Electronic delivery in Finland: Conclusions from a field experiment

The postal industry in Finland is facing the biggest change in its history. Electronic communication is winning ground and the new Finnish Postal Act opens up the postal market.

As a response to this change Itella developed new, even more versatile solutions for both physical and electronic communication.

Facts and figures

Underneath are some facts and figures on Itella:

• Finnish Postal Service
• Business customers account for 96% of net sales, consumers 4%
• Itella helps its customers to enhance their competitiveness and run their business more successfully
• The decline in volumes continues, parcel volumes increase as online shopping grow

The Itella Field trial

In the rural area of Anttila Itella conducted a field experiment ”Living Lab”, that focused on customer centric development of new postal services.

The Living Lab was started by trying a new service concept during spring 2010. 122 households and 17 small companies participated in the trial on a voluntary basis.

• In the trial mail was delivered both in paper and electronic form
• Mail was delivered twice a week to the mailbox as usual.
• On other days mail was delivered to the post locker located by the village shop.
• Mail that was not retrieved from the locker was delivered to the mailbox twice a week.
• First and second class letters were scanned and delivered electronically to NetPosti. After scanning mail was put back to envelope and delivered in paper form.
• It was also possible to receive letters to NetPosti from selected senders without format conversion.

In December 2010 the trial was extended to digital delivery of a local newspaper

• 15 households and 49 recipients participated in the trial
• the newspaper trial lasted 6 months
• in the trial a newspaper was delivered in digital form to the Netposti electronic mailbox

The key results of the trial

After the trial ended the participants together concluded that:

• In general, diversity occurred in the needs of the participants for postal services
• Many of the participants were satisfied with getting their paper mail only twice a week to the mailbox.
• Digitizing of letters got both positive and negative feedback.
• Receiving newspaper in digital form and reading it with e-reader got really positive feedback.

Download the presentation on the Itella field trial http://www.wik.org/fileadmin/Konferenzbeitraege/2011/13th_Koenigswinter_seminar/S3_3_Rokkanen.pdf