Survey records people’s attitudes to Royal Mail service
One year on from Royal Mail’s introduction of Pricing in Proportion (PIP), MarketingFile conducted a survey to see if business postal costs had increased or decreased.
When asked “since PIP was introduced, have your office mail costs increased”, 44 pct said yes, and 16pct said it had decreased. When asked how the changes affected their Direct Mail costs, 63 pct said costs had increased, with 25 pct staying about the same.
A sharp contrast to the Royal Mail’s initial pitch to Postcomm which stated: “The great majority of our mail will not change in price and this means that most of our customers will not be greatly affected”.
Whatever the opinion of PIP, 65 pct of businesses still use first class post for their office mail, and 44 pct for direct mail. With the British stamp still being the preferred method of payment for 49 pct.
When asked, are you happy with the service you receive from the Royal Mail, 50 pct of business users said no. Despite this, when asked if they would think about using a different provider the majority of participants said yes, but was confused about the available suppliers.
With last month’s debate between Postcomm and the Royal Mail on possible reductions of deliveries to 5 days a week, we asked “How would this affect you?” 28 pct of our readers felt it could have a serious impact on their business; with 60 pct voting they would least like to loose Monday deliveries and 64 pct happy to loose Saturday.
One thing is clear: with Postcomm recently giving permission to the Royal Mail to raise the price of a second class stamp to 29 p by 2010, business users feel that rising prices are not being matched with a rise in service levels.
