More than 13million people had to put up with parcels arriving damaged, late or not at all - in just the last month.
The snapshot survey by Citizens Advice ranked industry heavyweights Evri and Yodel as the worst carriers. But none of the delivery firms - which also included DPD, Royal Mail and Amazon Logistics - managed three stars out of a possible five. Overall, Citizens Advice said parcel delivery firms were offering a "miserable" service for consumers.
A surge in online shopping in recent years means many more of us are relying on an army of couriers in vans and cars to deliver items. But there have long been concerns the system is creaking, especially given hard working drivers can find themselves under huge time pressures.
Citizens Advice commissioned a report of more than 8,000 people who had received a parcel in the past month. A third - equivalent to 13.3 million people - experienced some sort of issue. Those included parcels left in insecure locations or arriving late. Other households in the past have reported items thrown over the fence and damaged, or lost.
The survey comes before what is expected to be a jump in demand in the busy run up to Christmas. One woman contacted Citizens Advice after £600 worth of products she ordered from a retailer failed to turn up. She disputed claims by both the retailer and the courier that they had, and was refused a refund. Another woman bought a laptop online for her daughter.
The courier said they tried to deliver the parcel and no-one was in. But the photo of the attempted delivery was from her neighbour’s door. When she contacted the delivery company, they said they would re-deliver at first, before saying it had been delivered. The second photo they sent was also not of her door but an unmarked one.
Have you experienced a problem with online deliveries? Do you work for one of the big parcel carriers and want to tell us about working conditions? Please get in touch via graham.hiscott@mirror.co.uk.
In a third example, a delivery firm left a parcel containing £500 worth of clothes in full view of a public footpath on a customer’s porch. The parcel went missing and the man could not get a refund, leaving him out of pocket. Issues are often compounded when households battle to get hold of anyone to help.
Citizens Advice found that, of those who had a parcel problem last month, 43% reported difficulties trying to resolve it. That included not being able to find the right company contact details or failing to receive a response. Evri, the UK’s largest parcel carrier, and Yodel both got just two stars out of five based on Citizens Advice research.
Yodel was ranked lowest for trust and joint bottom for customer service. Evri, formerly known as Hermes, can bottom for “accessibility” - or issues getting items in one way or another. Citizens Advice is calling on the industry regulator to take action. It recommends Ofcom conduct a review of its complaints and accessibility guidance by April 2024 and consider enforcement action, such as launching investigations or issuing fines, if there have been no significant improvements by then. The charity also wants Ofcom to expand its monitoring processes.
Dame Clare Moriarty, chief executive of Citizens Advice, said: “For the third year running our league table reveals online shoppers are being let down by a substandard delivery service. “This is an issue we feel has been neglected for far too long. We continue to hear from consumers who are chasing up lost, late or damaged parcel deliveries, it’s become an unfair and at times, costly burden to bear.
“With a seasonal surge of deliveries on the horizon, parcel companies must take action to protect shoppers and get to the root cause of these persistent failings.”
Chris Ashworth, chief customer officer at Evri, said: “We are disappointed with where Citizens Advice has placed us in its parcels league table – after a year of significant investment and listening to our customers to improve our service. Our ambition is that every customer’s experience with Evri is a positive one, and we work hard to understand each instance when this is not the case.
“Our rising parcel volumes are proof that customers and retail clients are voting with their feet and trust us with their deliveries. “We have invested more than £130million to improve our UK operations in the last two years with 99% of the 730 million parcels we handle annually delivered on time.
A Yodel spokesperson said: “We welcome feedback and invest heavily to continuously improve our service. However, this report is not reflective of our own parcel data, which indicates that 98.7% of the 200 million parcels we handled over the last 12 months were delivered correctly on the first attempt.”
An Amazon spokesman said: “The vast majority of deliveries make it to customers without issue. In the rare case something occurs, we work with customers directly to make it right.”
A Royal Mail spokesman said: “We are pleased to come joint first of Citizens Advice’s parcels league table. We are working hard to further improve our quality of service and continuing to introduce more convenient options for customers to access our services, including automatic redelivery and safe place delivery preferences.”
Full list of delivery firms from best to worst
- Amazon Logistics - 2.75 stars
- Royal Mail - 2.75 stars
- DPD - 2.25 stars
- Yodel - 2 stars
- Evri - 2 stars