Having had a failed collection on Tuesday, it was somewhat reassuring to discover this may not have simply been a failure on behalf of the local Postie, but looks like it was down to a systems error that caused the collections failure.
Having discovered the issue and gone public late on Wednesday afternoon, Royal Mail have taken drastic action and suspended collections from Send an Item and Click and Drop for the rest of the day and it’s still not back.
This morning it looks like they have resolved the systems error causing the collections failure as fix has been implemented and the company say that they are monitoring the results. However, if you try and book a parcel collection this morning it’s still not possible on their website.
The collections failure was a nuisance to say the least – having booked a Tracked24 I has let the recipient know that their parcel was due to be delivered the next day. It wasn’t until gone ten o’clock at night that I received an email informing me that they collection had failed and I could try book another… by which time I’d already got fed up and dropped the parcel at a Parcel Postbox outside the local Delivery Office just in time for their 5.30pm deadline. Plus of course, booking another when there’s an error would likely have resulted in another failure the next day as Royal Mail hadn’t yet suspended collections bookings.
Collections are one of Royal Mail’s flagship innovations in recent years offering convenience to customers and making it attractive to use their services – especially since although the service was supposed to cost 60p it’s largely been free ever since it was introduced. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to book a parcel without a free collection and you have to manually remove the collection from your basket if you want to drop your parcel off… or at least that was the case until this Collections Failure resulted in service suspension.
If you do have parcels to despatch today (or have had a failed collection) assume you’re best off dropping down to your local Delivery Office or Parcel Postbox to despatch (or a Post Office for a limited number of services).
3 Responses
I used the collection service a lot in November and December. Then I had a failed collection for 3 parcels which I rebooked for collection the next day. Nobody bothered to turn up then either.
I haven’t used it since. If they’re going to offer a service it needs to be reliable. The customer support was non-existent too, they took a week to respond and just told me to rebook it.
Apart from this week’s outage I have to say I have found the RM collection service excellent. I used it occasionally when it was 72p a pop but since pandemic it has been free in order for them to compete with other couriers. Having a small CWU ‘I Support My Postie’ poster up in my porch may have helped though and I have a reasonable good relationship with my Postman!
RM not perfect I know, but at least they don’t run over your parcels with a tractor and/or just leave them in people’s bins or don’t even deliver at all like Evri / Hermes. As a regular eBayer I soon learned that the 20p or so saving using them was simply not worth the hassle. Let’s be honest Evri only rebranded and changed their name to dissassociate themselves from the god awful reputation Hermes had.
What do you expect from this failing company? Why are you still using Royal Mail ????