A few days ago I wrote about the difficulties of getting a package sent by UKMail delivered on a day convenient for me. I had a confirmation email but no record of the retailer and no easy way to contact UKMail over a bank holiday weekend.
Needless to say they tried to deliver while I was out of the country for two days. Normally I’d expect a delivery company to leave the parcel somewhere safe for instance with a neighbour or simply take it back to the depot and wait for me to collect it at my inconvenience.
That’s doesn’t appear to be UKMail’s style however. I can’t blame them for not knowing I was out of the country, but I can blame them for leaving the parcel behind the green recycling bin. It might be a fairly safe place out of sight of passers by, but it certainly wasn’t sheltered from the torrential rain which fell before I returned home two days later to a wet soggy package.
It’s worth reiterating that the “Can my parcel be delivered to another address?” and “Can you deliver to my neighbour/leave in a safe place?” options on the UKMail website are both answered with “The delivery instructions are provided to us by your sender. If you wish to change the delivery instructions please contact your sender to see if this is possible”. That would have been great if I’d known who the sender was and if it hadn’t been a Bank Holiday weekend.
When will carriers learn that if someone isn’t at home they might not want their parcel today? More importantly if carriers gave consumers the tools to rearrange delivery they wouldn’t have people like me complaining about them twice in the space of a week.
6 Responses
Are you saying you’re not going to use ‘Parcel Pete’ and take advantage of their 20% off offer? 😀
I have no experience of UKmail as a seller, as a buyer I have had a lot, mostly bad.
If a seller is stupid enougth to say shipped by UKmail in his listings I look elsewhere.
Life is too short to be messed around by such a shower of the brown smelly stuff
I used them for years when I set this business up, only because they had a depot local to me that I could drop stuff off to upto 8pm. They were pretty rubbish back then and got very expensive. They also lost / misrouted / damaged a lot of parcels and were a nightmare to get a claim paid out so I thought I’d give Interlink a try and have never looked back. In three years with them I have had a total of three parcels go missing (all were because of address details being wrong on eBay) and their PREDICT service is brilliant, my customers get text / email updates from the moment their parcel is collected from me and get a one hour delivery window. They also have the option to change their delivery options via text message. Simply the best.
Haha as if delivery is their biggest problem. Here have a dispatches documentary about what they do to your parcels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rcp6eqry0LE