Reimagining the Post Office

How do you keep a near 400-year-old organisation relevant today? How do you maintain and develop services that serve the broadest possible range of people across the entire country? These are the constant challenges facing the UK’s Post Office.

Of course, these challenges are similar to those of other public institutions, but as a government-owned commercial business with a social purpose, the Post Office also faces additional complexity.

The Post Office operates the UK’s largest retail network with more than 11,500 branches – 99.7 per cent of the population live within three miles of a Post Office and 97 per cent of branches are run on a franchise or agency model by retail partners. The Post Office aims to reset its relationship with postmasters who run the network of independent branches and support them so their businesses can thrive, but it is under pressure to become more self-sufficient.

The need for transformation could not be clearer.

Delivering on the promise of modernisation

The Post Office had clear objectives for this modernisation. Firstly, completely reimagining its purpose, which in this case means reforming the fundamental mechanics of the organisation for the benefit of the postmasters.

The key component of the Post Office system is the postmaster’s terminal — the portal used to manage transactions with customers, and which also enables them to access other services to run their branches such as ordering stock.

The Post Office needed to make the whole service experience easier, faster and more intuitive for its postmasters. For two years the Post Office worked on building a new self-service system in-house to help postmasters manage their branches and provide a richer user experience than its legacy, terminal-based system, but progress had stalled. A partnership with Accenture and putting a new, delivery-driven internal programme team in place at the start of 2020 gave the project the kick-start it needed.