Case Study: La Poste – a story of change

This is a story of change, says Domnique Bailly, director of HR Strategy Management at La Poste.

"La Poste has two faces. We have public service activities with 2 million customers each day through 17,000 outlets each day in France. Then there is the industrial dimension of La Poste – we have to deliver 90 millions of items everyday. We are a public company under the pressure of change,” says Bailly. “La Poste was born in the 15th century. How people can believe that a company born 6 centuries ago could die is impossible to consider. We are facing real problems though and we had to move. We developed booklets of our problems and we gave them to our employees, the media and the parliament to say that we had to do something.

"Our first response was to invest in the main channel. We invested 3.4 bilion Euros to modernise. We can get the best profitability and the best quality and we can also have the most cutomised service. We are diversifying horizontally into parcels, finacial services with a full bank and a new retail network. We are also diversifying vertically with hybrid mail and marketing. We are the only company able to contact every consumer everywhere.