..that's ParcelFARCE (Parcelforce)

Member Name: indychick_uk

Product:	Parcelforce
Date:	01/11/01 (550 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: umm........?

Disadvantages: Depots are few and far between, Delivery is only during working hours (if they deliver at all of course.....), I really can't go on....

Having recently read someone else's op on Parcelforce and given the service a "thumbs down" I thought perhaps I better explain the reasons behind that rather harsh judgement and let you decide for yourselves whether or not it's deserved.....


Parcelforce Worldwide is, according to them, the UK's largest parcel carrier. They claim to deliver to 99.6% of the world's population and guarantee express delivery in over 200 countries, to be committed to customer service and to be able to give up-to-the-minute parcel tracking.

Obviously, not in Buckinghamshire.

Let me tell you first of my personal experience with Parcelforce.

I recently got married and my husband and I chose to have a wedding list with an online company called Confetti.com. Shortly before the wedding they contacted us to arrange for delivery of our gifts, which was done. The first delivery arrived, when we were told it would, a few days after the wedding. This was not delivered by Parcelforce but by a private courier.

Unfortunately not all our gifts had been in stock and when I contacted Confetti they said the remainder would be delivered when we returned from our honeymoon. Fine so far.

On the Friday before we went away on our honeymoon I returned home from a quick trip into town to find a card through my door from Parcelforce. "We called today but you weren't in, the parcel needs signing for, please call us to arrange delivery" I called immediately. The conversation was something like this -

Parcelforce: "We'll redeliver it tomorrow morning"
Me: I'm going off on honeymoon tomorrow for two weeks
PF: “OK, we'll redeliver when you get back. It will be between 9am and 5pm"
Me: I work during the day
PF: "We can deliver it to you at work"
Me: Great, my office is in Reading
PF: "Ah, that's a different postal district, we ca
n't do that. You can collect it from us here"
Me (getting slightly annoyed now): You are nearly 40 miles away, getting to you involves a drive across three counties, through some of the worst traffic in the country (past Heathrow & Staines) and you're only open in office hours when I'm at work as I’ve already told you!
Can you deliver it to my friend's house - she lives in the next street?
PF: "Ok, that's fine"
Me: You can't deliver it till Tuesday though as she's away
PF: "Ok, we'll deliver it on Tuesday"

So we went off on honeymoon, happy in the knowledge that my friend would be looking after our presents till we returned.

My friend came home from her weekend away on Monday evening to find a card through her door from Parcelforce. She called them and they said they'd re-deliver it on Wednesday. She stayed in specially all day. They didn't come.

She called again and this time was informed that they could arrange re-delivery to a post-office. We have a sub-post-office in our road. She left it at that point for me to arrange this when I returned home.

I called on the Friday afternoon that we got back from our honeymoon, this was now two weeks since the original card had arrived. I asked them to deliver the parcel to the post-office in my road from where my friend could collect it, at her leisure, during the week. They said they would deliver it on Monday.

Monday came & went, so did Tuesday, still no parcel. I called again on the Wednesday and asked if they could find out what had happened and here I started to get angry.

According to the person I spoke to, the telephone operators have no way of contacting individual depots except through some sort of internal message system. They do not have telephone numbers for them. They posted a message onto the system for my depot asking them to call me and tell me where my parcel
was. They also said they would rearrange delivery to the post-office for the next day, Thursday.

No one called me. On the Saturday – over 4 weeks now since the original delivery - I asked, not only at the sub-post-office in my road but at the two other post offices in Marlow and at the sorting office. There was no sign of my parcel anywhere.

I called again on the Monday and I also called Confetti to ask them to chase Parcelforce. Confetti got the same response I did, they would send a message to the depot and rearrange delivery. Still no parcel.

I asked Confetti to get Parcelforce to redeliver again, this time to my husband's office, which is in Marlow. They came back to say it would be delivered there on Thursday. On the Friday it arrived, five weeks after the original delivery date. Well, half of it did. There should have been a small glass vase and a garden rake. We got the vase but somehow Parcelforce have managed to lose the rake - Confetti are now sending another and claiming from Parcelforce who don't seem to be able to find it.

