Royal Mail have announced new enhancements to their parcel tracking. The announcements were made in their OBA (Online Business Accounts) dashboard and include delivery to safe place, delivery to neighbour and service point tracking enhancements.
These enhancements all appear to have come from Royal Mail’s push to barcode all parcels and their recent investments in handheld technology which every postman and postwomen now carry. It’s only be capturing the information that Royal Mail can make it available to retailers.
In particular, merchants will appreciate the customer service point acceptance scans as these should then also be made available to eBay and other marketplaces and count towards on-time delivery metrics.
“As Royal Mail continues to improve it’s business to maintain it’s position as the biggest and best parcels carried in the UK, we have recently delivered some enhancements to give more information about the status of your parcels.”
– Royal Mail
New enhancements for Royal Mail parcels for retailers
Delivery to neighbour
Additional information will be captured about the neighbour accepting the parcel.
Customer service point acceptance
Royal Mail will be providing an acceptance scan when you or your customers drop off pre-paid barcoded labels at Royal Mail Customer Service Points.
delivery to safe place
Royal Mail will provide information about Royal Mail Tracked 24/48 when a parcel delivery to safe place is requested
Unable to deliver to a safe place
Royal Mail will be providing information to customers to let them know that the safe place they specified was not available or not considered safe.
18 Responses
It will be interesting to see what the tracking shows, if anyone has received a “It’s with Mrs Biggs at no44”, notification.
Hopefully it may cut down on the “Where’s my stuff” messages, but do RM Posties have the time to enter even more information on the doorstep.
Trying to politely ask a customer, that is enquiring where their packet is, to ask around their neighbourhood to see if anyone has taken it in, is a little tricky when RM just showed DELIVERED.
When the customer then says, none of the neighbours have it, you can’t just say tough luck as RM say delivered.
Are they a scammer, are they genuine, who’s going to lose out, customer, ebay, or you.
Announced in OBA?
I was under the impression the OBA is being discounted….
Handhelds?
The barcodes printed from Click&Drop system quite often don’t scan on RM “handheld technology”…
I learned my lesson and anything more expensive (>£50) goes out with tracked service of my choice like UPS/DHL/etc. No more “it hasn’t arrived” from the buyer and RM saying “Delivered”.
really postman are pushed to deliver there rounds on time now so to be having them to do all this extra scanning walking up down your street looking 4 your neighbour to leave it with they won’t have time to do all this extra stuff so they will get to there finish time and the stuff that they not had time to deliver will go back to office trust me I’m a bloody postman so I know
As a seller on Amazon.co.uk I have been totally underwhelmed by Royal Mail as it is. Now they are attempting to introduce more and more services already provided by other couriers, whilst reducing staffing. What is needed by Royal Mail is a concerted effort to produce something truly original that they can deliver whilst they continually reduce staffing, or how about a truly original idea, stop reduce the number of staff, and then try and produce a service that people used to be proud of.
Back in the last century, tied in with wage grades and structures, businesses used to do ‘job evaluation’ and base them on where they were in the market, such as at forefront of technology and will let others lead and try to keep up.
RM are clearly in the try to keep up category but will have great difficulty as their cost ratio is clearly higher than others.
We stopped using Royal Snail years ago unless a customer specifically asks for it. Most of our stuff is over 1kg and the next day delivery deals we can get with couriers stuffs the PO by a country mile- and it’s collected from our doorstep.
It’s a win win- convenient for us and cost effective for our customers.
Having worked for RM for over 30 years i can give a true reflection of their service.
I have worked in every part of Royal Mail group.
Royal mail are still miles behind with tracking.
They are jn the past with new technology. They have the best network in the UK.
But their labour costs are the highest in
the courier business.
The high labour costs come from management.
Parcel tracking is scarecly done in the RM NETWORK.
I prefer DPD.
The royal mail have cut far too much staff over the last few years.
Postal staff now have far too much to do. in fact human rights need to get involved.royal mail staff are getting hammered into the ground.
I constantly see new faces doing deliveries probably because many staff are off sick or they have left their job or being sacked if they can’t complete their deliveries.The royal mail is always short staffed.
What they expect from their delivery should be against the law.
And their union ? Its a Shame their union does so little for their staff, the royal mail staff pay union dues for nothing.
Royal Mail is going through a big change at the minute staff are leaving the job or retiring as it is just to physical, walking 10-12 miles a day carrying weight on your back in this heat exhausting plus you got to drop off over sized parcels in the van with no air conditioning you don’t have a social life as your knackered all the time after 20 years I’ve had enough.
Hi, Paul I understand your comment but this is totally different from what we was doing 5 years ago never mind 20 years ago, other things I didn’t mention is we have up to 7 lots of leaflets on top to deliver and all the other parcels other companies don’t want to deliver because it’s not commercially viable plus scan everything our workload has probably trebled in 5 years with no extra time in the delivery and there’s a old saying if you don’t like it leave it and that’s what employees are doing . Duties are not completed on a regular basis but if that’s how the management want to run the business it’s a deep hole
Our postie often has to wait for the set time to scan the collection point barcode
If early they just chat or sit in the van, they cant do much else stuck until the pda lets them scan