I’m an entrepreneurial twenty three year old, part of the team at we are social, a conversation agency based in London.
On this site, I blog mainly about communication, design, technology and the arts, and their impact on society. I also write the Skype blog.
Alan Patrick bemoans Amazon’s continued use of City Link delivery services, and I sympathise. Royal Mail, while not perfect, has the benefit of local delivery offices and will happily redeliver things to alternative addresses (or Post Offices for pickup during office hours if you’re miles from an office).
On the other hand, while my experiences with City Link haven’t been as bad as Alan’s, I’ve never felt like my deliveries were being handled with a great degree of competence. Certainly the concept of customer service seems to elude them.
In a way, it’s a hostage scenario — Amazon doesn’t allow you to specify a delivery partner, and so you’re essentially stuck with their choice. City Link have no incentive to help the people they deliver to, as they’re paid by Amazon, not the recipients. Amazon are unlikely to axe City Link until the volume of complaints warrants an investigation.
Could be tricky. In the meantime, it seems that they use Royal Mail for Amazon Prime shipments, so I should escape the ‘services’ of City Link for the time being.
Amazon, City Link, delivery, shopping
I’m an entrepreneurial twenty three year old, part of the team at we are social, a conversation agency based in London.
On this site, I blog mainly about communication, design, technology and the arts, and their impact on society. I also write the Skype blog.
Peter, I have to disagree. ANYTHING but Royal Mail. I long for the day the company (along with Parcelforce) is broken into bits and sold to different buyers…
My experience with Royal Mail involves them losing several incoming Recorded and Special Delivery parcels; forgetting to redeliver a parcel to me no less than six times for the same parcel (the parcel was eventually returned to sender); forgetting to collect my outgoing Datapost parcel from the Post Office, so the parcel arrived a day late; and eventually getting to the stage where their depots stop answering the phone (either to me, or to the people at Royal Mail’s central hotline).
Incidentally, Royal Mail will only redeliver to an address or Post Office within the same postcode zone. Their depots (and the Post Offices) are of course only open during office hours. For most people with a job, this means that Royal Mail are no better than City Link.
I don’t think they’re perfect — far from it. I think UPS and TNT rank highest on my list. Perhaps we should move to the Netherlands, where TNT runs the postal service.