Royal Mail, anyone else having major problems?

Cuchulain

Cuchulain

Cuchulain

Soldato
Joined
28 Dec 2004
Posts
7,620
Location
Derry
Up until a couple of months ago we had a brilliant postie, always delivered by 9am, nothing was ever late or lost/misdelivered (that I know of) but then they moved him on to a different route in December and things went downhill from there.

My wife and I work from home and we normally get around 5-6 letters a day, Monday to Saturday, mid-December this suddenly dropped to 1-2 a week (apart from junk mail which was delivered, without fail, every day), items my wife ordered weren't turning up and were having to be re-ordered using RMSD to guarantee their arrival (RMSD items are delivered here by our old postman for some reason).

Then we started receiving letters for incorrect addresses, different house numbers, different streets and our neighbours and people from further afield started bringing round our mail that had been delivered to them. This has gone on now since December and despite 2 complaints to Royal Mail all I get back are canned responses saying:

The manager of your local Delivery Office will do all that is required to ensure you receive the quality of service you should expect in future
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Not sure where to go with this now, is there anyone above Royal Mail that can deal with their failures when they refuse to?
 
It doesn't sound like you've exhausted your options for complaint at Royal Mail, to be honest. If you're only getting generic replies back then you need to be speaking to someone in a more senior position e.g. the DO manager or someone higher.
 
I probably should have looked at their complaints procedure! Rung them again and it's been escalated to their "security team" due to the amount of sensitive mail that's gone missing.

I know I'm going to end up on the front page of our local rag as one of those poor sods who has a postie who stashes all the mail in his attic!
 
Yes! I have heard many moans and groans about Royal Mail around Xmas time and ever since. And to begin with I was putting it down to the usual “busy time” for them at Xmas and disregarding people pointing the finger at privatisation. However, I am now jumping on the bandwagon and moaning about Royal Mail. And I will tell you why!

- Never, not even once, have Royal Mail lost any of my mail or failed to deliver. I am now on 2 lost items as of mid January.
- I am now on 5 occasions since mid January where “1st class” has taken over 3 working days to get to its destination.
- I am now on the 3rd occasion of “1st class” taking over 3 working days to get to me in the Highlands from the Central Belt of Scotland.
- In general, larger packages and boxes are taking an extra day or so. I order lots of shoes, I try to order early AM so they get posted and come next day which was 85% of the time. It is now 2 days in most cases and a few times now on the 3rd day. This is from same company, same postage method, posted early on in the day.

I have the same postman. Nothing has changed on that front. So something elsewhere has changed, this isn’t just a little blip in the service, this is substantial differences. And when items start actually going missing is when it becomes bad. 1 or 2 days wait I can live with, but actively “losing” stuff is bad…. And when I post my mums birthday gift on a Tuesday with 1st class, I expect her to get it by the Saturday otherwise I am paying for a service I am simply not receiving, as has been the case many times now.

Everyone in my office and I see outside of work, and I mean everyone can relate to some annoyance and unusual act from Royal Mail they haven’t seen before. All since mid January. Usually they are praised up here as they’re the only people not ripping us off like the other couriers but now absolutely everyone has a negative story and are asking the question of, what is happening to Royal Mail these days?
 
We are in the exact same situation with our postie, we to are working through the complaints procedure, it does gripe me though that we are paying for a service that is not upto standard yet there seems very little that can be done about it.
 
We've always had delays here, first class normally takes at least 4 working days from the day of posting, RM parcels sometimes takes 2 weeks etc. but we were always confident that we'd receive stuff eventually (until December that is).

My wife and I order a shed load of stuff online for our respective businesses and recently it's costing a small fortune to pay for courier deliveries.
 
They use the escalating complaints to deter the majority of people, by the time someone replies by had not an automated letter the number of complaints reduce from 60 to round about 8 a more manageable amount.

Im having the same problem but I will stick to my guns I have also written on the 2nd letter that there will be an administrative charge of £30 per letter.
 
Ever since moving house I've sent mail to both the new address and my place of work. Both, first class, take multiple days to arrive. I've started to keep a list of things I've ordered and if they've been delivered yet.

An item I received yesterday was wrapped in a new bag saying "Sorry, it got ripped apart during transit".
 
dirtychinchilla said:
Yeah, if they hadn't privatised it you'd be getting 1-2 letters a month.
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Please, now they have privatised it you'll get as many letters as you like and they'll cost 10x the price, and you'll only be allowed to send in their branded envelopes (which miraculously cost 3x the price) and only to parts of the UK they deem profitable all the while your postie is expected to stretch out his already packed round for no extra money while sharing a van which makes him slower.

Oh and don't forget the special terms which basically mean all the problems in the past are now your own fault so we aren't paying out on the insurance claim.

Privatisation always ruins previously good companies, they all go down the ****ing ****ter eventually. They'll cut every cost, overwork staff and water down the service as much as they can, then shove the price up claiming "we need to do this, it's tax" or something despite paying no actual tax on their earnings and the UK taxpayer being expected to foot the bill, then because the service sucks and it's too expensive people just go elsewhere. Then royal mail will stand around going "we don't know what happened" but management and directors will miraculously get a huge payout while the employees and customers get nothing.
 
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I find it all very odd hearing about complaints like this. In our DO, even with our muppet of a manager, this would have been dealt with, by the second complaint at the very latest. With privatisation, this process is actually getting more stringent.

Of course this could be all down to working in a small town and a small DO, with a pretty good group of staff. I know that things are far from ideal in some of the neighbouring towns.

TheVoice said:
It doesn't sound like you've exhausted your options for complaint at Royal Mail, to be honest. If you're only getting generic replies back then you need to be speaking to someone in a more senior position e.g. the DO manager or someone higher.
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Speaking as a postman, do this. Or go to customer services, this will result in % points knocked off of Delivery Office targets, which are valued above all else. This will provoke some sort of reaction...
 
matdom said:
They use the escalating complaints to deter the majority of people, by the time someone replies by had not an automated letter the number of complaints reduce from 60 to round about 8 a more manageable amount.

Im having the same problem but I will stick to my guns I have also written on the 2nd letter that there will be an administrative charge of £30 per letter.
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Good luck with that! £30 administrative charge per letter! FFS!
 
Lunatic Dreyfus said:
Speaking as a postman, do this. Or go to customer services, this will result in % points knocked off of Delivery Office targets, which are valued above all else. This will provoke some sort of reaction...
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Thanks for that, I'm told they've already contacted the DO manager but it appears it didn't do any good, that's when I rang them again and they said that the delivery office now have 72 hours to detail what happened and also that their security team have opened an investigation.

It all sounds very official and promising but I'll have to wait and see I guess.
 
I've never really had RM issues until I moved to my new address. Now I get what I can only describe as "bottlenecking" - I'll order a few packages over a period of a week, and they'll all turn up on the same day at the end of the following week.
 
Not really, i had an issue where a calling card was not left, which i have to put down to individual human error, i order from amazon fairly regularly 2nd class, generally takes about a week to arrive which seems fairly reasonable.
 
With regards to the complaints procedure, I found it recently to be terrible. I ordered some hubcaps for the gf from ebay, and they turned up fine, except the seller had sent the wrong size. So they sent some more, which went missing at least once, and also, something sent three times to my gf's never turned up.

I called up to complain and the guy basically said, it's your fault for not having them sent first class or first class recorded etc. I said to him, then why the hell are you providing a service where you just told me that you can't actually deal with it. He pretty much put the phone down then, probably out of embarrassment. Moron.

The guy in the local sorting office, however, is an excellent fellow.
 
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