My esteemed colleague Dan told me yesterday he was crossing his fingers for a mammoth last minute delivery from Amazon hopefully to be delivered today. I’ve not spoken to him yet to see if it arrived, but he’s got a one percent chance that it won’t!
Many Amazon deliveries are handled by Yodel and according to the FT, Yodel are failing to deliver some 15,000 parcels a day. Their parcel volume is up from 1/2 million a day to 1.5 million and they’re struggling to cope. Demand is up 20% on that forecast with the surprised realisation from Yodel chief Jonathan Smith, that “This appears to have been a very strong online Christmas”.
Yodel were formed by the merger of HDN and DHL Home Delivery and are now the second biggest delivery network after Royal Mail. If they can’t cope at Christmas than how are the smaller guys faring? Let us know if you’re courier has coped admirably or if you’ve had a major fail with upset customers
31 Responses
We often use Yodel , but for the busy festive period we’ve sent orders out using either Royal Mail or My Hermes. All orders sent with Hermes on Monday showed as being delivered by yesterday.
Some Royal Mail parcels have been delayed and reported as not received , but certainly a lot less than 1%.
We have had issues with parcels not arriving with us. Items purchased from an ebay outlet are now well overdue , and a Parcelforce 24 hour delivery , which i’ve never previously known take 2 days to reach us took a whopping 5 days.
I work for yodel and It makes me very mad to see newspapers etc saying that yodel has failed to deliver parcels, I would like to see these reporters go out and deliver to 130 different address and do collections six days a week!! Us yodel drivers work very hard and we should be getting thanked for all our effort to ensure people get there Christmas parcels!!!!!
I used to use Yodel as an option from Parcels2Go and the Yodel guys were some of the nicest most helpful guys I have dealt with.
However I was using Yodel via Parcels2Go who were in my opinion quite simply the most unhelpful useless parcel delivery service I have ever used. (By the way Parcels2Go if you think this is libel – I’m the guy who threatened to take you to Court for money owed and I have lots of emails and screen shots showing your disgraceful conduct – so go for gold if you want to.) – You may recall that you paid up and ate humble pie, so perhaps my opinion has some justification!
Oh yes you can also keep the £20 credit you placed into my account as part of your apology – I wont need it because I will never use you again.
I now use Parcelforce and everything has been delivered safely and on time
20 days and counting for one of my parcels with Yodel.
Apparently, they can’t find it anywhere in the depot.
Oh yes, and they lied about the first delivery attempt it quotes on their tracking website!
Just had to refund a customer as I’ve been unable to ship his parcel to him via Yodel / Parcel2Go.
Parcel2Go are more useless than a chocolate teapot when it comes to finding answers, but at the end of the day it’s down to Yodel – if they were aware they were struggling they should have stopped accepting orders. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d said it’s not going to happen, I could then have sourced another route for the parcel.
As it is I wasted TWO days waiting in for a courier who never arrived and disappointed a customer, with no explanation and no apology.
I was looking for a new courier for my parcels in 2012. It won’t be Yodel.
Interlink, 0% failure rate for me in the last 12 months, best courier I’ve used by far.
My driver covers 90 rural drops most days, and arrives at my warehouse no more than 10 minutes either side of 2:20 every day.
Faultless.
I had a failed collection from City Link on monday, when I rang up to find out why I was told (with no apology) that the driver must have run out of time and that the only way to get it sent now would be if it I dropped it off at the depot 4 miles away.
By sheer luck a City Link driver turned up with a parcel and I sweet talked him into taking it for me.
Like Whirly says, it’s the management that usually get it wrong and the drivers are the ones who get the stick because they’re the public face of the company.
Yodel by far the worst one we ever had.
They did ‘DELIVERY’ the parcels but only the driver knew where and who signed for it. This happened every other day. Once Had a customer hunting for parcel and found it in his neighour garden shed, it was signed by ‘someone’, no notice were ever left to anyone. The lists goes one, with similler problems.
Had one complant to despatchbay almost everyday, so at the end they stopped reply my email and sales reps never called back. I was only spending £250 a day, so I might be just a small fish with very bad luck.
Sent a parcel using Yodel via Parcel2Go on Tuesday, 48hr service and got delivered next day!
No experience of yodel, but I hate to find out my items are being sent via UK Mail, If I knew before I bought, I would refuse to use any seller, shipping by them.
My main experience of Yodel is at work (DHL is one of the main couriers in the industry).
When the Yodel takeover took place everything was delivered/collected by Yodel drivers, with items routed through both the DHL and Yodel network (sometimes DHL delivered to the Yodel depot, who then delivered to the customers a day later!). Now most (but not all) deliveries take place with Yodel (often 2 or 3 different deliveries in the same day, often less than an hour apart), but the main Friday collection takes place with DHL drivers.
On Thursday a DHL driver delivered at 21:00!
—-
According to the FT article (accessed via Google News to avoid paywall) Yodel has still to integrate its two divisions (ex HDNL and ex DHL) and plan to do this in June. Does this mean that next Xmas they will have even less capacity and cause even more chaos?
We use UPS via pharosparcel.com
with one exception we have never had a problem in over 3 years.
Ironically enough the only parcel they ever lost was one I sent to myself from england to Spain!
I am fortunate to have turned down Yodel about 2 months ago. They were offering me silly low prices of £3.15 per 24 hr delivery. What alarmed me was they closed alot of they local hubs at the same time. For instance the Swindon depot closed, and all pick-up are being done from the Gloucester depot. This is why they are over stretched – too large an area for too few drivers, with too many parcels.
What I will say is their order monitoring software is very good. I hope they improve and learn from their errors. What I do like about them is they deliver upto 9pm at night (when alot of consumers are at home!)
I use Interlink Express, and was posting upto 200 parcels a day before xmas. I had no delays – every parcel arrived next day, with lots of +comments on ebay from my customers.
Well I ordered from amazon on 3rd dec, by the 15th nothing, so I rang and was told to wait until the 21st, still nothing and I’d lost out on someone’s birthday present due to it.
I was furious but at least amazon refunded me.
Been absolutely useless for me this year.
My new phone was delivered by Yodel. When I say delivered I use the term losely. The online tracking showed ‘noone available to receive, card left’ When in fact there was someone home and no card was left. That was mid afternoon with approx 6 hours remaining of delivery time for that day. So I contacted Yodel Head Office who I requested to make contact with that driver to find out if he could redeliver before the 9pm shut off. When the driver was contacted he reported that he was at home with a broken thumb…so who falsified the web tracking data there then. If Yodel were the last courier company on Earth I would take the parcel myself no mater what.
I have a package missing with an insurance value of 5000. They have no idea where it is. Out of curiosity, what routinely happens to mail dropped at another location/house? Will a postman take it back and redeliver?