Royal Mail - still suffering

[lewey]

Just wondering if any one else who uses Royal Mail to send out their orders is still experiencing problems with orders not having arrived to customers?

All we have done for past 2 weeks now is deal with complaints over late deliveries, and has been a nightmare to get any proper information from Royal Mail.

Someone finally admitted to me yesterday that the area I am in (South London) was one of the depots which experienced some of the worst of the wild cat strikes, which they weren't admitting to earlier.

Apparently smaller depots are almost back to normal, but the larger ones in biggest centres ended up with the most backlog, hence longest time to clear. Our customers are really suffering, and are bewildered that they are receiving other mail, but not orders from us. Anything sent out on 4th, 5th, 6th, 9th, 10th and 11th seems to be most affected.

My main gripe with Royal Mail is that the are not providing public information about just how bad the backlog was, and still is in some areas - only a standard 'we are trying to clear it' line. Have tried to complain to Postwatch, and even spoke to Trading Standards, but they weren't interested at all.

Just trying to gauge if most people are still having problems too, or is it now getting back to normal for most?

[little-linguist]

Yep - we're having terrible trouble too. I'm surprised at how rude the customers are too given that they live in the UK and hopefully watch / read the news from time to time so should be aware of the problems in recent weeks.
We're thinking of using the new "Royal Mail Tracked" service which is a bit like Recorded Delivery but the parcels are tracked along the way. At least this way we'd have a number to give to customers to prove we'd posted it and it's on its way. Most of the time they accuse us of lying that their parcel was ever posted which is really hurtful. On the days when the strike action hit us hardest and we had no Royal Mail business collection for 5 working days, I actually drove sacks of mail to the local Mail Centre in my own car and really went out of the way to minimise the effect on customers. Not sure it was worth the effort!
For our larger parcels, we use Parcelforce and I'm pushing for a better deal on courier deliveries with them. If they could drop the price a little further, we could get a much larger percentage of our parcels out with them and away from Royal Mail who, even when operating normally, are pretty terrible.

[TeamTorquesteer]

As per the 2 replies above Im having at least 2-3 calls a day asking where their order is!!
Stuff that was sent out on the 6th was only just being delivered yesterday.

What other couriers do Bluepark users use?? For anything over 2kg I tend to us Fastway, as long as the post code is covered, and also Parcels2Go.com Would be interesting to see what the best deals are. Parcels2Go actually dropped their prices during the postal strike to attract customers who usually use Royal Mail.

Thanks

Martin