I’m sorry if you were expecting one of my usual kit reviews but I just wanted to take the opportunity to give another view of whats going on in the postal industry. This article is in response to the column in Saturday’s Times by Andrew Ellson, the Personal finance editor, who having had a very important document lost in the post, decided to go into print with his personal tantrum and write a vitriolic article about service provided by the Royal Mail.
I know a bit about the service provided by the Royal Mail and so I thought that I would give my perspective on the issue. If you haven’t already figured it out, I write this Blog in support of an online Model shop and an growing ebay business. I absolutely rely on the Royal mail to deliver to my customers and the stats from where I am sitting are as follows.
I have dispatched approaching 10,000 parcels in the last few years (check out my feedback on ebay, this isn’t a made up stat or unconfirmed urban myth that journalists like). Of those, no more than 12 have gone astray. That is the actual number of customers that have said that they have not received their item and investigation has confirmed that this is the case. To be fair, there are probably a similar number who, for various reasons, have never contacted me. There are also about half that number who said that they hadn’t got the parcel but it turned out that the parcel was at the local sorting office and either they couldn’t be bothered to collect it or the postie hadn’t put the required card through the customers door.
Now here’s the thing that fascinates me. Of the 12 missing parcels that I have claimed for, 8 were overseas. I wont go into specific countries other than to say the hotter the country, the more likely your parcel is to be late or lost. The exception being Australia, because they seem to be good at everything. Italy is particularly bad and the South of France is worse than the North. I base those views purely on the number of e mails and claims that I have to deal with.
As for late delivery’s, I suspect the Royal Mails’ record isn’t quite so good but take a look again at my feedback and the customer comments thanking me for fast delivery. Well, it’s thanks to the Royal Mail. My commitment is to post all paid for orders within one working day of receipt of payment and that’s what I do. The Royal Mail does the rest.
I too had a special delivery go astray this weekend. It was very annoying for my customer, who was relying on receiving the item and had paid £12.65 for the service. I too complained to the Royal Mail but unlike Andrew Ellson I found the customer service to be excellent. I received a phone call back and two e mails in the same day letting me know what had happened to the best of their knowledge. Yes, I was annoyed that the parcel went astray and so was my customer. Yes, it was sods law that it was a special delivery parcel that went missing while the other 30 that were dispatched got there but that’s the point, it was one parcel of many and to rubbish the whole organisation because of the occasional foul up is just unfair.
In fact, on the subject of customer service, my experience has been that the service is usually very good and better than most organisations of anywhere near the Royal Mails size. The people that I have encountered, from the Postie that delivers my mail in Bingham to the counter staff at Nottingham, Beeston and Bingham and the people at the call centre are hard working, polite people doing their best to do their job properly and serve the great British public. Yes, you often have to queue and at peak times this can be a problem but it is no worse than the queues that I experience in the bank, supermarket, motorway, cinema, call centres and even at the Newsagents. I don’t think that queuing is a good idea, but to single out the Royal Mail as the worst offender is just nonsense.
Yes, the Royal Mail needs to improve and the problems it is currently experiencing are those common to any large organisation that is going through a change process. My experience is that when an organisation does try to change, the morale of it’s people is inevitably affected. The last thing that they need is an ill founded attack from somebody who should know better. Yes, the Royal Mail needs to improve (what Company doesn’t?) but the Royal Mail is nowhere near Britain’s worst Company and Andrew Ellson should know it. By saying so he does the Royal Mail and his readers an injustice. In the second half of his column he focuses on Npower and the problems there. Now here’s a Company that as I understand it, according to the Times, has cynically overcharged it’s poorest customers through prepaid meter cards, has redefined the term ‘year’ to suit it’s own billing purposes, regularly inflates customers direct debit payments to suit itself, and ignores advise from it’s own regulator. All that before we even have a debate about whether energy charges are fair and realistically priced for the general consumer. If Andrew Ellson thinks that customer service is bad in the post office I’d be fascinated to see how he categorises Npower.
So in my opinion, the Post Office is far from being the worst Company in Britain and it is probably in the top 50 percent rather than the bottom. I have a feeling that some of the attacks on the Royal Mail are motivated out of a desire to see it privatised. Well, the Royal Mail does need to improve and dare I say modernise but as for privatise, if you really think that this will improve things for the customer, take another look at Npower.
In the meantime, I’d like to thank to all the hard working staff at Royal Mail that have helped me to start my business and for the 10,000 parcels that they have delivered safely and quickly and that hopefully, have brought great enjoyment to all of my customers.
Well, that’s got that off of my chest, I’m off to make another model kit, a Doomsday Necron Monolith to be precise and if all goes well, I’ll show you how it turns out in a future blog……
