Could the postal dispute change the way we do things?

So here we are a week or so away from the postal strike, with more on the way. Putting the politics aside, the industrial action does perhaps encourage us to revisit the way we do things. It's a chance to look for alternatives to putting paper in an envelope and having it sent by vans, trains, trucks and bicycles.

What about switching to invoicing by email rather than posting hard copies? And what about insisting that customers pay us by electronic transfer rather than by cheque?

One chap I know routinely prints 100 copies of his customer newsletter, stuffs them in envelopes, sticks stamps on them and posts them. He does an email version too, so why not make a big point of asking the people on his hard copy mailing list for their email addresses?

Of course, it's not as simple as this. Sometimes people would prefer hard copies, so let's see if we can give them what they want. And sometimes we suspect that the paper stuff stands a greater chance of being read so let's go with that.

I'm not out to take even more work away from the Royal Mail. (Although I have said for years they should have been at the forefront of new technology and by now should be the UK's largest email and broadband provider.) But looking for delivery options that suit us AND our customers/suppliers surely makes sense.