European postal service quality surpasses EU objectives

Quality of letter mail service in Europe 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 2014 exceeded these objectives for the 17th consecutive year. In 2014 90.6% of international priority and first-class letter mail was delivered within three days of posting and 97.8% within five days. Average delivery time was 2.4 days. These results cover a total of 31 countries: the 28 EU Member States together with Iceland, Norway and Switzerland.

Commenting on the results, Herbert-Michael Zapf, President and Chief Executive officer, International Post Corporation, said: “In the 20th anniversary year of the UNEX™ measurement, 2014 was the 17th consecutive year that the end-to-end performance for priority letter mail in Europe exceeded both the speed and reliability objectives set by the 1997 Postal Directive. The consistent high level of performance demonstrates that postal operators’ continue to work hard to maintain the same reliable high quality services for customers, even if letter mail volumes are under pressure.”

Quality of service performance is measured by IPC’s UNEX™ end-to-end monitoring system which is conducted independently by external research firms. The results for 2014 were based on 263,000 test letters of which more than 60% was 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.

The UNEX™ results 2014 brochure is available at: http://www.ipc.be/~/media/Documents/PUBLIC/UNEX/Full%20Year%20Results/UNEX_leaflet_2014_EN.pdf