A question of compensation
As previously mentioned on the Postwatch blog, Postcomm are consulting on Royal Mail's Compensation Schemes. At the moment customers often find the various Schemes confusing and Postcomm are seeking to remedy this.
A number of ideas have come out of the discussions held on compensation, one of which is the suggestion that the first response from Royal Mail should be a no quibble offer of a book of twelve first class stamps. This would be offered to customers who did't have a certificate of posting, so removing this often difficult requirement from the first level of compensation. The book of stamps would be offered in the first instance for loss, damage and delay.
It would be really interesting to hear your views on this to feed into our response to the consultation, so please feel free to comment on the blog.
A number of ideas have come out of the discussions held on compensation, one of which is the suggestion that the first response from Royal Mail should be a no quibble offer of a book of twelve first class stamps. This would be offered to customers who did't have a certificate of posting, so removing this often difficult requirement from the first level of compensation. The book of stamps would be offered in the first instance for loss, damage and delay.
It would be really interesting to hear your views on this to feed into our response to the consultation, so please feel free to comment on the blog.
posted by Anonymous at 11:47 am
2 Comments:
I would support this suggestion; a "no quibble" compensation of this kind is disproportionately good for customer relations. However there would have to be some understnding that if there were a number of claims from the same person this would (and ought to!) trigger a proper investigation of what was causing the problem. This would also deter false claims, although I would have thought these would be few. Experience would tell.
Even if a simpler compensation scheme is finally ironed out, there still remains cases where customers have been misinformed by Post Offices over which service (ie 'special delivery' or 'signed for') is appropriate for any given situation.
The onus remains on the customer to get this right from Royal Mail's point of view - certainly if there is any quibble later on.
For this to work properly, customers need to be made fully aware of the differences in the services available as do PO counter staff.
All too often customers are using 'signed for' which they wrongly assume adds some degree of security to an item. Only Special Delivery can offer adequate insurance cover for items of any value over £32 and 'signed for' does not guarantee that an item will indeed be signed for. The practicalities of delivering items requiring a signature (particularly to large organisations) is that they all to often are not signed for and are delivered with normal post.
Special Delivery (on the whole) is handled differently by Royal Mail and is really the service of choice these days if a customer needs insurance cover and/or a better chance of an item arriving.
It would make sense to abolish 'signed for' and incorporate this into the Special Delivery service on a low compensation rate. That way at least customers will be able to make an informed choice and it should virtually eliminate cases of using an inappropriate service, something we hear repeatedly from customers in our forums.
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