facilitate distribution.

What can you say to these young graduates? Why work for La Poste? What can this big company offer them?

La Poste, first of all, will offer them the guarantee of a job, those we have employed for decades, we won’t chase them out; we will offer them the possibility to leave under very profitable conditions. Those coming into our employment must be reassured that their job at La Poste may change, but that it won’t disappear overnight. A country without a postal service is unfathomable, it is a perennial industry. The picture we want to paint for you is that La Poste is not cut off from this evolution, because the emergence that we are talking about couldn’t have come about without La Poste. La Poste will play a very important roll in the emergence. It will mean an increase in exchanges between Ivorians across Ivory Coast, but also many types of exchanges between Ivorians and people of the Diaspora, and even economic operators in other countries. All this shows that there is a profitable future for transnational commerce; and that is e-commerce. You can order on-line and pay with your credit card, but you will always need La Poste to receive the purchased item.

Even in a context of excess digitalisation, we have always said that people have faith in La Poste, but for all the administrative documents that will be de-materialised, we need a third party we can trust, and that third party is La Poste.

With regards to the supporting documents, can you explain the partnership you have with Aramex? What do you offer?

As I was saying, we need to make exchanges outside of the country and Aramex is a partner, but the product we developed with Aramex is Poste Express International. It is a service that allows us to send, on behalf of economic operators, parcels, letters and any other document to foreign countries within 24 to 72 hours, depending on the final destination. It’s a product which will help both small businesses and large companies with their foreign exchanges. It’s an identical express postal service to those of competitors.

Yes, and speaking of competition, what are your competitive advantages compared to big multinationals, what do you bring to the table?

The advantage of this La Poste product on this market is the price. Our prices are considerably lower than those offered by our competitors and I think that the best way to support the economy is to offer competitive rates to businesses, with identical service quality. The most important factor of express post is tracking. With our partner, we have the technical feasibility to allow our customers to track their item up until the moment it is delivered. At each stage of delivery they will know if their item has been delivered or not, and if it has not they will know the reason why it is yet to be delivered. It may be because of Customs or it may be that the customer was not present when the item was delivered, this information is reported every day and the customer can access it.

You are in the process of rolling out the hybrid service, you also have a foreign partner on this project who is Moroccan, can you tell us a little bit about the advantages of this service?

After much research, La Poste decided to launch 4 products. There’s e-commerce, the hybrid postal system, this morning we signed an agreement for new generation franking machines and we also have Trans Express.

The hybrid postal system is a postal system which starts electronically and ends with physical delivery. Big organisations, whether they be banks, for account statements, water and electricity companies, insurance companies, the Directorate-General of Taxes… they issue a lot of letters which contain fixed and variable data. At the end of each cycle, the bank will send us the variable data which allows machines installed at the national sorting centre to print the documents, to put them into envelopes and to send them to the recipient. The banks send us the data electronically, which allows us to print the letters and guarantee delivery. We created this in collaboration with a Moroccan technical partner, but with the support of ANSUT, the national agency for universal service, who is responsible for all universal service matters.

What is your strategic mid-term vision for the next one or two years? What would you like to develop?

The 4 products I was just talking about have to be introduced before the end of the first quarter of 2015. After that we have other products. We will introduce other products in 2016 which will really focus on ICT. We are going to start selling phone cards and the process is currently being put into place. We will be like telephone operators but without the installations. The places where the phone cards are sold will be marked La Poste. We also have virtual portfolios, which are one of the products to be rolled out after the cards.

Let’s talk about franking machines. Businesses are going to have their machines, they are going to issue items themselves, you’re launching a product that already exists but that is not-well liked, is that it?

Exactly. Because technology evolves quickly and the new generation machines are characteristically delivered to the customer by us, whereas previously the customer had to go and buy the machine from the supplier. Now, we make the machines available to them. We’re talking about smart machines that weigh all formats of post, the machine determines the weight, the price to pay, we no longer need to go to our customers to pick the post up, the machine does everything automatically, and the bill is prepared by the machine, so we don’t have to go anywhere. I think that it’s something that will really make our customer’s lives easier, they don’t have to invest any more.

Let’s talk about the event that will take place on 14th April in Geneva, the UPU Conference. Ivory Coast will chair this event, what does that mean for you?

After much research, La Poste decided to launch 4 products. There’s e-commerce, the hybrid postal system, this morning we signed an agreement for new generation franking machines and we also have Trans Express.

The strategic conference takes place between two UPU (Universal Postal Union) Congresses. Congresses are when big decisions are made. The strategic conference allows us to review the application of decisions made at the previous Congress before the following Congress, which will take place in Istanbul.

The strategic conference is the second most important event that comes just after Congress. This event was supposed to take place in Ivory Coast in October 2014. Unfortunately, because of the psychosis generated by Ebola, we realised that participants didn’t want to come to Abidjan. Despite all the guarantees we gave them, the states are sovereign, nobody wanted to take the risk. In agreement with the international UPU office, we decided to move this strategic conference to Geneva. It will take place on the 13th and 14th of April. Despite the move, the UPU decided to keep this conference under the chairmanship of Ivory Coast. It will be chaired by the high patronage of the Head of the Ivorian State. We have just learned that the Head of State will be represented by the Prime Minister, who will thus deliver a speech on behalf of Ivory Coast.

This conference will be based on the role of La Poste in the development of countries. Other sub-themes which will be discussed are innovation, inclusion and integration. These are important themes, because whether in financial terms or with regards to the postal industry as a whole, La Poste has to respond to these needs which are more than necessary today. Innovation is key. La Poste must reinvent itself, it must adapt to innovations around the world today. And La Poste must also contribute to social inclusion, first of all because, thanks to La Poste, everyone can have an address, if not you are excluded from society. Thanks to La Poste, you can open an account whatever you income level. It’s an inclusion factor. All of these themes are very important and postal workers will be thinking about them in Geneva on the 13th and 14th of April.

If you had to issue a call for applications, what would you like to highlight? What would your important message be?

What I hold near and dear to my heart is La Poste’s will, this will, which is encouraged by the top Ivorian authorities; the will to adapt to change. As such, in collaboration with the Universal Postal Union, we are researching the possibility of creating, in Ivory Coast and in a university setting, what we call a post office of the future. It’s a post office aimed at young students, the future of our country. These are very demanding young people, they have ever-changing needs. The office we are designing for these young people is essentially ICT orientated. An office where you can have all the commodities, on-line, to the extent of everything you can imagine which may be of interest to young people. This will be the ideal place to make exchanges with the outside world; it will have a friendly atmosphere, and so on.

The style of this office is already on the drawing board, we just need to make it a reality and we think that all the countries in the world will follow suit, because, as the UPU experts say, this office will be visited as a true sanctuary, people will come visit it to duplicate it elsewhere.

Are you the first to do it?

Yes, we are the first, it doesn’t exist anywhere else and when it will be done, I think we will have to duplicate it. The idea is to create a kind of post office that is truly geared up to the audience of where it is located. In the future the same services won’t necessarily be available in a post office on campus and in post offices in the commercial market. Products will vary depending on the needs of the target audience, that’s the new concept.