Some locally-relevant services by Pakistan Post – slightly innovative too

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Osama A.

Osama runs a Social Media Marketing Agency and a Software Product Company. He has been involved in building online communities since 1997 and his major strengths are understanding how people choose to come together and work as strong cohesive units that believe in brands or causes. His team's flagship product offers highly innovative ways to get professional teams to work better together - resulting in significantly saved time in common tasks around getting people on the same page; and also resulting in a greater sense of trust among virtual teammates. You may contact him at hashmi@cdfsoftware.com with inquiries.

With its reinvented face where Pakistan Post seems to be accepting its role as a black hole for mail, the department has also launched some services, which are actually interesting because of their local relevance.

Collection of Utility Bills at Doorsteps

Maybe this is old but its the first I had heard of it — now you can have your postman pick up your bill payments from your home.

This might be a small dent on the “electronic bill payment” service vendors like Inov8 and Orion who also solve the problem of “having to stand in line at the bank”.

Offline Email (“Paper Email Service”?)

Now you can send emails to your loved ones even to the most “disconnected” areas of Pakistan.

Here’s how it works:

1- You send an email to an email address on Pakistan Post

2- Pakistan Post office prints out the email and sends it out as a letter (snail-mail) to the offline person.

Kindof nice? Too bad India thought of it first.

DailyTimes via TeeEmm

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4 additional thoughts for this post.

Kashif Said:
June 20th, 2007 at 12:26 am
Changing logo and uniform won’t serve any purpose unless the whole decayed system is not changed. I have seen number of their branches here and they are still living in the ’80s using rotten manual registers for daily transactions.
On Strategy for Technology Companies : Green & White Said:
June 28th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
[...] 1- The resulting products will typically not be localized enough. Do people in Pakistan really want a mobile transaction engine for automated utility bill payments over an ATM network, or do they just want a friendly Pakistan Post? [...]
What hitech Entrepreneurs can learn from a Sabzi Waala : Green & White Said:
June 28th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
[...] For hitech ventures, find out what people want to pay premium for before you make yourself into a hitech venture in the first place. The example I give is “What if your consumers want to pay premium for paying utility bills in an easier way? One option is to build a highly-scalable mobile transaction management system running over ATM networks. The other is to do what Pakistan Post has done“ [...]
Badsra Said:
July 29th, 2007 at 9:32 am
About email conversion to snailmail, I wrote a post on similar lines. Not sure of the pricing for this service in Pakistan, but India charges something like 15INR per page of email.

Wouldn’t it be better to give the service for free and maybe add a flyer to the snailmail? Or a mail-order catalog perhaps? That would cover the cost of printing and the two-rupee stamp on a snailmail.