Is Your Courier Losing You Customers? Study Reveals The Delivery Companies Where Your Parcels Are Most At Risk

For the 5.5 million independent businesses in the UK, every sale that is made is crucial in order to grow profit margins and establish success. Building up a loyal customer base that trusts your business and values your products is extremely important in order to maintain a presence in the market.

Therefore, it can often be frustrating knowing that your reputation could be let down during the last mile delivery of your products, depending on the experience that your customer has with the delivery courier. In fact, 64% of customers are likely to leave a negative review when they experience delays with their delivery.

In order to warn independent businesses and support them in finding a courier that they can trust, a new study by DeliveryApp, a leading same-day delivery tech firm has uncovered the most common complaints about delivery companies on social media across the UK, to see where the problems lie for individual couriers.

Online customers take to social media, making over 56,000 complaints about their deliveries 

Taking a look at the UK’s top six courier companies, including EVRI, DPD, Royal Mail, Yodel, Parcelforce, and Amazon a total of 56,368 complaints were made on social media against the service that these couriers provided in 2022.

No stranger to public scrutiny, Evri coming top of the list, with 55% of complaints may be no surprise to customers of their service.

While Evri may be the most well-known courier brand, allowing them to price their services at a competitive rate, if you are an independent business or start-up, it is likely that you will end up spending greater amounts of money to correct Evri’s mistakes in order to maintain satisfied return customers.

EVRI, DPD AND ROYAL MAIL Have the most lost parcel complaints

With over 11,000 total negative complaint posts from customers claiming that their parcels had been lost, Evri, DPD, and Royal Mail received the most, with Evri alone reaching over 7000. Furthermore, DPD received 20% of complaints about lost parcels, and Amazon got off lightly with 3% of lost parcel complaints.

Regardless of the worth, imagine sending a product to your customer, for you to find out that it has been placed in a bin or over their neighbour’s fence. Well, this is a regular occurrence with Evri deliveries. As the major courier companies face ongoing pressures from their employer to deliver an unrealistic amount of drop-offs per shift, this often means that drivers have no choice but to find alternative “safe places” to deliver parcels.

Therefore, when seeking a reliable courier service, one of the most important factors you should do is opt for more agile delivery services that can ensure a seamless delivery of your goods. This will result in independent companies meeting the needs of their customers with networks of self-employed courier drivers who offer the benefits of both flexibility and reliability.

AMAZON’S Complaints process is searched almost 100k times a month

If we turn to searches on Google for the complaints process of the six major delivery couriers in the UK, the total amounts to a staggering 172,260 Google searches a month. To top things off, complaints from Amazon’s customers alone amount to almost 55% of all searches, highlighting the desperate need for Amazon to improve its service, and potentially its worker ethics.

For many businesses Amazon is seen as a great marketplace to sell through, as the audience reach is so high, being such a well-known ecommerce site that provides fast delivery. However, customers are keen for a package to arrive in a short timeframe, there’s increased frustration when these delivery expectations aren’t met, and the resulting pressure on customer service teams if there’s a lack of transparency.

Therefore, there could be a point at which the number of complaints received, and the quality of service provided by the courier will outweigh the number of sales a business makes through Amazon.

Therefore, when choosing a courier service for your business, it is advised not only to go with the cheapest and fastest option available. Customers will be more satisfied if their orders take a few days to arrive but are delivered directly to their doors, in a quality condition, rather than finding that their order has been placed in their bin, which has been deemed as a ‘safe place’ or thrown onto their doorstep and left in a damaged condition.

For more information, visit the study here.