Would you use Royal Mail over another parcel delivery service?

[throwaway1212]

I've just had a pretty rubbish experience with a Royal Mail delivery service, so I'm in rant mode. I originally 'missed' a delivery earlier this week (inverted commas because I suspect I was in at the time but the postie didn't bother to knock), and the 'something for you' card had the wrong date and no time written on it. But hey, these things happened, so I arranged for it to be re-delivered.

I live in a shared apartment block with no reception and where deliveries to the right person can sometimes be difficult, so to make things easier for both me and the postman I thought it might be useful to give them my mobile number so they could contact me directly when they're outside. I rang the number, was put on hold for 35 minutes, and then told that the call centre had now closed and they wouldn't be able to take my call. The next day I tried again, was put on hold for 40 minutes, and gave up (the jingle is seriously annoying). I tried again a bit later, managed to get through to someone after about 20 minutes, and was told that it would not be possible for me to be contacted prior to the delivery, and I'd just have to make sure I was in.

A bit annoying again, but ok. I waited. At a fair amount of personal inconvenience I waited near the front door of the apartment block from 8am until 6pm, taking only one quick break for lunch (I needed the item urgently, and was worried I might miss the delivery). Nobody came. I had provided my phone number and email address when arranging the re-delivery, but I received no communication whatsoever. A whole day wasted. Finally, I rang them again this morning (not so long on hold this time, fortunately) and the man was very apologetic, but explained that the only way I'd be able to get the delivery today would be to go to the delivery office, which is slightly over 2 miles away from where I live. I don't have a car and public transport wasn't suitable, so I ended up having to walk all the way there and back just to collect something which the sender had paid for to be delivered to my door earlier that week. At the delivery office there was just one bloke working and people were queuing up out of the door, and for about 15 minutes he couldn't locate my parcel because of the confusion over the re-delivery, but finally I managed to get it.

Now I don't say all that as a direct criticism to anyone here. I'm sure you all work very hard, under considerable pressures. To me, it seems like the problems are entirely down to underfunding and making unreasonable demands of people like you. But from a customer's perspective, the facts are this:

->Royal Mail is more expensive than all its competitors.
->Whilst its competitors are able to give customers a 1-2 hour window when a parcel will be delivered, Royal Mail can only give 10 hour window.
->Whilst its competitors offer online services to track the parcel and will text and/or email when it is about to be delivered, Royal Mail does not offer this service or only offers it for an extra charge.
->Whilst I can use live chat or telephone to contact its competitors relatively easily, Royal Mail's customer support services seem to be incredibly stretched.
->When Royal Mail fails to make a delivery on the agreed date, it doesn't contact the customer to acknowledge this or apologise.

Have I got anything wrong? Is there anything I'm missing out which means, actually, Royal Mail offers a better service for parcel delivery than its competitors? If you were in the customer's shoes, would you want to use Royal Mail? As things stand, I won't consider using Royal Mail again for deliveries I send, and will request that senders use a different courier service if possible. Again, please don't take that as any sort of criticism of the work that your frontline staff do, because I'm sure you all work very hard.

[fb1969]

"Whilst its competitors are able to give customers a 1-2 hour window when a parcel will be delivered, Royal Mail can only give 10 hour window"

No other parcel delivery company also has to deliver letters. Doing this means that something like a Special Delivery item which has to be delivered by 1pm can mean the round is never done in the same order two days running - which means in turn that even a 1-2 window isn't feasible, a postie could be just round the corner but then have to go elsewhere to deliver a Special in time. Most posties don't want to take items back to the office but are faced with little option, despite being expected to attempt delivery to a neighbour most rounds are so big that there isn't enough time to even think of doing this. I wouldn't telephone you because RM do not provide me with any facility or allowance for using my personal phone for such things - that isn't being petty, it is a simple fact that my phone is my phone and not theirs.

Royal Mail's competitors operate on a different playing field, though this doesn't stop RM from trying to compete with them. Some other companies pay their delivery operative (I won't say "staff" as many are self-employed) on a per-item basis, meaning they will be more likely to leave stuff on the doorstep - something RM staff shouldn't do. The only parcels that I delivered yesterday were flowers for Mothering Sunday and I, like several others in the delivery office, left all the other parcels behind as I simply didn't have enough time to deliver them.

As a member of the public, not running any sort of business, I would use Royal Mail because it is the easiest and most convenient. As a postie and seeing what goes on, I would probably look elsewhere.