Deutsche Post: Frustration through deliverers reaches new record

The complaints about the post and its competitors have reached the next maximum. As the Federal Network Agency announced on request, she received 22,981 complaints on postal services in the first half of her and 13 percent more than in the previous year-at that time the half-year highest value was achieved. 89 percent of the criticism is directed against the market leader Deutsche Post/DHL.

In the past it had been much less complaints. Should the previous pace of complaint continue, this year the previous maximum value of 44,406 from 2024 could be torn.

It is about late, incorrectly cast or damaged programs, whether letters or packages. Examples of a service that has led too much frustration is the case of a senior citizen from Berlin who has vacationed in her apartment on a North Sea island. She had forgotten her cell phone in Berlin, a friend sent it to her by registered mail. According to the post office, a registered letter is “usually the next working day”.

In the case of the elderly, the registered letter only arrived after six working days – so she had to do without her cell phone much longer than expected. The strange thing: she could see through the tracking that her cell phone was quickly transported from Berlin to the North Sea island, but stayed there for days.

When the deliverer finally came, he didn’t find her apartment and wanted to go away again – only by chance the woman saw him and ran after him. The postman was probably not really local, the address was clear and other postmans have had no problems in the past, says the 82-year-old. When asked why she had to wait so long for the registered letter, she was told that the post office had much less delivery staff on site than before.

Such examples are initially only isolated cases that can also contain individual peculiarities. However, the sum of the cases results in a sobering picture. For a long time, the number of posts complained at a rather low level before going up significantly in the summer of 2022 and the company initially talked to the topic. Finally, it admitted local problems and justified them with personnel problems.

In response to the half-year figures, a postal spokesman says that each complaint is one too much and that his company is working on quality improvements every day. He also points out that the proportion of symptoms in the billions of shipments are low. The Bonn group made 12.2 billion letters and 1.8 billion packages in Germany last year.

However, the company spokesman admits that in the first half of the year there were restrictions in the operational processes, such as the warning strikes at the beginning of the year and consequences of the heat wave in June, when the workload had to be reduced. This led to residues and delays at individual locations.

Furthermore, the postal spokesman attributes the development to the appeal to the posts law that came into force at the beginning of the year. Since then, the company has had much less time pressure in the promotion of letters than before: the vast majority of letters had to have arrived after one or two working days beforehand, so an obligation only reaches on the third working day – the average waiting time is increasing. This allows the mail to reduce costs and change its delivery system. The logistician promotes fewer and fewer letters in the digital age, which means that the classic mail business is under pressure.

In the meantime, the post office bundles its shipment quantities: If a recipient is to get a letter each on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Tuesday letter is now held back and only delivered on Wednesday together with the second letter. This saves the postman’s way to the mailbox. For the citizens, however, this also means that on average they look into an empty mailbox more often than before-and not only because of the Internet age in which emails and chat messages displace the classic letters, but also because of the postal law reform.

In his response to the number of complaints, the postal spokesman also indicates the consequences of the changes in the law. “Post supply today is different than in the years before: at the turn of the year, the letters have extended themselves in accordance with the postal law.” It is clear that the changes are not known to all mail customers and therefore customers contacted the company with questions.

Consumers can also report directly to the post office at the Federal Network Agency separately at the Federal Network Agency. Last year there were around 420,000 symptoms.

In politics you keep an eye on the topic. The SPD member of the Bundestag Sebastian Roloff says that the tendency should be taken seriously in the symptoms. Roloff has negotiated the postal law reform. “The new rules in the posting must actually be established first, but by the legislator, the mail has received more scope and flexibility, which should actually affect more reliability,” says the Social Democrat. “This is also the clear expectation of the personnel planning of the post office.”