Venting our anger on Yodel’s approach to parcel delivery

Can you help with a long-running saga I’ve been having with parcel delivery company Yodel? The problem started because our letterbox is in our back door. Royal Mail and some couriers know this, but unfortunately Yodel could only be bothered stuffing its card in a cellar vent under our front door. It stuck two cards in before we even realised they were there.

I rearranged the delivery, but we were out again and were rewarded with another card in the vent. At no point did it occur to the driver that there wasn’t a letterbox in this door and that we might struggle to get other post in there. Yodel’s phone line is useless as it only allows you to book another delivery.

As we have had “three valid attempts” to deliver (though I don’t consider any of them valid as it failed to find the letterbox) it now wants me to collect the parcel myself. What is most frustrating is that I’ve complained on Twitter and all that has achieved is a long chain of direct messages, where someone promises they will deliver the next day, but then I hear nothing more for a couple of days. My Amazon account shows the status of my order as having been delivered, but there isn’t even an option to tell it that it hasn’t shown up. JM, Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire

The Christmas rush means a whopping 390m parcels will be handled by Royal Mail and other parcel companies between November and December. Inevitably, the increased volume means things sometimes go wrong.

Yodel is an independent parcel carrier handling more than 155m parcels a year and has an 8% share of the UK parcel market. It checked its records and said that a fourth delivery had been successful, but that was only thanks to a kindly neighbour who took the item in for you. “We’re pleased to confirm that JM has received his parcel,” Yodel told us.

In future, it may be worth putting a sign on your front door pointing couriers in the right direction. However, what this case highlights is how parcel companies set up their phone lines to deal with problems. This week Citizens Advice said that online shoppers will typically spend two and a half hours sorting out a delivery problem this Christmas because an item is late, turns up broken or doesn’t arrive at all.

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