Following on from this, Confetti arranged with me to deliver the final package of gifts - a large box of Denby china. They couldn't give me an exact date but said they would put me down for the 5pm-8pm slot as I was at work during the day. For a week, my husband and myself took turns leaving work early to be home by 5pm until the Thursday when I arrived home at about 2 minutes past 5. No card so they obviously hadn't been.

I'd been home for about 15 minutes when my neighbour knocked on my door to enquire whether I knew there was a large package addressed to me sitting in the alleyway between his house and ours. It had apparently been there when he arrived home at 4.15.

So, Parcelforce had delivered outside of the timeslot they were given, they had left a large box of valuable items outside in plain view and they hadn't even dropped a card through my d
oor to tell me they'd done so.

My main gripes with Parcelforce are these.

1 In a day and age when most people are not at home during the day and work some way from their home, why do they only deliver during working hours?

They do have a limited delivery on Saturday but it costs twice as much as having parcels delivered during the week, so who is going to do that?

2 Why is their internal communication so bad, surely it should be possible for the staff dealing with customers to be able to talk to the staff delivering the parcels?

3 Why have they so few depots? Well, that's obvious I guess, cost cutting. Once upon a time we had a depot in Slough about 15 miles away, now we have to go to Woking which involves driving from Buckinghamshire, through Berkshire, past Heathrow & Staines to Surrey.
Yet there is a depot in Reading a mere 20 miles away and much more accessible - so why do I have to go to Woking?

4 Why aren't the depots open late in the evenings, or at weekends? They close at 5.30pm during the week and are only open for a few hours on Saturday morning. It stands to reason if you are having to collect from the depot that you are not home during the day, so what chance have you of getting to the depot at those times? And that's assuming you have a car.

5 Why, if they have such a sophisticated tracking system, couldn't they tell me where my parcel was?

Incidentally on point 5, I have a friend who was waiting in for a parcel and decided to look on the internet to track it and see where it was and when he could expect it. When he looked it was showing as "delivered". He called them to enquire where it had been delivered, as he didn't have it. They said they would get a copy of the signature for him at which point, whilst he was talking to them, the doorbell rang and the post man was standing there. When my friend enquired of the postman why his parcel was
already showing as "delivered" on the computer he just looked a little sheepish. So don't trust tracking.


6 As a service company they have a lot to learn about customer service. The staff I spoke with during my many telephone conversations were (variously) rude, unhelpful and patronising. On several occasions they simply launched into their “We’ll arrange redelivery” speech before I had time to explain that they’d already done that and all I wanted was for someone to contact me and tell me where my parcel was. When I asked to speak to a manager, or someone else in authority, they tried to persuade me that a manager wouldn’t be able to tell me anything more and obviously didn’t want to connect me.

At no time during this whole affair has anyone at Parcelforce apologised to me, the depot never contacted me despite three messages being left “on the system”, the manager never called me back as promised. In desperation I even sent an e-mail via their website. That was two weeks ago and I’m still waiting for a reply.

I am not alone in my experiences. When I started moaning (some would say ranting) about Parcelforce to my family and friends nearly everyone came up with a similar story and it was my brother-in-law who told me he now refers to them as "Parcelfarce".

So why does anyone still use them? Force of habit? Cost? I think the problem is that we, in this country, are so bad at complaining that we wouldn't think of going back to whoever we ordered the goods from to say "Do you realise that the carrier you choose to use are so bad". Consequently, firms don't realise that this is the case and so continue to use Parcelforce.

They should be told as, for a lot of mail-order companies, their choice of carrier is probably losing them business. If you'd ordered something and had that much trouble getting it delivered would you
order from the same company again? Probably not, and it's not because THEY have given you bad service but because Parcelforce have.

I made a point of telling Confetti this and have asked that they send my rake by a different courier.

I would suggest to anyone ordering any goods which are to come via mail to request that the company supplying those goods send them by anyone other than Parcelforce.

Unless you don't mind waiting of course....

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