Most Portuguese people give a rating of 14-16 (on a scale of 1 to 20) to the services provided by CTT - Correios de Portugal, the public postal services provider. This is one of the results of a survey by the Instituto das Comunicações de Portugal (ICP), aiming to portray users' perception of the quality of CTT's services. The report and its recommendations have already been presented to CTT.
Almost half of those polled, around 45%, considered the services currently provided by CTT to be "Good" - the equivalent to a 14-16 rating on a scale of 1 to 20. Of the others, 35% considered the services to be "Reasonable" (10 to 13) and 17% "Very Good" (17 to 20). Only 3% of the sample's universe rated the services as either "Bad" or "Very Bad" (1 to 9).
Appraisal of the services was equally positive when considered from a historic perspective. Most of those polled, 90%, stated that there has been an increase in the quality of the services provided by the postal services over the last 5 years.
In relation to the use of services, a significant number, 40%, claimed that they still do not use the new postcodes. The majority of this group explained that this is due to lack of the habit of sending correspondence or ignorance of the new codes.
The majority of users polled stated that the main services used are letter correspondence and payment of services. The majority ,62%, considered the services currently available in post offices to be sufficient. Even so, many users suggested the introduction of new services such as an ATM service, submission of tax returns (IRS), purchase of car stamp duty, submission of lottery tickets, sale of newspapers/magazines, Internet access etc.
On the other hand, information on the main services and the last collection times for priority and regular mail, were considered to be "not very visible" by a significant group of those polled - 27%, 26% and 25% respectively.
Information on prices and tariffs affixed in the post office was considered to be the least visible item of information by 35% of those polled. In relation to sending correspondence, 47% of individuals stated that they send 1 or fewer letters per month. The main reason identified for this low level of use of the postal services was preference for use of the telephone (54%).
In the document resulting from this survey, entitled "Perception of Quality of the Postal Services - 2001", ICP recommends to the operator CTT, that it divulge the new post codes in an adequate manner in order to overcome the public's relative ignorance of these codes.
ICP also recommends more extensive divulgation of information on the characteristics, prices and quality standards of the various postal services provided by CTT. This principle also applies to the divulgation of standard delivery times for regular and priority mail, as well as collection times for postboxes and correspondence collection points.
The company is also urged to study the possibility of creating a greater number of correspondence collection points, and divulge the current collection points via suitable means.
The study's results were based on an opinion poll. Fieldwork and data analysis were conducted by a specialist company. The sample used for the study consisted of 1080 individuals, interviewed between March 29 and April 12, 2001. The sample has a confidence level of 95%, with a sampling error of 3%.
Consult:
- Perception of Quality of Postal Services 2001 (publication July 2001) https://www.anacom.pt/render.jsp?contentId=678678
