As a part of an ongoing dispute with Royal Mail about a business P.O Box, we’re keen to find out from our visitors if anyone else has had, or is having, problems with their P.O Box service not living up to expectations.
If you or your company uses a PO Box service for mail collection or delivery, and you’ve experienced any problems, such as mail being returned as “gone away”, post sent to the wrong address, or the P.O box being ceased by Royal Mail in error, we’d love to hear from you.
Please add a comment in the box below.
below you will find my letter with the description of my story. Today I was offered 6 months free service which i refused. i am now going to escalate it. I would appreciate any help or words of encouragement.
many thanks,
Alex
I am writing to you to express my deep dissatisfaction with the Royal Mail service.
I am running a small translation business and my business model is that I advertise my services and clients who want me to translate documents for them, send me a copy of the document in the post. Once I have received and translated it I send it back to them also by post.
Just after I started my business on 2nd May 2007 I bought a PO Box and chose to have it delivered to my home address. I was sent a letter informing me that the details of my PO Box are:
PO BOX 9146
Stansted
CM24 9WT
I then put these details on all my stationery: leaflets, flyers, 2 types of business cards, internet adverts, press adverts and on my website. I have been continuously using these details for the last 5 years and to date I can estimate I have distributed about 10 000 items with these details on.
I believed these details were correct and I sometimes received letters addressed to this PO Box. The volume was very low.
About 2 years ago I was notified by my customer who had sent me some documents for translation and never got my answer. He sent 2 first class letters addressed to the PO Box and I did not receive them. I called Royal Mail and I was assured everything at their end was up and running and that they have emailed my local delivery office and everything was fine.
Later I was told by a customer that their letter was returned marked “gone away”. Again I contacted Royal Mail but I was told everything was fine.
In April or May a client sent two first class large letters to my PO Box. I never received them and lost this clients business. I called the Royal Mail again and complained. I was promised this will be investigated but it was not. I was also told to speak to my postman which I did.
In July 2012 I received letter from a county court addressed to my PO Box. In this letter the court informed me that a listing questionnaire I was supposed to fill in could not be delivered because it was returned to the court marked “gone away”. Since this was the second time this happened, I was even more concerned and called Royal Mail again to complain. The operator took the details and I was told somebody will deal with it. About a month later a person called Becky called me saying she will try to get some answers and she will call me back. She did not do either.
In mid-September 2012 another client called me saying that he had sent me a letter which I had not received. I asked him to re-send the letter which he did. I did not receive it either and lost this client’s business. On 24th and 26th September I sent 2 test first class letters to my PO Box. Yet again the letters disappeared.
So I called Royal Mail yet again on 2nd October. I spoke to an operator and informed them that I have had enough and I want to speak to their manager.
Some time later Mr. Antony O’Connor called me about my PO Box issue. We had a chat and I explained the situation I told him I was upset and dissatisfied with the service I was provided with for so many years. During the conversation he read out the PO Box details and I noticed that the details he had were different from the ones I had.
The only difference was the post code which in his records was CM24 8WT. He closed my case as resolved and offered me a £10 as a good will gesture which I did not accept. He also said that he can allocate me a CM24 9WT postcode or I can start using the CM24 8WT.
Since I lost all the trust with Royal Mail I called the next day and I spoke to Mr. James Clinton from the PO Box team who confirmed that the CM24 9WT post code does not exist and therefore it would be impossible to allocate it to my PO Box. So the only way forward it to start using the CM24 8WT.
I told him that this would mean informing all my clients of the change and changing all my promotional material, business cards and the websites which will come at a significant cost.
The next day a lady called probing me for the cost to replace the stationery.
It is very difficult to estimate the total loss that my business has suffered. I cannot quantify the letters I have never received and clients whose business I have lost.
All I know is that over the 5 years I have paid about £1 000 for a service which was unbelievably poor. I am very frustrated and disappointed with that.
I cannot believe that after so many phone calls nobody actually bothered to help me. Every time I called I gave the postcode as CM24 9WT. I remember that the operator could never find it and asked for my home postcode instead. I did not alarm me because I had no idea how the Royal Mail computer system works.
To add to the poor service I received, I can also say that I called numerous times to ask Royal Mail to change my title to Mrs. It was previously changed on some of your systems and I kept receiving letters addressed to Mrs A. Fiddler and invoices and other materials addressed to Miss A. Fiddler. All my calls were ignored. Surprisingly, it was changed last week after somebody finally took my case seriously and I even received a letter informing me of the change.
To sum up for the last 5 years I paid for the service, which due to Royal Mail’s mistake, I could not use. I lost business because of that and now I am left with thousands of promotional items with the non-existing post code printed on them.
On top of that I spent many hours on the phone to Royal Mail trying to rectify this problem and was repeatedly fobbed off. This caused a lot of frustration and nerves.
Please take this letter as a start of my formal complaint. I would expect any resolution to include reimbursement of a proportion of the service fees paid to date and compensation towards replacement stationery and changes to the website which I estimate to be about £120.00.