Royal Mail is one of slowest courier services for solving customer service complaints, new study finds

Royal Mail was found to be one of the slowest companies when it comes to resolving customer service complaints, a new study has revealed.

The postal service was ranked eighth, behind the likes of Yodel, Parcel Force and DHL. A surprise name came out on top with Evri, the rebranded Hermes, being listed in first place.

SaaSGenius.com contacted 10 of the UK’s leading delivery courier companies with the query, “Hi, my parcel hasn’t turned up, and I need to locate it”. The study found that DPD gave the worst response, offering no viable methods of customer support.

The website used five different factors with which to test each company’s live chat. These were the number of clicks before you get from the website home page to the help desk, the length of time it takes for a first response, the number of messages exchanged before getting to speak to a human, the length of time it takes to resolve the issue and the number of messages it takes to resolve the issue.

SaaSGenius gave the companies a score out of 10 for each factor and then combed them to determine an overall score out of 50. As not all of the companies offered live chat customer service, it also considered the alternative methods of customer service - such as e-mail, phone and social media. In each of these categories, it contacted the courier companies and measured the length of time taken to deliver a first response.

Every company was contacted on a weekday and at regular working hours (between 9am and 3pm), which determined a score out of 10 each.

Each company was given an extra score out of 10 for the number of different customer service methods available. A company which offered all four modes of service would receive a 10 point score in this category.

In order to take into account consumers’ opinions regarding the customer service offered by each company outside of the study, they also factored the Trustpilot rating out of five for each company and doubled it for a score out of 10. This took the total score for each company to one out of 100.

Royal Mail among slowest for responding

The postal service came eighth out of the 10 companies featured in SaaSGenius’s report. Royal Mail did not have a live chat available and the average phone line response time scored 4.8 out of 10.

It also found that email customer service was not available for the Royal Mail, however it was in the top half for response time via Twitter with a score of 5.9 out of 10.

Royal Mail declined to comment on the research, however told NationalWorld that it was recently ranked as the second best delivery company by Which? with a 86% satisfied customer rate.

Evri and Amazon top performers

Evri was found to be the best delivery courier for customer service, scoring 60.7 out of 100. The company had a near-perfect live chat experience score of 49.8 out of 50 due to the super short response time of one second, alongside the company’s speediness in resolving any issues in one minute.

Customers also only needed to exchange one message in the live chat before being connected to a human. However, whilst Evri topped the table for its speedy customer service on its live chat, it’s important to note that this method of contact is the customer’s only way to reach customer service - so the company’s customer service resources are all focused on this.

Joining Evri in joint-first place is Amazon, also scoring 60.7/100 for its easy-to-use and super quick help desk. The American tech giant’s speedy one-second live chat response time has scored the online retail giant full marks (10/10) in this category. While those choosing to use Twitter to contact the courier were kept waiting for three minutes for a response.

Yodel secured its position in third place for customer service, with a total score of 58.5 out of 100. Customers of the Liverpool-based delivery company only needed to make one click to reach Yodel’s help desk and send one meessage before being connected to another human. The customer service team responded to customers in one minute with issues being resolved in two minutes.

SaaSgenius.com is known to compare help desk software, the primary purpose of this campaign was to test each of these companies’ on-site live chat customer service. It did not assess postal delivery or courier service.