Quality of universal postal service in bulgaria

Postal services around the world play a critical, daily role in keeping countries, economies, and people connected. The world has changed dramatically over the last decade: digitization has fundamentally altered how people communicate and do business. This has caused a major structural shift in the postal industry: letter items volume has declined, e-commerce has boosted the parcels volume, and competition has intensified as the postal markets are liberalized. The impact of information and communication technologies (ICT), competition, liberalization and the demand of user for better and more reliable postal services have had a major impact on the postal sector and particularly on the segment of Universal Postal Service (UPS). In an increasingly competitive environment quality of service (QoS) is the only weapon which UPS operators can successfully use to face with the challenges of growing competitive, sensitive and very demanding market.

The European Postal Directives aim at improving quality of postal service and to foster the establishment of the internal market for postal services by providing QoS rules and regulations. These are generally defined as minimum requirements for the provision of UPS. However, except for intra-Community cross-border transit time objectives within the Postal Directives there is no precise specification of these rules. Hence, present paper discusses the process of liberalization of the Bulgarian UPS market, the scope of the UPS obligations and the level of competition and concentration. The second part of the paper focuses on QoS objectives set in Bulgaria. An analysis of quality of UPS with regard to timely delivery of postal items as well as on the number and category of customer complaints is made. The result of the study shows that quality of UPS in Bulgaria is low and under the average level of European Union Member States. UPS providers should make a strong commitment to collect and deliver every single shipment, on time, and with accordance with the prior agreement. The recent changes in demand of UPS in Bulgaria due to competition and changes in customers’ preferences have to be taken into account when the scope and depth of QoS regulation is reconsidered.