European cross-border letter services hit EU quality targets
Europe’s cross-border letter mail services met EU quality targets for the 14th consecutive year in 2011, the International Postal Corporation said today. Its annual test results found that last year 93% of international priority and first-class letters were delivered within three days of posting and 98.1% within five days.
The achievements surpassed the European Union’s targets for 85% of intra-EU mail delivery to take place within three days of posting and 97% within five days.
And, the 2011 performance improved on 2010 when services were a little disrupted by an Icelandic volcanic eruption during the year, resulting in a 91.7% three-day rate.
The results were based on 336,000 test letters containing RFID tracking chips sent between 27 EU Member States together with non-EU European countries like Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey and former Yugoslavian nations.
The service measurement, including times for collection, transportation, sorting and final delivery, was carried out by IPC’s UNEX end-to-end monitoring system, which is run independently by external market research firm TNS Research International.
The average time of delivery for this year’s test letters was 2.2 days, about half a day’s improvement compared to 1998 and one day better than in 1994, when UNEX was launched with just 18 postal operators.
“Determination”
Commenting on the latest results, IPC president and chief executive officer Herbert-Michael Zapf said: “2011 was the 14th 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.”
The IPC’s UNEX system is currently used to measure international letter services between 43 postal operators worldwide.
It involves anonymous letters being posted by more than 3,000 volunteers in participating countries, passing through the world’s postal networks to the ultimate recipient. At key points during mail delivery, radio frequency identification (RFID) chips inside the letters are read by scanning systems, with the data sent through to the IPC’s global RFID Network Centre in Brussels.
The European figures involved mail sent within 964 country-to-country flows in the 35 countries involved.
Individual mailflows
While the overall letter volumes for the 35 European countries met the EU quality and reliability targets, the IPC research suggested individual countries, particularly those recently joining the UNEX system, have not seen individual country-to-country mailflows meeting the EU targets.
Among the original 18 postal operators that have been part of the UNEX system since 1994, 88% of the mailflows measured complied with the European Union targets in 2011.
Including the full 35 countries involved in the monitoring system, 2011 saw just 55% of the country-to-country mailflows complying with the speed target (three-day delivery) and just 62% of the country-to-country mailflows complying with the reliability target (five-day delivery).
IPC explained to Post&Parcel that the reason the overall European target was met was because the study was weighted according to the size of each international market involved, so that more letters were sent between, for example, the UK and Germany, than were sent between countries like Iceland and Malta.
With generally higher speed and reliability performances between the larger European mail markets, the higher volumes of their mailflows pushed up the overall European average for the study as a whole to the 93% three-day and 98.1% five-day result.
