Just another example why Germany (as a country) struggles in modernizing it’s public service structure

For a while now i’m struggling with a simple task: how to a get my letters not through my classic, analog postbox but directly in a digital inbox.

The source of this struggle has two roots:

For once all official announcements (legals, tax, …) in Germany are send as a letter into your mailbox on your registered address. There is no alternative to this. E.g. even if you send an email to your finance authority, you will get the answer as a letter.

The reason for this are some legal issues, build up over centuries and never get reformed.

The second thing is that there sure are a couple of companies exists that provides this type of service. Their service required to have a virtual mailbox linked to an address provided by them where your analog mail can be send to to get processed.

But as a good german as i am i really don’t trust a private company with handling my very private legal or tax information.

German post service is a de-facto monopole

With some small local exceptions the german post service is a de-facto monopole. Originally a state-controlled company, it get privatised in the 90s. But still controls the majority of all mail sendings in the country.

From a customer point of view it isn’t that bad: because you have only one point of contact for this service. Makes decision easy.

So a while back i thought it would be nice if the one company, who is already in control of most of all the mail transactions, would also have a service to have a service for a digital inbox.

And they have. And it is bad. Very bad.

For once, i tried it 3 times now.

The first time i didn’t trust them.

The second time i didn’t understood how the service worked.

The third time is now on the clock.

Bad user experience, bad communication

The first time was a year or so ago. The first impression was, it felt like a big alpha test:

• I didn’t understood how the service worked
• I didn’t understood if the service was free (as in getting the mail for free), or had a price tag somewhere
• The site itself looked like a big proof of concept application
• I didn’t trust the service, because of the intransparent communication, in any way.

Still bad, but also expensive

A couple of weeks ago, because i‘m still in need of such a service, i tried it again.

The site itself didn’t change (as far as i could see). It was still a intransparent communication. As an example: i still didn’t understood how the service was activated. Because after i’ve done (afaik) everything they described, i still got my mail in my analog inbox.

So, after i got yesterday yet another paper-letter i looked a bit deeper. Outside of the portal itself, thanks to Google on some marketing-pages.

Now i understood it wasn’t free, it costs. And it is expensive. Very, very expensive. And the type payment is again low cost a version of the early 2000 years, then a modern approach.

I will try it out now more in hope to have a bit more comfort here.

But to get back to the headline, the result is the following:

Black duckling behaviour

The german company, which has a monopole on a service used by millions, who could easily provide a modern service to improve it’s service to their customer, has this type of service and handles it like it’s some bad side-product which was created some aeons ago and nobody wants to have to do with it.

And because it’s not handled well, everything is a minimum state:

• the ux/user-approach itself
• the payment type
• i bet the tech itself is years old.

But bills have to be paid, so it is expensive.

That again results in being not of interest for most of the potential customers. Because honestly, who would pay 25 bucks a month for a service which he/she gets for free in their mailbox!?