The customer comes first? In your dreams

[TrueBlueTerrier]

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What do I hate more than sin? What do I loathe more than Strictly Come Dancing? Easy. It's the home delivery service Yodel. I won't bore you with the details: it's the traditional saga of "Sorry we missed you" cards, phantom delivery trucks and long, anguished conversations with call-centre employees. Gah!

One bad experience, of course, does not a pattern make. But then, reviewcentre.com - where of 869 reviews Yodel averages 1.1 out of 5 - does look like a pattern. Indeed, it looks like some sort of record. Still, angry voices are loudest. Let's be charitable and suppose that, in the silent majority of cases, their customer service is unrivalled, drivers show up on time, and their tracking system is accurate to the zeptosecond. Let's suppose, in other words, that they generally deliver on the service they offer.

Look at what the service they are offering actually is. The first you know of a failed delivery is the "Sorry I missed you" card. You are invited either to call to book a redelivery - choosing any 13-and-a-half hour time-slot that may be convenient for you.

Or you await them between 7:30am and 9pm the next working day. Or you travel to their nearest "service centre" to collect it.

Where does it come from, this idea that the receipt of a parcel you've paid for is a privilege for which you should spend a working day housebound from dawn until dusk, or travel at your own expense to collect it from a depot in Hertfordshire? Here's my theory. And this is why - as many like me, customers of Amazon, Virgin and Tesco, face Yodel-related misery in the run-up to Christmas - I make a public spectacle of a private gripe.

My theory is that we're looking at a little parable of the market-driven post-post-office world, and that for a delivery service in the business-to-consumer market, "to hell with the customer" might be a perfectly sensible business plan. You compete for customers on price; and your customers, properly described, are the online retailers.

How do you compete to attract them? You make your savings at the consumer end. You save money if you give yourself a 13-hour delivery window. You save money if the customer can be annoyed into delivering the parcel to himself. You may even make money if you're on a cut of the 0844 number on which the customer calls to complain ("Your delivery, your call" as the slogan has it). Do you mind if you bring misery to the customer? No. He's not your client.

And this, boys and girls, is why we -and the retailers we shop with - should all remember the old-fashioned Royal Mail as was with a bit more love.