Euro postal quality exceeds EU target
Quality of European letter service has exceeded targets set by the European Union (EU), according to the International Post Corporation (IPC). Statistics show that levels of quality “continues to far exceed both the European Union’s speed objective of 85% of intra-EU mail delivery within three days of posting, and its reliability objective of 97% within five days”.
Performance recorded by the IPC UNEX measurement system in 2010 exceeded these objectives for the 13th consecutive year.
In 2010, 91.7% of international priority and first class letter mail was delivered within three days of posting and 97.6% within five days. Average delivery time was 2.3 days.
These results cover a total of 34 countries: the 27 EU Member States together with Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey and parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Commenting on the results, Herbert-Michael Zapf, president and CEO, IPC, said: “2010 was the 13th year in succession that the end-to-end performance for priority letter mail in Europe exceeded both the speed and reliability objectives, demonstrating the determination of the postal operators to maintain high quality services for customers.”
Quality of service performance is measured by IPC’s UNEX end-to-end monitoring system which is conducted independently by an external research firm.
The results for 2010 were based on 325,000 test letters containing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags.
The passage of a test letter at a specific point in the mail pipeline is recorded by RFID readers.
The test letters move anonymously through the international mail processing system, from posting to delivery.
