Britain trails rivals in postal survey
THE British post office Consignia has seen its expensively acquired European parcel network ranked bottom in a customer survey against its top six rivals.
Independent market analysts Datamonitor, in a survey of 650 leading manufacturers and retailers, rated Consignia&’s General Logistics Systems seventh for overall performance.
United Parcel Service came top, followed by French post office GeoPost.
TNT, owned by the Dutch post office, was third, followed by DHL, Deutsche Post&’s Euroexpress and FedEx.
The latest survey is bad news for loss-making Consignia, whose domestic package delivery business in Britain, Parcelforce, is at present shedding 6,700 jobs and closing 50 depots.
But government-owned Consignia&’s European parcels network totally separate from Parcelforce is meant to be the jewel in the express delivery crown.
It cost more than GBP400m ($575m) to acquire and build up the European network, a process that saw the GBP250m purchase of German Parcel criticised by Westminster MPs as a ‘rushed job’.
John Manners-Bell, lead analyst with Datamonitor, said that the survey of eight countries, between November and January, was representative of customer viewpoints and ‘gave a fair crack of the whip’ to all the leading parcel operators.
The survey focused on price, innovation, flexibility, service range, geographic coverage and IT capabilities.
‘We found price and flexibility as the top two criteria,’ said Mr Manners-Bell.
‘Flexibility included such things as how late were the cut-off times for parcel pick-ups and how well a company can deal with operational peaks and troughs.’
He said that GLS scored well for geographical coverage but not so well for the other key criteria.
‘I think it shows that Consignia has a considerable amount of work to do in integrating its European parcel network,’ he continued.
‘UPS went through the heartache and pain of that integration process some time ago and made all its mistakes. It now has a mature network and direct management control of all its European operations.’
GeoPost came top for price, DHL for innovation, TNT for flexibility, UPS for range of services, Euroexpress for geographic coverage. UPS and TNT were joint top for IT capabilities.
Shippers were asked to rank parcel carriers from one to five.
For overall performance, UPS scored 4.22 while GLS was given 3.91. The weighted average was 4.08.
Mr Manners-Bell said that, because shippers tended to rate carriers in clusters, the small numerical differences were actually ‘very significant’.
A spokesman for GLS in Amsterdam was unable to provide a comment on the survey.
