Royal Mail chooses the NETbuilder QMS solution to automate it's questionnaire process

Royal Mail Group plc is a public limited company wholly owned by the Government. Employing almost 193,000 people in the UK Royal Mail Group reaches everyone in the UK through the Post Office® and parcels businesses collecting, processing and delivering around 84 million items to 27 million addresses at some of the lowest prices in Europe. Each week Royal Mail serves 28 million customers through its network of some 14,300 Post Office® branches and delivers some 337 million parcels a year through Parcelforce Worldwide and General Logistics Systems, its domestic and European parcels businesses.

Local councils are required to solicit opinion from residents on how to spend their budget as this essentially is public money. Historically this has been conducted through mail shots which have had a very poor response rate. Post Office Limited, with its footprint of Post Offices, is ideal for soliciting public opinion through interactive kiosks conveniently located within the branch network.

The Post Office needed a way of improving the response rate when soliciting opinion from the general public. On putting out a tender, the Post Office selected NETbuilder because of its expertise as a managed service and infrastructure company but also due to its proven track record in software build and the projects conducted to deploy Question Management System (QMS) software at other public sector sites.

NETbuilder started working with the Post Office in February 2008 to provide a fully managed service including:

• Supply and provision of IBM Touch screen Kiosks
• Supply and management of connectivity, remote monitoring and support for the kiosks deployed
• Build, testing and configuring of the QMS, an enterprise questionnaire management system developed by NETbuilder and tailored to Royal Mail requirements
• Management of the infrastructure, hosting and server environment
• Build and management of report writing

The project, which ended its first phase in October 2008, has enabled The Post Office to fully automate its questionnaire process and during the trial period, public responses increased by 7700%. NETbuilder's unique offering has meant that with the strategic and widespread locations of the post offices, the Royal Mail can now target polling as well as providing other services to the community.