Missing Letters

Way back in early December, I posted a couple of letters, both by Royal Mail Special Delivery – a service that tracks the letter, requires a signature on delivery, and is guaranteed to be delivered the next working day by 1pm.

In my case, one letter arrived, and the other didn’t.

After a week, I raised this with Royal Mail through Twitter, and they were… pretty slack, to be fair. The letter had disappeared into the system, they needed to investigate, blah blah. At no point did the words “sorry” pass their (online) lips.

Another week or so passed, and they came back with “we can’t find it, can’t you check with the recipients whether they’ve received it or not“. Which is taking the piss, as that was the entire reason for sending the sodding thing by Special Delivery in the first place.  And still, no sorry.

I ended up having to file a compensation claim with Royal Mail – again, the person who paid for the service has to jump through all the hoops, fill in the forms and so on – and wait even more. Still no “sorry”.

I finally got the response today to that compensation claim. They’ve taken six weeks to acknowledge that this “guaranteed service” isn’t, has failed, and I’ve finally got my money back.

The kicker, in my opinion, is that in that letter they say…

“If you need to cover yourself against this in future, I suggest you send items by Special Delivery “Guaranteed”

So the fucking clowns recommend I use the service that lost this letter in the first place – because it’s better. What the fuck?

All told, the customer-service experience of this process has been abysmal.

• It’s taken nearly two months to get this sorted
• Once we were past that ‘guaranteed delivery’ timeline, it should’ve been an automatic process to say “Yep, we fucked up, here’s your money back”
• If you can’t guarantee delivery, don’t guarantee delivery.
• If you don’t trust your own tracking systems and still require ‘proof’ that the item was posted into the system, you’re doing it wrong