The Postal Service accelerates its demise.

The United States Postal Service, like many service organizations facing reduced demand in a downturn, is trying to cut costs.

Like the masses of unimaginative service businesses, their “best idea” for cost reductions is to reduce service levels. In this case, they’re considering shifting to a 5-day delivery service from the current 6-day operation, eliminating Saturday deliveries.

It’s a bad idea.

Three major service components differentiate USPS from its primary competitors, UPS and FedEx:

They’re inexpensive. Though it now known as “snail mail”, USPS is very reliable, given what are usually substantial price differences between its offering and that of the parcel carriers.

They serve outlying areas. UPS and FedEx place enormous charges on deliveries beyond their core service areas, because they lose money delivering to places without density of stops.

They deliver Saturdays. Before the recession forced the elimination of shifts, an increasing number businesses were conducting Saturday operations. With the growth of ecommerce, Saturday is looked on by many companies as needed fulfillment day.

By eliminating Saturday deliveries, USPS eliminates a key reason businesses use them. Add in that they’re considering reducing service to rural areas and increasing the prices on parcel sized shipments, and they may actually be in the process of killing all three of their service differentiators at once.

It has been suggested that the USPS should be run more like a standalone business. Some go so far as to say it should be privatized. While that idea may or may not have merit, changing core elements of the service to replicate their closest competitors – ones much more nimble and far less bureaucratic in decision making than they are – is exactly the wrong sort of service model change.

Obsession is a service virtue.

Businesses have their own central tendency, moving toward the mean of the market they serve.

It makes sense. Capture the largest available market by making your service as good as possible in all aspects. Communicate how good you are at everything, and gain a large enough portion of the ‘everyone’ segment to make you successful.

But a service company representing ‘everything’ can’t represent anything specific, making them average and unmemorable. Presenting its bland, median self and demanding the same of line employees, companies make it impossible to engage customers on beyond a superficial level.

Great service companies, however, are obsessed about one aspect of their business. Maniacally obsessed. To the point that any 'good' businessperson sees their behavior as going too far. What outsiders don’t grasp is that they have chosen a service aspect representing the core of the problem they want to solve for their customers, and focus all their energy on it.

Southwest obsesses about the operational efficiency involved in turning a plane, deploying every available resource to that end – technology, marketing, employees, and even customers. Wisely, they use a casual, fun environment as the mechanism to make all the work you’re doing for them tolerable.

Ritz-Carlton obsesses about the individualization of the service experience.

FedEx obsesses about time, and what it represents in terms of reliability.

Early Starbuck’s was obsessed with the in-store experience of the “American 3rd place”. Late Starbuck’s seems obsessed with quarterly numbers. The interstate is lined with Starbucks off-ramp signs, and you can buy 20 branded products in your local supermarket. The people who wanted the experience long ago ceded the territory to freelancers who don’t want to conduct business from their basements.

Service is intensely personal. It can’t represent an “average of good” and expect to be seen as exceptional by anyone. For it to be meaningful, it has to discriminate. It has to be exceptional for some, and exclude the needs of others.

Great service has to be obsessive.