Yodel crowned UK’s worst delivery company

A study from telecommunications service provider Ringover has uncovered the UK parcel delivery company with the longest average call waiting times.

Ringover contacted the top five most-complained-about parcel delivery companies, according to the Citizens Advice [1], to discover how long on average it takes to successfully talk to a human.

This also uncovered the quickest ways to bypass systems to avoid the dreaded hold music.

To read the full analysis please visit: https://www.ringover.co.uk/blog/how-to-speak-to-a-human

Key Findings

• Yodel has the highest average time out of all parcel delivery companies analysed with it taking 16:21 minutes to get through to a human

• DPD has the shortest wait time to wait to talk to a human at 2:20 minutes

• Evri only allows one call with a human per parcel, with any calls after directing you to the website

• DPD failed to deliver the parcel to the correct recipient and it was returned to the sender by the person who received it by mistake

• Evri’s call bot frequently struggles to understand verbal dictation for reference numbers

• 9 a.m. is the best time to call parcel delivery companies, with the exception of Amazon Logistics

Longest time taken to successfully speak to a human at parcel delivery firms

With parcel reference numbers in hand we called each company three times throughout the day at 9 a.m., 1 p.m., and 5 p.m. to calculate the average time it took to speak to a human rather than a bot. Calls were not made on Fridays and weekends to ensure peak times didn’t unfairly influence the data.

The results show that Yodel has the highest average time to successfully talk to a human at 16:21 minutes, whereas DPD has the shortest time to wait to talk to a human at 2:20 minutes.

Time taken to successfully talk to a human at top parcel delivery firms

We called each individual parcel delivery company three times on the same day to ensure we took peak times into account to give an average wait time.

Yodel was shown to have the longest average wait time of all the companies analysed at over 15 minutes, 16:21 minutes to be exact.

Royal Mail took second place with an average time of 13:24 minutes. Amazon Logistics followed in third place at 5:21 minutes.

Evri only let us speak to a human once after 3:16 minutes. After hanging up the company called back and registered a case number for the enquiry and reference number. This meant that on the second and third calls, we were unable to speak to a person as per their policy.

No stranger to controversy in relation to their customer service, it’s no surprise that we had issues talking to someone about our parcel. In one instance a customer said that the courier set her property on fire in order to get a call back from customer service, before admitting the fire was a lie [2].

Despite having the shortest time to successfully talk to a human at 2:20 minutes, DPD failed to deliver the package that was sent.

How to talk to parcel delivery companies quicker

Ringover put in the time and effort to discover the fastest ways to get to talk to a person at Yodel, Royal Mail, Amazon Logistics, Evri and DPD.

You can view the steps taken for each company here: https://www.ringover.co.uk/blog/how-to-speak-to-a-human

Ringover quote

Discussing the study, Ross Slogrove, UK & Ireland Country Manager at Ringover, said:

“Our findings show the importance of good customer service software, ensuring that people have access to a human to talk to so that queries and problems can be solved in a timely manner. Poor customer service not only impacts the customer experience, but your business overall with data from ICSS showing that poor customer service is costing UK businesses £11.4bn a month in lost productivity.”

Sources

1. Citizens Advice – https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/about-us/about-us1/media/press-releases/parcel-firms-still-failing-to-deliver-in-citizens-advices-second-league-table/

2. Cosmopolitan – https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a43396732/evri-customer-service/

Methodology

Using the five most complained about parcel delivery companies according to Citizens Advice, we sent out identically sized parcels using each service to determine the average amount of time it would take to speak to a human when we called their customer service line. The parcels were posted between 15th – 18th May.

The only exception to this rule was Amazon who we ordered an item from directly on 15th May 2023 to then be delivered by Amazon Logistics.

We called each individual parcel delivery company three times within the same day to take into account spikes in call waiting times and to give a fair time average. The times we chose were 9 a.m., 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. Calls were made between 18th – 24th May 2023, avoiding Fridays and weekends so that peak times didn’t unfairly impact the data.

The times captured are from the start of the call until the point we got connected to speak to a human.