Our customers

We remain committed to delivering a consistent and excellent customer experience to businesses, consumers and recipients who use our services.

Key facts

• Royal Mail Letters and Parcels deliver to almost 29 million UK addresses every working day.
• We deliver six-days-a-week, whilst the EU requirement is only five days a week.
• 87% of our mail bag is business mail; just 13% is for social use.(1)
• 74% of our deliveries are made to 13% of the country.
• Our Post Offices receive 20 million customers a week. (2)
• We dealt with over 14.7 million customer enquiries in 2010/11. Only 1.23 million of these customer enquiries were complaints.

Strategic priorities

Meeting the needs of our customers is a key part of our business strategy. We must continue to deliver the six-days-a-week, one-price-goes anywhere Universal Service at competitive prices, in the face of a declining mails market.  Royal Mail, Parcelforce Worldwide and Post Office are brands that enjoy considerable public support.

We must work hard to continue to maintain this trust and loyalty throughout a period of significant change for the business. With tougher competition from other mail companies and digital communications, people have a choice where and how they spend their money.  We must continue to:

• Connect customers, companies and communities. We enable businesses to reach their customers and enable citizens to communicate with others within their communities.
• Meet the needs of our customers. We must continue to provide our customers with the products and services they require, at competitive prices.
• Provide a high standard of service. We must ensure that we deliver the highest standard of service and ensure that we are customer responsive. We must be transparent with our customers.
• Ensure the security of our mail. We are determined to do all we can to protect our customers appropriately.

Connecting customers, companies and communities

Royal Mail Group reaches almost every UK resident.  Royal Mail Letters and Parcels deliver to almost 29 million UK addresses every working day. Our Post Offices receive 20 million customers a week.(3)  We are the sole provider of the Universal Service. We have a duty to provide a six-days-a-week service at the same competitive price wherever in the country an item is collected from or delivered to. As Ofcom recently acknowledged, most European countries do not provide a six-day service or enable their customers to post as late in the day as we do.(4)

Our mail bag is made up of 87% business mail and 13% social mail. 74% of our deliveries are made to 13% of the country. But every delivery we make is equally important to us. Our provision of the Universal You can read more about this in the Post Office section.

Meeting the needs of our customers

Royal Mail is currently undertaking one of the biggest transformation programmes in UK industry.  A key operational challenge facing the company is to deliver high-quality customer service while implementing such major changes. We remain committed to delivering a consistent and excellent customer experience.  What is most important to our customers is that we keep our basic service promises. We must continue to collect and deliver on time. We must be easy to do business with.

At the end of the 2010/11 financial year, Royal Mail achieved our first class quality target (5) with a 92.6% performance. A recent Which? survey found that 84% of its respondents are either satisfied or very satisfied with the service provided by Royal Mail.(6) Customer satisfaction figures for the Post Office are 85%.(7)

Our prices need to reflect our costs. However, we operate under significant  competitive constraints.  Consumers have real choice. If we were to increase prices beyond what customers are willing to pay, the rate of decline in mail volumes would increase. We therefore have every incentive to price competitively.  Service means that those in rural communities are not disadvantaged because of where they live.  The postal service represents a key communication channel for rural residents and businesses. This supports effective social action and cohesion. You can read more about this in the Inclusion section.  Our Post Office network forms a core part of many urban and rural communities across the country.

We must continue to be the most reliable postal service, delivering the highest level of specification at the lowest possible cost. This is why our first class quality scores are key measures in our new corporate scorecard.

Improving the Customer Experience

We invest significantly in our customer service.  We operate one of the largest call centre networks in the UK. In total, we dealt with over 14.7 million customer enquiries last year. We receive on average 568,000 calls and 28,000 emails every month and 62,000 letters a year. Our customer facing website, www.royalmail.com, received 116 million hits in 2010/11.  Only 1.23 million of these 14.7 million customer enquiries were complaints.  Although this represents a slightly higher number of complaints than the previous year, last year saw the worst winter weather in living memory, the unprecedented closure of UK airspace because of the Icelandic volcanic ash and delays in transit to the USA because of security concerns.  Complaint numbers are still significantly lower than three years ago. Over 99% of complaints were resolved at the first line of customer service. Continuing to reduce the number of complaints that we receive is a measure in our new corporate scorecard.

During 2010/11 we worked hard to improve the experience our Royal Mail and Parcelforce Worldwide customers have when they interact with us. For example, we have introduced a new range of communication channels including an online advisor chat service and a twitter account (@RoyalMail). We have put a lot of effort into simplifying our customer complaints process in order to make it easier to contact us. Our customer service staff and call centre procedures are focused on resolving enquiries as swiftly as possible.  Our net satisfaction score - the percentage of satisfied business customers net of dissatisfied customers - for 2010/11 was 34%. The challenge for us to maintain and increase business customer satisfaction against a backdrop of intensive change in the business.  We are also committed to being more responsive, open and transparent with our customers. Please see the Transparency section.

Ensuring the security of our mail

We are determined to do all we can to appropriately protect our customers. The security of mail is of the utmost importance to us.  Royal Mail Group has robust security measures in place in all parts of our operations. We monitor the movement of mail through our network and operate a zero tolerance to any person found tampering or interfering with customers mail.  Working with the police and relevant authorities, we ensure anyone found guilty of damaging the trust in our business is dealt with robustly. As a demonstration of this, in the past year, 312 former employees of Royal Mail Group were prosecuted (out of a total of 163,000 employees).

Priorities for 2011/12

We have identified the following priorities for the forthcoming year:

• Introduction of improved delivery options for our customers and simpler, more effective products and services.
• Continued improvements to our core customer service proposition and focused action to tackle the causes of frequent complaints.
• Greater openness with our customers, through better timely information, clear statements of intent and enhanced transparency reporting.
• Continued action to tackle ‘scam mail’, working with relevant authorities.

Further information

Royal Mail’s products and services: http://www.royalmail.com/

Post Office’s products and services: http://www.postoffice.co.uk/

Royal Mail customer service: http://www.royalmail.com/customer-service

Post Office customer service: http://www.postoffice.co.uk/find-out-more/customer-service

Parcelforce’s products and services: http://www.parcelforce.com/

Direct Marketing Association: http://www.dma.org.uk/

Action Fraud: http://www.actionfraud.org.uk    

(1) 2010/11 figures.

(2) This figure is based on quarterly research. The most recent quarter was July – September 2011.

(3) This figure is based on quarterly research. The most recent quarter was July – September 2011.

(4) Ofcom, Securing the Universal Postal Service, October 2011, p.1.

(5) For more information: http://www.royalmailgroup.com/how-were-performing/quality-service-reports.

(6) Which? survey, July 2011

(7) This figure was derived by taking an average from 10 months’ worth of data.