One in three people in the UK had problems with the most recent delivery of a parcel to them, Citizens Advice research has shown, as the charity named Evri and Yodel as the worst courier companies.
Citizens Advice’s annual league table of parcel delivery companies found that an estimated 13.3 million people – 34% of recipients – faced a problem with their most recent package last month. No big parcel firm secured even a three-star rating out of a maximum five stars.
Evri, the delivery company formerly known as Hermes UK, came joint last with Yodel, with both companies receiving a score of two. The rating is reached using a set of criteria that include customer service, delivery problems, accessibility and trust.
Evri received the lowest rating on any single criterion, scoring just 1.6 for accessibility, which covers people with needs such as additional time to answer the door. Royal Mail and Amazon came joint first in the league table but with only 2.75 stars.
An Amazon spokesperson said: “The vast majority of deliveries make it to customers without issue. In the rare case something occurs, we work with customers directly to make it right.”
Dame Clare Moriarty, the chief executive of Citizens Advice, said: “Online shoppers are being let down by a substandard delivery service.
“With a seasonal surge of deliveries on the horizon, parcel companies must take action to protect shoppers and get to the root cause of these persistent failings.”
Citizens Advice called on the regulator, Ofcom, to conduct a review of its new complaints and accessibility guidance by April 2024 and consider enforcement action, such as issuing fines, if there have been no significant improvements by this date.
The charity said its online advice page for undelivered parcels had been viewed almost 222,000 times in the past 12 months, a 78% increase compared with 2019.
In the category of delivery problems, which includes parcels left in insecure locations and parcels arriving late, the worst offenders were Yodel (with 40% of recipients reporting a problem), DPD (37%) and Evri (34%).
Of those who experienced a problem with their delivery, almost half (43%) of recipients had a further issue when trying to resolve the problem, such as not being able to find the right company contact details or not receiving a response. In the end, more than half (53%) of those who had further issues found it difficult to resolve the problem. This figure rose to 60% for people with a disability.
Almost all parcel delivery companies scored two stars or below when it came to meeting the needs of disabled customers or individuals who required adjustments to how they received parcels. An estimated 7.2 million people have an accessibility need they would like to share with their parcel delivery company, but almost half (45%) of these people were unable to do so.
Chris Ashworth, the chief customer officer at Evri, said the company was “disappointed” by its ranking “after a year of significant investment and listening to our customers to improve our service”. He added that Evri’s “rising parcel volumes are proof that customers and retail clients are voting with their feet and trust us with their deliveries”.
A Yodel spokesperson said: “This report is not reflective of our own parcel data, which indicates that 98.7% of the 200m parcels we handled over the last 12 months were delivered correctly on the first attempt.”
