Royal Mail said that First and Second Class quality of service improved significantly over the last six months but industrial action in 2009 along with disruption caused by severe winter weather meant most services fell short of their quality targets in 2009-10 despite the record high quality performances delivered last spring.
The latest quality of service report covering a 12-month period until March 2010 showed that Standard Parcels, European International Delivery and some business bulk mail beat their targets. However, 87.9% overall of First Class mail arrived the day after posting - below the 93.0% target for the year but more than ten percentage points above the 78.9% figure in the autumn during a period of several national one-day strikes by the CWU.
Second Class mail narrowly missed its 98.5% target for the year to the end of March 2010 with a 96.7% performance.
Mark Higson, Royal Mail’s Managing Director, said: "Everyone in Royal Mail is focused on restoring quality of service to the target-beating levels we achieved a year ago and I’m delighted to say that the modernisation agreement we’ve reached with the CWU provides the stability and framework to complete our transformation to provide consistent, high quality, efficient service for all our customers."
Royal Mail’s First Class service in the first quarter of 2009-10 - before Communication Workers Union strike action - was the best springtime performance on record with 94.5 per cent of stamped and franked mail arriving the next working day after posting. Second class performance in the spring of 2009 at 98.9 per cent was also above target.
Royal Mail’s Quality of Service is measured independently by Research International, a company with a long track record in this field. The methodology used and the results obtained are verified independently of Royal Mail and Research International. Royal Mail knows of no other measurement of its quality of service that gives results with the geographical coverage and degree of reliability and accuracy in the figures obtained by Research International. The latest report is based on more than 240,000 sample letters, parcels and packets sent to 7,000 addresses, and over the 2009-10 financial year 960,000 test items of mail were sent.
The 2009-10 Quality of Service Report will be published on the website.
