Royal Mail Special Delivery

[martinkay]

Recently a large number of packets I have been sending out to customers are going astray, arriving late or damaged. I use ordinary first class post and the cost of that is currently included in the store prices.

Having read http://www.hellmail.co.uk/GH_ShowArticle.asp?HID=708 it seems I am not alone, and I am coming to the conclusion that if this is the way things are going, I don't want to spend the run-up to Christmas arguing with Royal Mail about lost packages. It looks like the only option is Special Delivery for everything over £32. Expensive but potentially could save a lot of aggro and possible damage to reputation.

What would be the best way to incorporate this into my Actinic checkout? An extra line that goes in automatically once the total gets to £32? Presumably with the option for the customer to remove it although I'd rather they didn't as it seems the onus is always on the sender. There are about 4 Royal Mail price bands for SD depending on weight, although I don't use the weight functions in Actinic so maybe I'd just go for another price band at say £75, and win some lose some.

Any ideas? What do other folk do? Is everyone else really experiencing these postal difficulties?
Cheers
Martin

[leehack]

It looks like the only option is Special Delivery for everything over £32. Expensive but potentially could save a lot of aggro and possible damage to reputation.

Does this presume that people who spend under £32 will not cause aggro and damage your reputation? Surely if there is likely to be a problem, the amount of the order is the last thing to think about. Why not offer recorded and special delivery as your only options? That way they are going to have to sign somehow and you have your compensation side covered.

[siwalker]

Is it really that bad? Since we started keeping accurate records we've found that 0.5% of packages have gone missing - annoying to lose any, but well within estimates. Customers have been understanding when it happens.
Only around 1 in 3000 are damaged - which is no problem at all.

Only one Signed For package has ever gone missing in our 2.5 year history so you might want to look at that as a cheaper option than SD. You cite the £32 compensation limit on First Class (inc. Signed For) but technically that's for cost of goods, so depending on your margins you might want to review that level. We send ordinary First Class up to £50 (at order value), Signed For at £50+ and Special Delivery at £100+. These are all transparent to the customer - ie. we offer free delivery for orders over £10 and the delivery costs are built into our pricing model. We've actually considered scrapping the SF and just going from First Class to SD at £100, but haven't decided whether this is the right move yet. It would remove some admin overhead every day but inevitably lead to slightly higher losses.

You need to balance cost + effort (which is usually the bigger issue here) of despatch overhead vs. loss management.

We found that putting 'Cult Pens' on the return address label made our smaller packages just too tempting to pocket, especially for those temporary contract mail workers in London. Removed that and just used our fairly anonymous Ltd company name - losses went down dramatically.

Do the analysis and try get a genuine feel for what's happening and what the cost would be of changing. Try and separate compensation issues from customer service issues.
We went through a relatively bad patch in March with losses, but didn't change anything and it settled down again.

simon

[martinkay]

Historically I've not had any trouble till this last couple of weeks, and it was maybe a coincidence that I read that article, dated yesterday. My thought on the £32 was that it seems a bit steep to add an extra £2 or £3 to cover SD on items less than that anyway. Seems that "Signed For" is really an outdated service only appropriate for documents, according to other articles on that Hellmail site, and is not handled any way different to regular First Class. Maybe the stepped option of First to SD at a set order value is the way to go, and as you say, just build that into the prices.

[siwalker]

Historically I've not had any trouble till this last couple of weeks

So make sure you're not over-reacting - it could be making extra work/cost for yourself for no good reason.

Seems that "Signed For" is really an outdated service only appropriate for documents, according to other articles on that Hellmail site, and is not handled any way different to regular First Class.

Signed For is very low-tech. It's not tracked until the postie's card is scanned in a day or two after delivery. But it works and it's cheap. There's an online signature to 'prove' to the customer that it's been delivered and the orange sticker makes it, in my view, less liable to pilfering by dishonest Royal Mail staff*, which let's face it is almost certainly the primary cause of 'lost' mail (where the hell is it 'lost' to otherwise?). We've had no real problems with it, which is why we're wary of dropping it.

Cheers,
simon

* I'd just like to say for the record that Royal Mail staff that we deal with on the ground are almost universally excellent chaps. There just seem to be a few bad apples lurking in the organisation, and I entirely blame Royal Mail management for not getting to grips with 'loss post'.

[Darren B]

I send everything either recorded, standard parcel or SD

i choose how its going, because actinic cant/is not capable of doing this for me. I use weight, but tweak it to fit best i can, some items are over priced on delive some are under but i has taken a bit of time and when i spot one i adjust it accordingly.

Recorded, compensation is now £34 not £32
Standard Parcel Service £34 but you can buy extra insurance £1 for upto £150 cover.
SD minium charge £4.70, i send some items this way because the custome rgets it quickly, it probably cost me a little more but it has the extra insurance. Oh and and these get lost 2, and it took over 2 months to get the claim sorted

D