Royal Mail sorting officesl
I found out this morning that Royal Mail are planning to close the customer service desks at all the sorting offices in my area ( Teesside ). As we can’t leave tracked parcels at Post Offices this rather leaves me high and dry. Our sorting office desk is incredibly busy so it seems idiotic to think of closing it. Is this a general problem?
67 replies
Seller_7VbclcPFFRTnc
Collection offices are separate to delivery offices
The ones closing are possibly the ones where customers collect their parcels - open 7am to 10am mornings
Do you drop yours in the afternoon at the depots with the collections ?
Seller_DTufFoxJuMU0M
there should be special post boxes you can drop them into, if you call up Royal Mail they can tell you where the local ones are.
Seller_ae51e0CJoHqCX
I haven’t heard anything about our local sorting office and it isn’t usually busy. I fear a lot of these cost cutting measures to reduce labour will certainly hit the front line first. All part of modernisation and not sure if these measures are what is driving the strike action or whether strike action is driving the measures.
Seller_TK2OUpwGNKKsN
We normally have a collection but when something happened we’ve been able to just drop off at a depot without the customer service point. Basically just grabbing any postie about to drop off with our manifest.
Not sure when it’s closing but you can arrange a collection for free until 17th of Feb, just need to purchase postage for 1 item through the website.
It’s 15k a year spend I think now for a free daily collection.
We have a regular collection but have been purchasing tracked through the website because currently it’s almost 50% cheaper. The madness of RM Management. It’s actually cheaper for me to cost them more money by adding additional collections to their day (although I just delete the collection from my basket and hand over to my usual collection)
This is the kind of thing the strikes were opposed to, that the general public doesn’t realise. It’s always been handy to be able to pick up mail that you missed, but big companies prefer profits over customer convenience so would prefer you to spend your time going in a circle with a chatbot. It’s part of the staff reduction which was announced before the strikes were even involved.
Seller_RcApN52L8C1ZV
Yes I heard this from within Royal Mail yesterday. All collection desks to close apparently. There is a memo floating around amongst managers within Royal Mail to close collection desks and basically do everything through track and trace in terms of redelivery and/or collect from post office and if it is not called for after 3 days it is returned to sender. Also they are talking about charging for redlivery. They are essentially trying to go down the route of ‘traditional’ parcel carriers. They did warn this last year and for me this will 100% happen. The evolution of Royal Mail or the death of Royal Mail as we know it is on it’s way
Seller_0nPfmlYateqWp
I’ve been using Tracked 24 (online Click & Drop) since it’s been on special offer (slightly cheaper than my Parcel Consolidator’s standard RM48…)
You can only buy them in batches of 10 and collections have to be arranged the day before. So on busier (for me) days, I might drop 10 off at the Customer Service Point at our local (Hereford) Delivery Office on my way into work, get 10 collected at around lunchtime by my friendly postie, and then drop a further 10 off at the CSP before it closes/to catch the lorry at 4pm (and an early finish for me).
I don’t want to (literally & metaphorically) overburden my postie/keep him onside.
It took me a week or two to realise that the prices (on Tracked 24/48) were VATable.
Seller_OD408ZNiEUfUp
RM are closing all the sorting office collection offices from mid January. This is for customer collection. You can still drop with the sorting office. From Mid Jan, if the customer is not at the address for 3 attempts, items will be returned to sender and no longer held for collection. RM also have plans to leave non tracked items in a safe location, rather than take it back to the sorting office. I am not sure if this will also apply to tracked items at some stage.
Seller_3TuKPsB3ieWKC
Our postie told us that this is what the Royal Mail CEO wanted to do, close all delivery offices so customers cannot collect, and no items are to be brought back (i.e. they must be ‘delivered’, whether this is to a neighbour or in a ’safeplace’)
We have had a large increase this year in ‘safeplace’ deliveries, and when I say safeplace, we have had these so far,
- Behind bins
- Under car on a driveway
- In a hallway of communal flats
- Propped up against front doors
Also be aware (we generally use Royal Mail 48) that you can’t claim for these packages dumped in full view of anyone and not actually delivered as Royal Mail class them as delivered. We have had 5 this year ‘delivered’ to a safeplace where the delivery has been disputed by customers saying they haven’t received items. When a photo is provided from Royal Mail they confirm, for example, that the hallway is in their building, but it has public access and anyone could have picked it up. Royal Mail deny all claims as they have ‘proof of delivery’.
I can see the delivery standards dropping big time and Royal Mail end up being just like Evri.
Seller_WChbFymG0Ifsc
I noticed that Tracked 24 and 48 parcels are now scanned and accepted at post offices. It seemed to change sometime in December, which is better because the delivery office is/was only open from 8-10 am.
Seller_1a9aic95k6HPe
I’m now sending tracked 24 and 48 parcels, booked on the Royal Mail website. My regular postman collects them from me and even brings the labels and they are charging £2.85 for tracked 48 which is the same cost as standard 2nd class small parcels. I used to have an account with RM but they stopped me using it a few months ago as I was only posting about 10 items a day. They said that wasn’t enough to qualify for a parcel collection so if I wanted to keep my account I’d have to pay a collection surcharge of nearly £100 per month(told them where to stick that!). This was lucky for me as I was paying nearly £5 for the same service!!
