It had a cosy place in the British way of life for decades, providing a
much needed service to many, especially in rural areas; trusted helpful
and friendly, often incorporating additional sales anything from
greetings cards and the likes to a full local village or neighbourhood
store. But times have changed, much of what post office outlets used to
do can now be done online and, with the explosive growth in online
trading, they seem to now be mainly outlets for dispatching and
receiving mail. Or that is my experience from the many visits I make to
my local PO and friends share the same view so there is anecdotal
evidence.
Queues of people waiting to weigh and send mail instead of queuing for help with their passport application or car tax/ Thought some larger branches still do.
So now to my point and my frustration. The 'evil' monster behind all our
post offices is Royal Mail, which used to be a state owned monster but
is now a publicly owned one. They are just as inefficient but now using
sharper practice to cover their faults and to try to extract more money
from their users.
I spend a lot of money with Royal Mail annually, dispatching stuff to
dozens of countries, and I have to say their service level is abysmal
when things go wrong, which they seem to be increasingly doing of late. I
have had more packages go AWOL in the last six months than in the last
three years. They haven't all been lost, some have reached their
destination weeks or even months later than forecast. Others have been
rejected (mistakenly) by poorly trained staff and returned to sender.
Some have gone to the wrong country and done a round trip before finally
returning to source. The reasons given have been Brexit and of course
Covid. Hardly ever an acknowledgement that Royal Mail had screwed up and
never an offer to compensate for more than the actual postage cost and
then you have to wait weeks for them to agree to pay it and more weeks
before you actually get a cheque.
In the real world you can't do that. You can't tell a customer they have
to wait for a Royal Mail inquiry to conclude before they can get their
goods or reimbursement for not getting them. You would just lose the
customer and get bad reviews to boot. So what do you do, or what do I
do....if I can see there's a problem I first say sorry to the customer
for the inconvenience and tell them what I think the realistic chance of
the package arriving is. I offer to re-send the goods at my own expense
or, if preferred, a full refund. Most customers either wait a bit
longer or go for a re-send which I'm happy to do.
And that leaves me to deal with the monster that is Royal Mail and it is
a nightmare of form-filling, proof of this, proof of that, scans or
photo images to back up, post office counter receipts, it takes a lot of
time. Then, at the end of it, when you think you're done and you can
press 'Send' to log it into the RM system, a little message pops saying
you haven't waited long enough from the anticipated delivery due date
(in my most recent case 25 days) for the form to be valid, please
re-apply when you have reached the qualifying number of days. Why the
FFFF don't they tell you that at the start? And why don't they let you
save the form so that you can revert to it later without doing the whole
thing over?
I could do a long list of stuff which would sound funny but not funny if
you're in the middle of it. It's almost as if they make it as hard as
possible to get through to them to put you off even trying. Then they
don't have to pay out. No, they wouldn't do that would they?
Ah well, rant over. Anybody else get angry with their mail services?
A little reminder - don't forget Friday 19th is Love our Lifestyle celebration.
If you haven't heard/read anything about it, please visit Hermione's blog.
I hope you'll stop by. I wont be around for the morning but hopefully visit later in the day.
Thanks to Enzo for providing the image.
