Royal Mail madness

Disclaimer: Although this blog has come about because something didn't go according to plan there are some good points that I thought should be mentioned too!

Scenario
I had some important documents that had to reach their destination asap, the value of the contents wasn't all that much it was just paper after all, but what was important was that the documents should reach the destination in time to secure a mortgage so to me pretty important.

Realising the importance of such a delivery I decided to spend a staggering £6.22 to get the letter where it needed to be, sadly due to other things that were happening on the Saturday I missed the last outbound delivery but was assured that the letter would be sent out first thing on Monday so was guaranteed to arrive by 1pm Tuesday this was good enough so I went for it, like I said spending £6.22 to post a single letter is quite a lot but it does guarantee arrival by 1pm Tuesday.

Pit fall number 1!
All through Tuesday I kept checking the Royal Mail tracking system, this was a very simple webpage, the sort that I tend to knock up in less than an hour, I am not joking a single text box and response to a query doesn't take a genius.  Anyway the tracking system just told me the letter had been posted on 5/10 which is something I already knew because I was there at the time :)

As you can imagine the letter didn't arrive when it was guaranteed to, otherwise I'd not be writing this blog.  Luckily I was able to make alternative arrangements, but that didn't stop the fact that I'd been totally let down by what I considered to be quite an expensive service.

At lunchtime on the Wednesday the day after the letter was supposed to arrive I went to a post office, just to note this was a different post office from the one that I posted the letter at since I don't work where I live and I asked the simple question about what do I do next?  The ill informed clerk informed me that there was nothing that she could do and that I'd have to go back to the post office where I posted the letter to get a refund!  What!!  So let me get this right if I post a letter whilst on holiday in Scotland and it didn't arrive I'd still have to travel back to the exact branch I posted it at to get a refund for a service I'd paid for but not received, seriously was this clerk not listening to the words coming out of her mouth!

Ignoring the lady to whom I shall refer to as dimwit I decided to call the Royal Mail help number which is prominent on their contact us page.  The man on the other end of the phone was exactly what I wanted, calm competent and reassuring, even though he wasn't telling me what I wanted to hear in my book that's a good phone support guy!  The reason he wasn't telling me what I wanted to hear was that he was saying although the letter will be late, as it hasn't arrived yet they can't give a refund.  As processes go this is already stupid, I would assume the best way to keep customers happy is to be proactive when things go wrong.

It gets better/funnier
When I eventually found the information about refunds for guaranteed delivery the text is;
A refund of your Royal Mail Special Delivery Guaranteed™ fee/postage if your item arrives later than the due time of delivery. Claims must be submitted within 14 days of posting.

For Royal Mail Special Delivery Guaranteed by 1pm™, additional compensation of £5 if the item is delivered more than 24 hours (Mon-Fri) after the guaranteed time. Or an additional £10 if delivered 7 or more working days (Mon-Fri) after the guaranteed time. Evidence of posting is required. If the sender is claiming they must apply within 3 months of posting. If the recipient is claiming they must apply within 1 month of receipt.

Consequential Loss for up to £10,000 is available to purchase at the time of posting at an additional cost. Evidence of Consequential Loss purchase is required. Claims must be submitted within 14 days of posting.

So let's start to examine this policy in a bit more detail, in my case the letter hasn't yet arrived so I can't yet claim for a late arrival, however if the item arrives more than 14 days after I post it then the first line excludes me from claiming a refund.  This means that if the mail is extreemly late Royal Mail get out of providing a refund, so by being more terrible than you think they'll be they get out of refunding!  Sounds crazy but you could read it like that!  
Luckily I think this interpretation of the policy is incorrect and a claim can still be made after this time period although I am not sure if the fact that I called as soon as the letter was late i.e. 24 hours late or 3 days after posting counts as starting a claim.

It arrived woohoo
At this point I assumed that the letter had been lost so was amazed when I received a letter in the post that contained the original copies of the documents I'd sent to arrange the mortgage on 23/10, which means I'd probably have been better off posting the letter by standard first class post!

The very next day I made yet another call to the Royal Mail and once again I spoke to a very nice lady who sympathised and was shocked that the delivery had arrived so late, it had arrived on 22/10 some 14 days late, 17 days after posting.  The lady on the phone said that I could start a claim by going to the post office and filling out a p58 claim form but that would mean sending proof of postage e.t.c. and that it'd be easier to submit an online P58 claim.  So I did the online claim and was given a nice little email that said:

"Your claim has been submitted and will be allocated to one of our claims handlers within the next 24 hours.

