DSA mail - why are delivery times so bad?

[nikkibaddick]

Hi,

I send my invoices using one of those "print and post" companies who, I've been told, use a third party (Citypost?) though a DSA licence so Royal Mail still do the actual delivery of the invoices.
The delivery times recently have been quite bad (up to 2 weeks on some occasions) and wanted to know if anyone knew the reason for this?
I'm tempted to just go back to stamps!!

Thanks,

[TrueBlueTerrier]

Yep - although this is an unofficial answer and I can't prove it, I suspect that my guess would be quite close to the truth.

What I think happens is that the DSA companies rely on numbers, sending 10 items is a lot more expensive per item than sending 500,000 so what they may try to do is introduce small mailings grouped together to cut down on their costs. This may mean that some mailings may enter Royal Mails system quite late into their contracted schedules.

DSA once it arrives in Royal Mails system is treated as 1st class and delivered within 1 day normally. This is even though its one of the mail streams that we make very little revenue from. The Government with the help of a regulator limit how much we can charge the DSA companies, and stops RM undercutting them as well. Isn't competition and liberalisation of the Post great.

[barrowc]

There's more info on DSA quality of service at http://www.royalmailwholesale.com/index ... f-service/ and the most recent QoS figures are that over 94% of DSA items delivered are on target (i.e. first working day after RM received the item) - see http://www.royalmailwholesale.com/index ... f-service/

In their March 2012 review, Ofcom raised some issues about DSA quality of service monitoring but didn't require anything to be done about full end-to-end QoS at that time:

Quality of service

10.81
We did not receive any opposition to our proposal to include a requirement in the USP access condition for Royal Mail to monitor the quality of service of access and provide the results of this to access users. We continue to consider this to be an important requirement to place on Royal Mail.

10.82
We also continue to believe that end-to-end quality of service information could be of benefit to customers and we support the provision of information that allows customers to make more informed choices. Of those sending customers that expressed an opinion, there appeared to be support for such a system.

10.83
We are aware that Royal Mail Wholesale has introduced its own system to measure the quality of service of access items from the point that the customer sends the item to the point that they are received in Royal Mail’s network. Some customers and users have indicated their support in principle for such a system. We are also aware that access operators have raised some concerns over this system. Given those concerns, we consider that it should be in their interests to engage with Royal Mail to seek to establish a system that they believe better meets the requirements of their customers. Therefore, we reiterate our view that the industry should take the lead in developing an independent, transparent and consistent system to monitor quality of service that meets the needs of customers, and that access operators should work with Royal Mail to overcome any concerns that they have with the system proposed by Royal Mail Wholesale.

10.84
If access operators and Royal Mail Wholesale are unable to resolve these differences, this could be an area where we might need to resolve a dispute or give more formal guidance in due course. However, on the whole we consider that that this would be less effective than an industry led solution.

(from http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binari ... tement.pdf)