I used to defend Royal Mail/Parcelforce but it's getting harder and harder all the time. Two personal experiences this week alone, two packages on from within the UK posted 24hr tracked posted on the 6th of Jan arrived at the local hub on the 8th not to worried the weather had been bad so I thought give them a couple of days to get it to the local sorting office then out for delivery no problem, no they held it at the hub for the next 5 days eventually got it yesterday. Package two sent from Germany on the 8th Jan, cleared customs on the 10th, arrived in Edinburgh on the 11th and it's still there, so 3 days to get the over 800 miles as the crow flies from south east Germany and 4 days and counting to get the 160 or so miles to my door from Edinburgh. Like I said it's getting harder and harder to defend them, personally I don't think privatisation has done the customer much good.
P.S. don't try and ring their customer services the average waiting time from personal experience is 1hr + and they can only tell you whats on the tracking and will only escalate if you are very very insistent, still waiting to here from them even though they state within 24hr reply. Unless the class the call the gave me as the 24hr response, my phone rang, twice i.e. two ring tones and hung up so called the number back to get a recorded message Royal Mail and Parcelforce Worldwide attempted to call you, we will try again another time, they must be so busy with all the complaints they just don't have time to let it ring more than twice but I suppose it will show they tried in their performance stats..