 Your reference number is P58_cXXXXXXXXX

We're sorry you've had to report the loss, damage or delay of a letter or parcel. Our claims department will review the information you've provided and start making the necessary enquiries.

 if you're claiming for the contents of a letter or parcel that's been lost or damaged whilst in our care we would kindly ask you to print this page, attach your supporting evidence and send it to the relevant freepost (no stamp required) address below:"

So my claim will be submitted to a handler within 24 hours, and the information provided will be reviewed.  I only need to send further proof if claiming for the contents of a lost or damaged parcel, excellent so I should expect to hear something very quickly since it's pretty obvious that my letter is delayed and the standard £6.22 plus £10 compensation is due.

I waited and waited
Much to my surprise actually it's no longer a surprise,  I hear nothing from Royal Mail so once again I call the support centre, once again I speak to a very kindly and courteous support person.  However she tells me that the reference number I have from the online claim form can't be queried on her system.  Then when the claim information is located by using my postcode the lady tells me that I need to send proof of postage in and that if I'd just made the claim over the phone I wouldn't have needed to send any details in.  For a start this information is now (a) in direct contradiction to the information given earlier and (b) complete nonsense.  The reason that it's complete nonsense is that the proof of postage is the postage ID, that ID ties in the postage to the delivery and even the digital signature at the other end, the only information that the postage receipt could possibly provide is the number that's used on the track&trace system.  I asked this person how I could make an official complaint, not against her, but to let the people in charge of writing the policy that they can't have run any story-boarding or use case analysis for this particular case and it needs to be reviewed.  She very helpfully gave me an email address royalmail@royalmail.com

So I wrote an official complaint

I spent even more of my own time, and I don't have much spare time, writing a complaint.  I made sure the language was calm and devoid of emotion as getting angry never solves anything in these circumstances.  The email contained references to everything that would help the policy makers in charge to make the policy better.
I sent the email and...
Alomst instantly received a bounceback informing me that the email address didn't exist, I tried royalmail@royalmail.co.uk in case the lady had made a simple mistake, although I did ask twice as I was writing everything down as I always do when talking to any support department, I really should invest in some recording equipment to save time!

So How do I email Royal Mail!
I went to look on the website:

1. The online contact us form asks for a reference number when you've contacted the support by phone, although I'd contacted Royal Mail 3 times previously I'd not once been given a reference number.  In fact the only reference number I had been given (save for the initial postage ID) was the online claim number that apparently couldn't be used to query for my case!

1. The contact us contains no email address, none and hunting the site was a miserable experience.  I write online applications and I am pretty sure that if the flow for my sites were as misleading and frustrating as the Royal Mail site I am likely to get the sack, it's not that it really bad, just that it's bad enough to be frustrating to the user which is enough to lose sales!

I did find a few email addresses that pointed to [places that I'll put on when I check my other laptop]

Then it struck me, I wonder if they have a twitter account and if anyone reads it, surely if I said something to cast them in a bad light someone might listen.  So I tweeted [actual tweet in here] to my utmost surprise I received a barrage of tweets and emails from [list people, show tweets and emails] which might be the same person and the delayed postage claim was resolved, apparently since the cheques in the post.

So a staggering 43 days after posting the letter I am close to getting the issue resolved, is this good enough?  In short no and I will be happy to pay more from a different provider if they can give me more of a guarantee, a proactive refund policy and better trained staff.  A note on proactive refunds the computer tracking system tracks everything so it will already know a delivery is late, the postage originally had my home address so there's no reason an automatic refund couldn't have been applied which would have saved me plenty of time and the loss of faith in the mail system!

I am still waiting

I am still waiting for the cheque to arrive before I give my absolute final conclusion but my experience so far with Royal Mail has been that the telephone support are nice yet not well trained and the people in charge of making the policies simply aren't demonstrating due diligence when it comes to designing and implementing processes.  One thing I can see from this is that the government surely hasn't undervalued the company when floating it because it too badly run to compete as soon as private enterprise sink their teeth into letter delivery...yet to happen!

The cheque has arrived almost 2 months after posting, well done Royal Mail!