Royal Mail is currently prohibited from offering parcel tracking for Universal Service customers, which means that any 1st & 2nd letters, large letters or parcels that you send won’t be tracked. Royal Mail wants to change this, recognising that untracked services simply don’t cut the mustard for today’s ecommerce world.
Royal Mail proposes that Ofcom enhances and modernises the Universal Service by removing unnecessary regulation that prohibits Royal Mail from offering parcel tracking for Universal Service customers. Tracking is now a hygiene factor when sending parcels in this highly competitive sector. The current restriction does not reflect what customers want and renders the Universal Service unfit for the digital age.
– Royal Mail
This make a heck of a lot of sense, especially considering it’s almost impossible to send an item today that doesn’t already carry a barcode – even a basic 2nd Class stamp on a postcard will have a barcode in today’s world, so why not simply add tracking?
Tracking for ecommerce could take a number of forms – it could include tracking at different stages as the item is passed through Royal Mail’s network, or to avoid diluting the value of Royal Mail’s higher value services (e.g. Tracked24, Tracked48 etc), it could be simply a scan on delivery. Either way it would be a much preferable solution to that currently offered which is zero tracking.
Royal Mail’s input to Ofcom is not all about adding tracking. Ofcom’s consultation proposes to remove the requirement for Royal Mail to deliver Second Class post six days a week and allow delivery of these letters every other weekday, Monday to Friday.
Royal Mail is also concerned that the level at which Ofcom is proposing to set the new reliability targets is over specified and will add significant cost to the delivery of the Universal Service. They say that this would put the benefits of Universal Service reform at risk and could lead to materially higher prices for customers.
It is vital that Universal Service reform delivers a postal service which is reliable, affordable and better meets what customers need for both letters and parcels. These changes we seek are important measures to ensure we can protect the one-price-goes-anywhere Universal Service for many years to come.
– Martin Seidenberg, Chief Executive Officer, International Distribution Services
5 Responses
I didn’t think Rm could get much worse with their attempts to extort more and more money from me!
Over the past few weeks I noticed extra charges on the invoices Unreadable barcode.
And extra £1.00 EACH.
I asked for clarification and they kindly sent a few photos of the offending items.
When I told RM that they were wrong, they told me no way and the charges would remain.
One of the labels was for a Tracked 48 item. For me our nice postie collects and scans upon collection.
What does this mean.
It entered RM’s network without a label issue. The tracking clearly shows it was collected and ONCE RM got it’s grubby mits on it, THEN it became unreadable with the extra £1.00.
I pointed this out to RM and are awaiting their response.
If I’m doing something wrong, as they accuse me of, then I hold my hands up, but this is like the fiasco of the FAKE STAMPS. RM machinery can’t read sometimes or cant weigh sometimes, but don’t blame me for your MESS UPS.
You are not the only one Simon, I’ve seen these surcharges too.
RM told me via email that they over-label the original unreadable barcode with a new barcode to aid processing and as a result, it is not always apparent from the images as to why the barcode could not be read.
I requested details of all instances to try and get to the bottom of things. They have sent photos, most of which show the over-labelled parcels. But I have also seen a proof of delivery photo, where there was no over-label, The original supposedly unreadable and surcharged barcode, was in the end perfectly readable for delivery scan.
The mail here currently gets collected in their mail sacks, so is not getting scanned by RM before it goes into their network. But as of last week I thought to get them scanned in-house, check the barcode works, and store that data for proof. So far, all the scans have been successful. What I’m now waiting for is a successfully scanned label to become allegedly unreadable after entering the RM network. Then I’ll ask for a credit and see what happens.
I think your example of the parcel they scanned to accept, yet later failed to be read automatically, should get a credit. Only £1, but that’s not the point. It these things were one-offs, it would not be worth bothering with. But if it’s a percentage, like 1 in 100 labels that can’t be read automatically, then it’ll add up over the year.
This is Royal Mail’s response.
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Good Afternoon Simon
Thank you for your enquiry.
The scans you see when you track the item at Delivery Offices, or when your postperson scans your items on delivery are done with a PDA device, which is not the same scanners that are built into the machinery within the Mail Centres. This is why you can see scans for the items when tracking them.
Our PSMs use advanced camera technology to read the data matrix on your parcels as they travel at high speeds across our belts. When presented with appropriate labels, the PSMs can achieve close to 100% read rates. The operating conditions differ from those seen by your phone or PDA, which have more attempts to read the barcode and are generally closer. This can mean that labels readable by a handheld device are not of a high enough quality to be readable by our machines.
When the machine cannot read a label, it is sent to a central computer, which judges whether the label has an issue and whether it should be over-labelled or ejected to be manually sorted. Only around 0.3% of items in our Mail Centres are over-labelled due to unreadable barcodes.
Please ensure you take the time to read through the label best practice guide my colleague attached to his previous email.
Kind Regards
Danielle Wood
Royal Mail
What a poor response from them, but there is a case to be made from what they have disclosed.
They’ve said the PSMs can achieve close to 100% read of appropriate labels. It sounds very impressive. But, they’ve just admitted the PSMs CANNOT achieve 100%, even if there is nothing wrong with the labels. So we can do everything correctly, tick all the boxes in their “Parcel Label Best Practice Guide” but are still going to get a small number of surcharges, because their system is not 100%
If we were putting through parcel labels and say 10% of them were unreadable, then it would probably be fair to say there was a printer or label issue. But if we’re scoring anything over 99% for success of scans by their PSMs, then they need to look at other reasons for the scan failures. Such as the PSMs cannot achieve 100%. Such as the possibility of dirt and debris being picked up in their network. One of those reasons could be what happened to yours after it had been successfully scanned in. Still can’t believe they’re not doing a credit for that.
As it looks like these surcharges will continue to occur no matter how good the labels are, I’ll ask for a credit every time. I’ve not done that yet. And I know I won’t get it, but my response to that will be to tell them I will recover the amount of any surcharges I feel are undue, by switching a suitable number of parcels that they would otherwise have got in that week over to a rival carrier. I think we should all do something similar. See how they like it.
Getting postmen to scan every letter they deliver, well good luck with that one considering they deliver thousands of letters a day and if they are scanning more items at the doorstep then that means less time for them to deliver, so royal mail have to employ more staff, again good luck with that one. If this rolls out then expect your mail being delivered once a week, if you’re lucky.