Rothenburger — Canada Post’s ‘precision’ admail system isn’t precise at all

COLUMN — What ails Canada Post may have been amply demonstrated by the botched City of Kamloops mailout during the civic election campaign just past.

Some 1,700 City voter cards were delivered to homes outside Kamloops, in three different electoral areas in the Thompson-Nicola Regional District. The City quickly followed up with a letter apologizing for the mistake but it was an embarrassing situation.

In the immediate aftermath of the error, when the cause wasn’t yet known, I suggested to City Hall that it check its bulk mailout order with Canada Post, because it was likely the mistake centred on the delivery routes that were included on the list.

Indeed, I spotted that likely culprit right away because of my own experience with Canada Post in trying to arrange election mailouts. Canada Post uses an online system for businesses — or, in this case, local governments and politicians — that want to send out unaddressed mailings.

It’s called Precision Targeter and it isn’t very precise at all. I literally spent weeks fooling with the online program and making phone call after phone call to Canada Post agents in three different departments plus local branches of the post office trying to figure it out.

More often than not, there was a reason something couldn’t be done than a reason it could. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep a complete log of my calls and attempts to work through the online system, but it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say I talked to about 20 people and spent hours on the phone as well as online. With those kinds of numbers, a small order is going to cost the post office many times more than it makes and result in an unhappy experience for the customer.

The agents I spoke with were, without exception, pleasant and patient. However, they had various levels of knowledge, and sometimes I found myself bounced from one department to another and back again on the same call.

At times, the program wouldn’t work at all, not for me nor whoever I was talking to at the post office. Finally, one agent directed me to a completely different program than Precision Targeter and talked me through that one. Even then, it required transferring data from Precision Targeter.

The Canada Post website in general and the Precision Targeter program in particular is glitchy and confusing and not, at least for me, intuitive, thus the need for live employees to get involved in order to help people through it.

This is compounded by the mysteries of the Canada Post delivery system. Some postal routes begin in the City and end outside City boundaries. Some are split, with one part in the City and the other out. Canada Post won’t delivery bulk mail to only one part of a route. In rural areas, it’s impossible to find exactly where unaddressed mail is delivered on some routes because, as Canada Post acknowledges, its mapping is imprecise.

It would have been easy for whoever placed the order from City Hall to miss these details and end up sending out the voter information to the wrong places. In fairness, Precision Targeter is designed as a business mailout tool where precision isn’t actually essential. If you’re selling widgets, it doesn’t matter much if a few hundred or even thousand mailout pieces miss your target audience and land somewhere else, but in an election it’s important.

Even trying to place an order for a relatively simple business mailout would be frustrating for a first-timer, though. This is not one-stop shopping — far from it. Get used to hearing, “That’s a different department.” The very fact that so many fingers are necessary in this “precision targeting” pie suggests to me it isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do — providing good service at low cost and healthy profit for Canada Post.

The City of Kamloops likely wasn’t the only local government that experienced the pitfalls of Canada Post’s admail system during this year’s election, and I’ve talked to other candidates who threw up their hands in surrender and basically gave up on using the post office as part of their campaigns.

We can only hope this isn’t the way our entire new-look postal system is going to be run.

armchairmayor@gmail.com