Customer Retention
Background
The U.S. Postal Service has a significant customer base, ranging from residential customers to large commercial mailers. Commercial mailers account for most of the Postal Service’s revenue — 71 percent ($46 billion) in fiscal year (FY) 2013.
The Postal Service has implemented customer retention efforts, including making changes to its Sales organization, enhancing its analytics to predict which customers it risks losing, and operating customer retention call centers. Our objective was to evaluate the effectiveness of the Postal Service’s customer retention strategies. We focused on the customer service and operational issues that hindered the Postal Service’s retention efforts as they were (a) identified by customers we surveyed as key reasons they churned or defected and (b) primarily within the Postal Service’s control.
What the OIG Recommended
We recommended the Postal Service enhance the effectiveness of its customer retention efforts by implementing strategies to promote organization-wide collaboration for handling customer service and operational problems that could lead to churn or defection, effectively sharing information on at-risk customers, and reaching out to former customers.