Parcel delivery companies must handle complaints better

People told us they want it to be easier to sort out issues when things don’t go to plan

The nature of retail has changed dramatically. More people are shopping online — and that means more parcel deliveries.

At Citizens Advice, we’re working with parcel delivery companies to make sure that the parcels market works in customers’ interests, even when something goes wrong.

In the UK, we receive around 2 billion parcels per year and millions of deliveries are successful. However, our previous research found that 7 out of 10 UK customers have experienced at least 1 delivery problem in the previous year. And we know that people are unlikely to complain when things go wrong, and even when they do, they find the process is difficult. Many turn to social media to complain, even though it’s not always effective.

To understand more about the complaints process, we interviewed 30 people who had complained about a parcel delivery in the last 3 months. We’ve released the results in a digital storybook. This new research clearly shows the barriers people face when they want to complain, and allows us to present an ideal process based on what people told us.

People want clear ways of resolving issues when things don’t go to plan

Good complaints processes should make it easy for people to get their delivery problem addressed. Parcel delivery companies should work with the online retailer and the customer to provide a suitable solution to the problem.

We also heard that the actual experience of resolving a parcel delivery problem consistently fails to live up to this ideal model. The people we spoke to told us that there are barriers that make it hard to complain when there’s an issue. These barriers meant some people had to put in a lot of effort to complain, and some abandoned their complaint altogether because it was too hard.

People told us about friction at every stage of the journey that made it more difficult for them to resolve their delivery problem:

Experiencing these barriers is frustrating for people who are trying to make sure they receive the goods — and delivery service — they’ve paid for.

“We work really hard to be able to order stuff, for it to not then be taken care of is quite upsetting to be honest.” — Debra

The people we spoke to told us that they want to be able to easily get in touch with the delivery company to complain, they want to have a productive interaction with the company, they want a follow-up and a resolution from the company.

Based on what customers told us, we’ve mapped an ideal customer journey for complaining about a parcel issue:

There are consequences when people struggle to fix parcel delivery problems

When the ideal complaints journey is not realised, it means something has gone wrong and it’s difficult to fix. This can have 3 effects on customers:

For some, these might be small impacts. But for many people, they can have serious consequences. We heard that people had to take unpaid time off work to organise redelivery and experienced stress when they couldn’t access medicine for pets and didn’t receive the compensation they were entitled to under consumer rights regulation.

“I’ve had the issue of having to get to somewhere to collect the parcel in the first place, or if they say, ‘Do you want it redelivered?’ I say, ‘Well, yes, but if I’m in hospital or I’ve got treatment and I’m called in at short notice, I can’t operate on that basis.” — Ayla

What are we doing to make it easier to complain when things go wrong?

To avoid these negative effects, parcel delivery companies must make it easier for people to complain when things go wrong. So over the next few months, we’ll work with our colleagues at Citizens Advice Scotland and the Consumer Council for Northern Ireland to develop a best practice guide for complaints handling by parcel delivery companies. We’ll combine the ideal complaints journey outlined above with existing research from all 3 organisations to produce a public document that’ll help parcel delivery companies put our ideal complaints journey into practice.

We’re also working with parcel delivery companies to develop an agreed system for measuring complaints handling performance across the sector. This will allow us, and the industry, to better understand where individual delivery companies can improve, to the benefit of customers.