MyBroadband recently ran a series of tests which showed that the SA Post Office was unable to deliver a letter on time.

Multiple letters were sent as part of the test, with many not arriving after weeks of waiting.

While many readers were not surprised by the result, a few questioned the point of the test.

They stated that sending letters was a waste of time, and no individual did this any more.

The point of the test, however, was to highlight the utter incompetence of the SA Post Office – as delivering a letter is the foundation of what the state-owned entity does.

Email test

To see if this lack of service extended to other aspects of the Post Office’s business, we tested the organisation’s customer support system.

We emailed the customer.services@postoffice.co.za address – listed on the SA Post Office website’s Contact Us section – asking for assistance with a query we had, for the test.

We sent an email every morning for two weeks, starting on 17 August 2018, to the same email address with the same request. Emails were also sent on Saturday and Sundays.

The result was definitive – not a single reply.

There was no acknowledgement of the query, and no contact from the Post Office in any form following the multiple emails.

The lack of customer support follows multiple stints of downtime for the SA Post Office website this year, which included three days of being offline because domain fees were not paid.