SATISFACTION GUARANTEED

For my readers' edification and diversion, here is a letter I intend to post tomorrow to the Chairman of Royal Mail, with a copy to my MP:

Dear Mr Brydon,

I was referred to your office by a member of the Royal Mail Customer Services team, from whom I have received no satisfaction whatsoever in pursuit of a complaint.

This is the burden of my experience. On March 30th last, I took a letter to the local post office. I wished to ensure that the letter reached its London destination the next day and was advised that the so-called Special Delivery Next Day service was the appropriate route. I duly paid £4.60 and was assured that the letter would be delivered the following day before 1.00 pm.

The letter was to a man working in a London pub as a barman. He owes me rather a large sum of money. The letter set out my final terms for the repayment and enclosed a stamped envelope addressed to me so that he could have no excuse for not replying (in confirmation of his understanding of the terms) by the deadline that I stipulated: the end of business on the following Friday. Hence the full amount I had spent on the exercise was £4.96.

When no reply from him was forthcoming, I began to set in train a number of sanctions against him. This produced from him a flurry of pained emails, in one of which (sent on the evening of April 15th), he swore that he had never received my letter of March 30th.

Though I felt disinclined to believe him, I went to the website indicated on the receipt I had received for my “guaranteed delivery” – so described on the receipt. I entered the code for the item – ZW119511162GB – and read that the Chiswick Delivery Office had tried to deliver the item “before 12.34” on March 31st and had left a while-you-were-out card. (This information has since been changed to read that the item is being returned to the sender. It has yet to arrive).

I mused on the meaning of the phrase “guaranteed delivery”. It seemed to be succinct and clear and to allow of no controversy over its interpretation. If the language is to have any meaning at all, then being “guaranteed” is an absolute, not a matter of degree. The Oxford English Dictionary gives these four definitions for the verb guarantee:
“1. trans. To be a guarantee, warrant, or surety for; spec. to undertake with respect to (a contract, the performance of a legal act, etc.) that it shall be duly carried out; to make oneself responsible for the genuineness of (an article); hence, to assure the existence or persistence of; to set on a secure basis.
b. with inf. or obj. clause: To engage to do something; to warrant or ensure that something will happen or has happened.
2. To secure the possession of (something) to a person, etc.
3. To secure (a person or thing) against or from (risk, injury, etc.); to secure in (the possession of anything)”.

Not much wriggle room there, I feel.

Next morning, I telephoned 0845 272100, the number given on the receipt. I will not divert myself here with a disquisition on the prerecorded hoops through which a caller must navigate to reach a human voice: you must be tired of hearing customer complaints about that particular aspect of trying to contact Royal Mail. When I did get to speak to somebody and put it to her that I had not received a service that, according to my receipt, was “guaranteed”, she began to argue with me, seeming to suggest that no such guarantee was possible and that the attempt to deliver which had been made constituted a guarantee of service and therefore fulfilled the company’s obligation.

She had a little more intelligence than I had gleaned from the website, namely that an attempted delivery had been made some time after 10.00 am (I forget the precise time) and another at 12.34. I told her that, as it happened, I had been in the pub to which my letter was addressed the Friday before it was sent. I observed then that the pub opened at noon. I also saw a postman enter the pub and place a bundle of mail on the pub bar some time between 12.20 and 12.30. This would seem to be in accordance with the delivery time of 12.34 given on the website. There seemed to be no reason why the Special Delivery Next Day letter could not have been delivered and signed for at 12.34. She argued with me again about the guarantee in exactly the same terms as before, at which point I understood that she must be reading from a prepared script. I asked to be put through to Customer Services. She agreed to do this. As soon as Customer Services replied, I was cut off.

I took some time to collect myself and then called again and, when I reached a point in the process where I was permitted to speak to someone, I asked to be put through to Customer Services. This time I got through and described my case to a woman whose job, I imagined, was to listen to my case and to help. On the contrary, she argued with me quite as vehemently as her predecessor had done. I was careful to keep my temper, knowing from previous experience that sweet reason plays better than undisguised frustration. If, as your recorded voice informs us, my call was recorded “for training purposes”, you will be able to confirm this.

I did note an interesting variation on the previous conversation, however. When the Customer Services woman consulted the file on my case, she said that only one attempt was made to deliver the letter – the earlier of those mentioned before – and that 12.34 pm referred to the time that the postman/woman had signed off the round. A card would therefore have been left on the mid-morning delivery and the onus was thereafter on someone at the pub to collect the letter. This timetable did not of course square with what I had observed myself on the Friday. I once again argued that “guaranteed delivery” did not so much imply as state categorically that delivery was guaranteed. If, as I now understood it, delivery was not guaranteed, the service should, at the very least level of candour, be called “guaranteed attempted delivery”.

