My heart sinks every time I order something and find out that the cour­ier is Evri

[TrueBlueTerrier]

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/daily-ma ... 6283614146

WHEN the cour­ier deliv­ery ser­vice Her­mes rebranded as Evri a few years ago, it didn’t take long for those who had been let down by the busi­ness to come up with their own reas­ons for the name change.

Among the most pop­u­lar on social media: ‘Because Evri par­cel goes miss­ing?’ and ‘Because Evri time I see they’re deliv­er­ing my par­cel, my heart sinks?’

Now, Evri is fight­ing back against its knock­ers – in the courts. But not, oddly, in defence of its ser­vice to cus­tom­ers.

This week it filed ‘par­tic­u­lars of claim’ in the High Court seek­ing dam­ages of £1.2mil­lion from the BBC. This relates to a Pan­or­ama doc­u­ment­ary entitled Evri: Where’s my par­cel? broad­cast last Decem­ber – much of which was, indeed, about the reli­ab­il­ity, or oth­er­wise, of its deliv­er­ies.

However, the pro­gramme also con­tained inter­views with some Evri cour­i­ers who claimed they were paid less than the min­imum wage, which is illegal. This is a murky area as its cour­i­ers are tech­nic­ally self-employed, and paid per par­cel delivered.

Not only has Evri vehe­mently rejec­ted the BBC’S alleg­a­tion, it says that this ‘defam­at­ory’ claim had cost it con­tracts worth £1.2mil­lion. And it also seeks an injunc­tion pre­vent­ing the BBC from repeat­ing the charge.

Bullishly, the BBC has not taken the doc­u­ment­ary off iplayer so any­one can still view it in full – and it may well attract many more view­ers because of the atten­tion that the defam­a­tion action will attract.

It may be for­tu­nate for Evri that these cor­por­ate defam­a­tion cases are almost invari­ably held by a judge alone, rather than in front of a jury. Because, if my exper­i­ence is any­thing to go by, the court might oth­er­wise have struggled to find 12 cit­izens who had never exper­i­enced any per­sonal frus­tra­tion with an Evri deliv­ery, and thus able to dis­claim any pos­sib­il­ity of pre­ju­dice against the claimant.

ONE dis­sat­is­fied cus­tomer must have enjoyed put­ting this as a com­ment under­neath a news story about the case: ‘The legal pro­ceed­ings have been post­poned as Evri delivered the paper­work not to the High Court in Lon­don but to a ten­nis court in Lon­don­derry.’

If I seem a little obsessed, it is because my fam­ily have had dire exper­i­ences with the largely US private-equity-owned firm. Our hearts sink when we learn that whichever retailer we are buy­ing from has Evri as its cour­ier ser­vice. The trouble is, you don’t know until you’ve com­pleted your order.

Now, we are not the easi­est to find, as we live down an unmarked track in rural East Sus­sex (though Amazon and Royal Mail seem to have no trouble). Still, it is a bit of a shocker when we find that, for example, an item is dumped at the top of our track, a quarter of a mile away, by some bins on the main road. Or when – this has happened on more than one occa­sion – we get the mes­sage that our par­cel has been delivered ‘and pos­ted through your let­ter box’.

Only it had not been delivered – and we have no let­ter box through which any­thing could be pos­ted.

In all but one case of failed deliv­ery, we were able to get a refund from the retailer, so it was not neces­sary to con­tact Evri, which was just as well as it’s notori­ously hard to find a human to talk to. Though some­times we hear from a gen­tle­man who lives about half a mile away from us and with a very sim­ilar post­code.

He’s quite witty about it. Hence, one email from him said: ‘It’s a while since we com­mu­nic­ated but Evri clearly thinks we should speak. We have a par­cel for you dumped at our gate.’

After that exper­i­ence, my wife took up the option of nom­in­at­ing a con­veni­ent deliv­ery point less obscure than our home: it was our nearest super­mar­ket about 15 minutes’ drive away. But even that help­ful branch of Tesco seemed impossible for the Evri cour­ier to find.

Now, I’m aware that mil­lions of people do not have these prob­lems with the firm, as it appears to have a decent rat­ing with Trust­pi­lot (if you can trust that).

It may depend on whether the Evri agent in your area is good, or not. And that seems like potluck.

For example, in the Pan­or­ama doc­u­ment­ary, a cus­tomer in the beau­ti­ful Berkshire vil­lage of Twy­ford told how she had failed to receive a par­cel while being sent a ‘con­firm­a­tion’ photo of the item delivered to a spot she did not recog­nise. This woman even­tu­ally went on to the vil­lage Face­book page, and it turned out that there were 89 miss­ing par­cels, which Evri were to have delivered, and many of those cus­tom­ers were shown the same image.

Evri’s busy law­yers told the BBC this was ‘an isol­ated incid­ent’ and that it had ‘taken prompt action’.

However, the gen­eral pic­ture is given by the most recent sur­vey by the reg­u­lator Ofcom of these cour­ier busi­nesses, pub­lished last Octo­ber. Its annual deliv­ery mar­ket review showed that 41pc were dis­sat­is­fied with their ser­vice from Evri, the highest neg­at­ive rat­ing of any cour­ier.

Only 31pc of Evri’s cus­tom­ers said they were sat­is­fied while 14pc repor­ted late deliv­er­ies, almost twice the national cour­ier aver­age of 8pc. It received the low­est rat­ing for the third con­sec­ut­ive year.

For the record, Evri dis­puted the er… reli­ab­il­ity of Ofcom’s fig­ures.

Why is it then, that the firm is so com­mer­cially suc­cess­ful, with retailer con­tracts gen­er­at­ing around 900mil­lion deliv­er­ies for Evri last year? The point is that it charges retail­ers less than, for example, Royal Mail – the tra­di­tional mar­ket leader.

STILL, a salut­ary exper­i­ence was told, in that BBC doc­u­ment­ary, by Becca Tans­ley, who runs a Shrop­shire wool and yarn retailer called Ewe & Ply. She explained how she had switched from Royal Mail to Evri ‘because it would be cheaper for our cus­tom­ers’. But in 11 weeks, as many of those cus­tom­ers had com­plained to her about undelivered items, as had done in ten years with Royal Mail.

Ewe & Ply, not sur­pris­ingly, went back to Royal Mail.

We are not alone, in our house, as those whose heart sinks when we dis­cover our online pur­chase is to be delivered (sup­posedly) by Evri. For the past four years, we have hos­ted a Ukrain­ian mother, Vera, and her young son – they left to escape the ter­ror of Rus­sian bom­bard­ment in their Kyiv home.

He is a fast-grow­ing lad, and so Vera is always need­ing to order new clothes for him. After the latest of many delayed or failed Evri deliv­er­ies, Vera exclaimed, with a wry laugh: ‘I’d get a more reli­able cour­ier ser­vice in Kyiv under attack from Rus­sian mis­siles.’

Well, you have to laugh, so as not to cry.