2024-07-13 07:53:00
Yellow Giant’s negative record
More and more customers are complaining about the postal service
July 13, 2024, 9:53 am
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Where is the letter and why is the package somewhere completely different than expected? Anyone who complains about the quality of the postal service can contact the Federal Network Agency. The authority includes far more complaints in the first half of the year than in the same period last year. Citizen dissatisfaction is growing.
Many more citizens complained about delayed or lost letters and packages to Deutsche Post in the first half of 2024 than before. The Federal Network Agency announced that 20,184 postal complaints were received, a quarter more than in the same period last year.
About two-thirds of the complaints related to letters and a third related to parcels. 88 percent of the critical comments were directed against market leader DHL and its postal division Deutsche Post, while the rest referred to competitors. If the level of complaints remains so high in the second half of the year, the Bonn supervisory authority would have received more postal complaints than ever in a year at the end of 2024.
Fines should be possible soon
So far the Federal Network Agency has not been able to do much here – ultimately just raise a warning finger and call the yellow giant to improve. As a result of the reform of the postal law, the authority will soon be given a sharper sword; it could then impose fines and penalty payments and thus increase the pressure on the Bonn-based logistics group.
However, the reform also states that the post office is under less time pressure when carrying letters. Currently, 80 per cent of letters posted today must be there on the next working day In future, the first mandatory value will only apply on the third working day after posting – then 95 per cent first to exist. This means that consumers will have to be a little more patient in the future than before.
There are only a few complaints based on the size of the post
The number of complaints increased significantly in the second half of 2022, when the postal service struggled with staff shortages in some areas. The company then took steps to control the problem. If you take the number of complaints as a benchmark, this was decidedly unsuccessful.
However, the proportion of complaints compared to the total – a total of 15 billion parcels and letters in 2023 for DHL alone – is negligible.
The fact that the possibility of making a complaint has become more widely known over the years probably also plays a role – the higher numbers may be at least in part because some people did not contact the Federal Network Agency earlier because they did not know about the complaint. channel.
Reply from DHL
In response to the half-yearly figures, a DHL spokesperson says the statistics are not representative of the group. “Many of the complaints we receive have nothing to do with Deutsche Post’s performance.”
For example, there are many delays because letters from business customers sent by our competitors into the postal network were only delivered to the post office after a long delay. “However, every complaint is a complaint too loud and we are sorry if customers are not satisfied with our service.”
Consumers can not directly contact the network agency, but also DHL. The company spokesperson reports that his company received more complaints in May and June than before. Sometimes there was a large number of unexpected parcel shipments and the volume of letters was high during the European elections, which caused delays. In some places, many employees were sick, which sometimes delayed processes.
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