When it seemed to me that the Customer Services woman was repeating herself to the extent that she too was reading from a script, I asked to speak to her supervisor. She agreed to put me through and I was promptly cut off again. To be cut off once is unfortunate, twice looked malicious.

I walked the dogs round the field to give myself an opportunity to prepare for a further attempt to get the Royal Mail to admit that some fault in this case must attach to itself, then called Customer Services and asked to speak to a supervisor. The man to whom I was put through gave his name as Ben Ferguson. He was the first person I spoke to who did not argue with me and who took my complaint seriously, which I appreciated. After listening to my account and examining the entry on the website, he told me that the postman/woman whose round was in question would be interviewed and that he would call me back within 48 hours. I told him that, because we both work from home, our answering machine is permanently switched on and that he would need to leave a message – if I were in a position to hear him speak, I would pick up immediately. I understood that he had made a note of this on the file. He also gave me what he said was a direct line number (08457 740740).

Having heard nothing after eight days, I called the number. It proved to be very far from a direct line and I had to wade through the usual lists of options, none of which applies to one’s case. When I eventually got through, the woman I spoke to said that Mr Ferguson was away. She called up the file and reported that Mr Ferguson had telephoned but we had not picked up. I pointed out that he had noted our use of the answering machine, the message of which immediately declares that it is always switched on. There was a curious parallel here with my undelivered letter: Mr Ferguson clearly felt that he had tried and need not do so again. His note said that the postman had been interviewed and claimed to have left a “we-called-but-you-were-out” card. I told her that I had since spoken to the person to whom the letter was addressed and he had said that nobody else who worked at the pub knew anything of such a card. I again argued for a different title for a service that could not in reality “guarantee” delivery and in response she uttered the line that no Customer Services representative should dream of uttering: “No one’s ever complained about it before”.

I said that at the very least I would be applying for a refund and she said that I was not entitled to a refund because an attempt to deliver the envelope had been made. I was taken aback at this. I remarked that this would seem to depend entirely on the word of the postman as no such card was known to exist. At this point, I observed that I would be taking up the matter with my MP and she volunteered the chairman's office as a suitable target for my complaint.

The barman duly sent me a cheque for £5,000, which, however, is only a first instalment of his debt to me. I paid this cheque into my bank along with another for £1. As it happens, this second cheque was from the Royal Mail. As a philatelist of several decades’ standing, I have occasion to order items from Tallents House. Recently, Royal Mail sent me two unitemised invoices, the sums involved differing by £1. I wrote several times enquiring as to the discrepancy but received no reply that resolved the matter. Eventually, a little exasperated, I sent Royal Mail a cheque for the higher amount. With no accompanying explanation, I received the cheque for a £1 refund some weeks later. When I paid in the two cheques, the bank teller was amused by the contrast in the two amounts. I decided not to bother to explain to her how the cheques were in fact united in their respective relationship to Royal Mail incompetence.

In sum, there are two aspects of the matter of the guaranteed delivery item that ought to merit your attention. The first is the shadowy nature of the system’s operation at ground level, where the details of the story change according to what must seem most expedient in fending off a dissatisfied customer and Customer Services interpret their role not as a soothing balm for such a customer but as a first line of defence against complaint.

The wider point concerns the face that Royal Mail shows to the public. Calling a service “guaranteed” is a large and clear statement that does not admit of failure. The promotional material on your website urges customers to “take advantage of Special Delivery Next Day for guaranteed delivery of your urgent or valuable items before 1.00pm the next working day” and also undertakes that “if your item is not delivered on time we’ll refund your money providing you have proof of posting and claim within 14 days of posting”.

By searching around the site, I eventually found what even the site accounts “the small print”: “Attempted delivery shall constitute delivery for purposes of our guarantee”. To post there a piece of careful legalese that in effect entirely negates the claim made in the promotion of the service is to act wholly in bad faith. That small print was not available to me when I walked into my local post office with my letter and, in good faith, accepted the assurance of the woman behind the counter that Special Delivery Next Day would achieve what I wanted to achieve, guaranteed.

And here is the final absurdity of this whole sorry experience: had I simply posted the letter at the normal first class rate, it would certainly have been delivered to the pub, even if only by means of being dropped through the letterbox, and the recipient would have received it. Instead, I spent nearly fourteen times as much as the first class letter rate and the letter never arrived. A cynic would suggest that the service be renamed “guaranteed non-delivery”. I am no cynic. But some indication that you intend to rectify this poor service would be very acceptable.

I have always been a fierce opponent of the privatization of any part of Royal Mail and/or the Post Office. At the very least, this experience has made me think again.

Yours sincerely,

W Stephen Gilbert