Royal Mail Claims

[Laura@FYP]

We have put in many claims with Royal Mail over the years for lost parcels, and usually have no problems with getting compensated. However for the last batch that was sent off, we had the letters, which have usually just been letters confirming that they received the claims, so I just put them aside without paying much attention. However, I checked them again the other day when I realised that we still hadnt received the cheques, and realised that these ones do actually read that they had tried to contact the customers for confirmation of failed delivery, but hadn't heard anything back, so were advising us to contact them. They said that if they didn't hear back from us within 10 days, they would assume that delivery had been completed. Doh!

So now Im wondering, what do other people do when the customers dont respond to the RM requests for confirmation- as if they dont respond then obviously we dont get compensated so lose out....?

[little-linguist]

We gave up to be honest. It was getting ridiculous with the time it took us to fill in the claims. First they wanted original invoices for when we purchased the goods that had gone missing. Because a lot of our stock is purchased abroad, we then had to provide proof of exchange rate we received for each invoice. Then they now rely on the customers filling in a letter to say that they hadn't had the goods which is silly as once we'd replaced the goods, there is no reason from the customer's point of view why they should waste their time filling in the letter and sending it back (plus - I recently received one of these as the customer - Royal Mail don't even supply an envelope for the letter to be returned to them).

It just isn't worth the time taken for a claim worth £20 - £30 and Royal Mail know it which is why they make the claim process so long.

[mikepayn]

We gave up to be honest....... It just isn't worth the time taken for a claim worth £20 - £30 and Royal Mail know it which is why they make the claim process so long.

I agree, same with us. When we first hear about a suspected lost parcel we always advise the customer that we will send out a replacement and claim from Royal Mail on their behalf. We always email them a scan of the Cert of Posting (more or less to prove that we did post it) and in nine out of ten instances we hear no more from them about the alleged lost parcel. On the occasions we do have to send a replacement it just isn't worth the hassle of claiming from RM.

[chubster]

Yep same here.....unless its worth £100 + we just dont bother.

[KayJay]

We contact the customer to ask if they returned the letter. Mostly they say they never received it so we get RM to resend. Sometimes it pays off, mostly it doesn't.

[lewey]

Royal Mail use every and any possible trick to not do anything on a claim, so like others have really given up sending claims in. Interested to see that some people are having some success though - any tips of how you do it that you could pass on?

It just got too ridiculous for us after a case of a parcel sent via Royal Mail to France. The French post mishandled the package and basically destroyed it, but at least went to the effort of sending us the packaging back (the jiffy bag) enclosed on a La Post plastic bag saying sorry that they had destroyed the parcel and that we could put in a claim. Went through all the Royal Mail procedures, and we were told to send off the original of what we'd received from La Poste, which we duly did. Eventually got a letter back from Royal Mail (so they did receive our claim, which included everything asked for) saying that they didn't have the proof from La Poste, so could not process our claim unless we could send the original to them. Of course we couldn't because it was already sent to them - but they had lost it or deliberately decided to ignore it.

[powertoolworld]

We have put in many claims with Royal Mail over the years for lost parcels, and usually have no problems with getting compensated.

We got sick of the length of time taken to deliver and the claims process being useless so we negotiated with our carrier for a better rate . We increased our delivery cost and explained to our customers that they were paying for a quicker and more trackable service and most appreciate it. Our sales have increased and the time to process our orders has gone down.