Sony Professional Services helps La Poste achieve its goals by installing 5,000 flat screen terminals

Executive summary

Against a backdrop of changing regulation and a growing competitive sector, La Poste, the French postal service, wanted to overhaul its retail postal strategy and offer enhanced, modernised facilities to both customers and staff. La Poste engaged with Sony Professional Services to help it deploy the biggest digital signage project in Europe; a total of 5,000 digital signage displays across 2,500 postal outlets running bespoke content to be entertaining and informative to customers.

The project has completed stage one, with the implementation of 500 post offices digitally wired in 2007, 1,000 post offices were completed in 2008 with another 1,000 expected to be completed in 2009.

Company background:

La Poste is the second biggest postal carrier in Europe, with 700,000 customers passing through its doors every day. With the total deregulation of the French postal service by 1 January 2011, the service has been keen to completely re-modernise, put customer service at the forefront of its strategy and expand its offerings to the public. As the second largest employer in France, La Poste was also looking to enhance its employee experience within its retail outlets.

Customer challenge

La Poste wanted to be able to communicate and promote its products and services to its customers throughout its 2,500 retail locations across France, from one central hub, rather than complicate each retail site with its own software. It was essential that any system was easy to use and flexible, to enable La Poste to update the system with new features and content as it required.

Sony solution

Sony PSE is helping La Poste achieve its goals by installing 5,000 40 inch flat screen terminals, without changing any structural elements of the La Poste sites, running across a network and controlled by Sony’s Ziris software. This enables the user to control the terminal, perform simultaneous media transfers and carry out maintenance, all from a single site in Nantes, France.

Results

By using the flat screens to update customers of information such as new services, changes in prices or opening and closing times, La Poste has fostered a better relationship with its customers with 76 percent saying the postal service is closer to its customers and more interesting. While La Poste customers were high on its agenda, the system has also had the additional impact of lowering stress within the post office, benefiting its staff. By keeping customers entertained during the busiest times, the staff became more relaxed when post offices became crowded, satisfied that customers were being kept happy while they were waiting.

The digital signage systems enable La Poste to connect and communicate with its 700,000 customers every day, and the postal service believes this number is likely to increase to 800,000 once all of the display units have been installed – helping to increase its revenues and its reach.

Why Sony were selected

La Poste put the project out to tender in 2006, to all the main market players. The service selected Sony because of the quality of its visual displays and the software that would enable La Poste to manage the system from one site. The additional benefit of having the capacity to develop regional and more localised content was also a key part of the buying decision.

Quote from La Poste Director:

Pascal Gilardi, Director, La Poste Group

“In the choice we made, one of the key criteria was our capacity to do regional slots, to relocate our programmes, locally and regionally – that’s why we chose Sony. The software is being developed with the help of Sony with their R&D department to help realise our objective. This will help us in the future to help all the local partners of La Poste across the whole territory.”