The Cheque's in the Post - But Will It Arrive?

Written by Mike Meade

From Reporter Issue 94

Jill Penton-Browne talks to Jacqueline Mirtelli, head of communication for La Poste in the Alpes-Maritimes.

In our correspondence columns this time a reader complains that "several letters and packets this past few months have gone missing." When I followed up Mr. Beaman's letter with a telephone call I found that what he meant was that part of the mail addressed to him here, including from the U.K., hadn't arrived. Could I find out why? And that's how I came to be sitting in the office of Jacqueline Mirtelli (picture) at the departmental headquarters of La Poste on rue Gounod in Nice.

"We do a good job"

"We take complaints very seriously," she told me, "and even more so now as we have to function in an increasingly competitive situation. On the other hand, they have to be placed in the context of our total operation. Here in the Alpes-Maritimes, for example, we deal with 1.5 million inward items every day and at our sorting centre we've a daily throughput of some 1.7 million items. Across the end of the year period we're delivering up to 2 million items a day. Of course, letters and parcels can go astray but most people don't have that experience very often and although we're not perfect I still think we do a good job."

The inner workings of the postal service are a bit of a mystery to the average user who imagines rows of doleful sorters frowning over letters, postcards and packets and, very slowly of course, assigning them to pigeon-holes. "Well, that's history, I have to tell you. To start with, almost all sorting is now done by high-tech machines which have a remarkable reliability both with typed and hand-written addresses. When the machines can't manage, then a human sorter quickly takes over. In the vast majority of cases, we can honour our promise to get domestic mail through someone's letter-box during the 24 hours following the day it was posted.

"But it's not just the machines that have brought about change. People play their part, too. La Poste is no longer an old-style administration. I came here from the private sector and I'm impressed by the quality of management-and by their effort to motivate our employees to the highest standards of service. We've got over 4,700 employees in the Alpes-Maritimes-with 1600 postmen, 450 sorters and 690 counter clerks. Certainly, you can't change all the old stagers but most of our people are aware of the need to be as efficient as possible and take pride in what they do."

"A very complicated system"

That sounds fine-but there are still people out there, like Mr. Beaman, with complaints that need to be answered of letters delayed, parcels lost. Why? "Well, as I say, we handle a huge volume of items and from the moment you post a letter or parcel, it enters a very complicated system which finally brings it to one of the 687,000 letter boxes in the Alpes-Maritimes or to a destination elsewhere in France or abroad. The same is true of inward mail. Your Mr. Beaman's items from the U.K., for example, would have been processed by our British colleagues before coming into Nice on a British Airways flight, being transferred to the sorting centre up the road from the airport and then sent out for delivery. Whether a letter's going from Cimiez to Colomars or from Menton to Manchester things can go wrong. The wonder is that they so rarely do."

I was impressed, I have to say, by Jacqueline Mirtelli's facts and figures. But there are some disquieting stories about. A reader was told by his postman that those amazing machines that can sort up to 30,000 letters an hour are sometimes seen as having an excess capacity and so mail is held up until there's a sufficient quantity to justify using them. "Sorry - that's just not true. But I'm not surprised your reader heard it from a postman. We've got a bit of an acceptance problem with some of the technology. For example, these new sorting machines can identify exactly which postman will be responsible for delivering a particular item and this can lead to some understandable apprehension." I also remembered something else I was told years ago by Jacqueline Mirtelli's predecessor Mady Baloche - that the Alpes-Maritimes was the "medical region" and that any employee with physical or mental problems could apply to be transferred here. This, I was glad to hear, is no longer true.

"Different services match needs"

Did Jacqueline Mirtelli have any advice for the user who wanted to get the best out of La Poste? "Absolutely. Find out about the different services we offer which match different needs. And that doesn't just apply to the business user. For example, if you're worried about an item of mail going astray you can pay a small sum to have it tracked all the way along the journey from the moment you post it to the time it reaches the addressee. The other thing is that the client can help us do our job well-above all, by addressing items clearly and especially with a correct postal code. If an address is incomplete it slows things up." And did she have any seasonal advice? "Well, as my daughter works in London I know there can be problems to and from the U.K. so I'd resurrect that slogan the old G.P.O. used to have: post early for Christmas. Like now."

� Jill Penton-Browne

EDITOR'S NOTE: We made a few last minute changes to this piece at the request of the Communications Department of La Poste who disapproved of our "tone." Plus �a change....! - Mike Meade

Where to go to grouse

So that letter plus cheque you expected didn't arrive? No use just whining to the postman or grumbling to a counter clerk. There's a special department dealing with complaints about the mail:Direction du Courrier,
Qualit� de service,
41 rue Gounod,
06000 Nice
TeL: (04 93 82 65 57)

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