Here’s the background: A letter was sent Recorded Delivery from a Post Office on one side of Liverpool to a business on the other side of Liverpool. When it arrived, the envelope had been damaged and was open. Some, but not all of the contents were missing, including a photo intended as a countersigned form of ID and a cheque. The recipients immediately contacted the sender and discussed exactly what had gone missing, and so needed to be re-sent. Sorted.
So then.
There appears to be no way to actually speak to a human being at the Royal Mail about this. The customer services phone number demands you listen to a succession of slowly read out menu and sub-menu and sub-sub-sub-sub-menu options until it all just routes to not a human being but a pre-recorded set of information relevant to what a customer can do. A customer can fill-in a compensation/claim form, which can be downloaded from the website, printed off, filled-in and then posted to them.
Except of course, it can’t.
At the time of trying, and again at the time of writing this, a fault at the Royal Mail site would not allow access to the pdf of the relevant form. So, the only place to get the form is from a Post Office, it helpfully advises.
I have spared you the sliding scale of my growing anger and frustration over the period of time that I endured the previous painful experiences of getting no customer satisfaction from the Royal Mail.
Now, back at the beginning, the bright clean new A5 envelope was handed in to the Post Office counter and duly stamped up and had the relevant stickers applied to ensure it was a Recorded Delivery. The envelope that arrived at its destination looked like it had aged 30 years, been pulverised by a huge press, walked on by an army, attached to a sled, and slashed by Freddy Krueger. How could this have happened in the space of 24 hours?
Naturally, this is worthy of letting Royal Mail know, even if compensation isn’t available, at least they should know that something has gone wrong? But, no, there is no know mechanism available for advising them. Therefore, no central quality control, no centralised intelligence gathering or knowledge or ability to identify problems while mail is in their charge.
That’s got to be wrong, surely?
The Royal Mail appears to be hiding. It’s sitting there with its fingers in its ears gently rocking back and forth whilst emitting a manic hum, thinking that if we can’t talk to it, then we’ll happily go away. No, we won’t go away happy in the slightest. We’ll just get angry and maybe get driven by them to ‘go postal’ as it’s called in parts of America.
Where’s my AK47?
England's England 