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Study reveals that even the best delivery firms have a lot of room for improvement.
It’s the busiest shopping time of the year.
Between the promised bargains of Black Friday, and Christmas looming on the horizon, the next few weeks will see huge sums spent by British shoppers.
And while the high street shops are open once more, for an awful lot of us the bulk of the shopping will take place online.
It’s more convenient ‒ you can shop from your sofa, after all ‒ and it offers the chance to earn some free money on your spending too by going through a cashback website.
There is one significant drawback though. Shopping online means relying on delivery firms, which as one new study makes clear, is often a less than pleasant experience.
Even the best are mediocre
Citizens Advice has launched a new annual parcel delivery league table, based on its surveys of shoppers on their experiences with the five big delivery names.
Below are how the results from the first Citizens Advice poll shaped up, with delivery firms scored on a range of criteria out of five, as well as receiving an overall score.
|
Delivery firm |
Customer problems |
Accessibility |
Customer service |
Trust |
Score |
|
Amazon Logistics |
3.25 |
2.25 |
2.75 |
4.25 |
2.75 |
|
Royal Mail |
3 |
2 |
2.5 |
4 |
2.5 |
|
DPD |
1.5 |
2.25 |
2.5 |
3.75 |
2.25 |
|
Yodel |
2.25 |
1.25 |
1.75 |
2 |
1.75 |
|
Hermes |
1 |
2 |
2.25 |
2 |
1.5 |
What immediately stands out here is that even the best two delivery firms according to the ratings, Amazon Logistics and Royal Mail, still only end up with very mediocre scores.
Sure, Amazon does remarkably well on trust, and scores the highest when it comes to dealing with customer problems, but there is plenty of room for improvement when it comes to actual customer service or being accessible should issues occur.
It’s a similar story with Royal Mail, where again the high trust score masks some less than impressive results elsewhere.
Nonetheless, both of these firms perform markedly better than Yodel and Hermes. Let’s be clear, scoring less than two in any of these categories is a disaster, yet between them they manage it in three of the four main categories.
Digging into the data further, 41% of those polled reported a problem with their last DPD delivery, compared to 32% of Amazon Logistics customers.
As for resolving issues, almost half (48%) said they weren’t able to get the help they wanted.
This rose to 56% for Yodel and dropped to 43% for Amazon, but even that is simply not good enough.
Delivery disasters
The shoddy service we receive all too often from delivery firms would be one thing if we only occasionally encountered them.
But since the pandemic, all of us have become far more reliant on delivery firms. As Citizens Advice’s study points out, online shopping is up by 56% from the start of the pandemic.
After all, if you needed some new clothes and the high street shops were closed due to national lockdowns, then you had no option but to order online and hope that the retailer used a relatively reliable delivery partner.
A study by Citizens Advice at the end of 2020 found that one in three people had experienced a problem with a delivery since the onset of the pandemic.
Most commonly that was down to a delayed delivery.
Ultimately how big a problem this delay is really comes down to how desperately you need the item you’ve ordered ‒ if you’re setting up a home office, and can’t work properly without the new computer you’ve ordered, then having to wait an extra day will be more than a minor inconvenience.
These delays aren’t just annoying either, they can actively cost us money, with one in five reporting a financial loss as a result of the issue with their delivery.
Some of the individual case studies relayed by Citizens Advice are mind-boggling, too.
One man ordered some headphones to his address in Hertfordshire but discovered they had been delivered to a different address.
In Australia.
Another had a parcel worth £150 stolen, but was passed between dozens of different customer service agents, having to repeat his story over and over again in his desperate attempt to rectify the situation.
Delivery firms need to raise their game
The results of this poll should serve as a real wake-up call to delivery firms. That even the best among them perform to such a mediocre standard is simply unacceptable.
Sadly, shoppers have little direct say in the delivery firms utilised by our chosen retailers.
But we can vote with our feet ‒ and our money ‒ by avoiding shops that work with the worst offenders, making clear that their delivery partners were a factor in that decision.
Understanding our rights is also crucial. We’ve detailed them at length in this piece, including insight from the complaints experts at Resolver.
