UK’s largest delivery provider to open five temporary sorting centres and expand vehicle fleet in a bid to curb customer dissatisfaction
Royal Mail is set to employ 16,000 temporary workers in a bid to ensure customers receive cards and parcels on time this Christmas.
The new jobs – which will be based in 38 different mail sorting centres around the UK – include 8,000 posts in England, 1,200 in Scotland and 500 in both Wales and Northern Ireland.
Contracts for the posts will run from the end of October to early January, covering the busy Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend in November, as well as the Christmas period.
Five temporary new parcel sorting centres will open for the festive period – in Atherstone, Milton Keynes, Northampton, Daventry and Greenford – with an extra 6,800 trucks and vans added to the company’s fleet.
According to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index, 5.1 billion parcels were sent in the UK in 2022, which equates to 162 parcels per second.
Royal Mail was responsible for 1.3 billion of those parcel deliveries in 2022, which means there will be a lot of packages, boxes and mailing bags for sorting office staff to work through during their busiest time of the year.
Whilst they remain the UK’s largest delivery provider, Royal Mail’s market share has dropped from 30% in 2021 to 25% in 2022, as the company faced a challenging year – including industrial action by postal workers during the Christmas period.
With customer dissatisfaction on the increase, Royal Mail this year lost its 360-year monopoly on delivering parcels from Post Office sites, with Evri and DPD now among the selection of couriers offered to customers at Post Office counters since June.
Against that difficult background, Royal Mail executives know the importance of delivering a good service this Christmas to prevent further customer dissatisfaction, but they believe they are prepared to ensure people can rely on them this Christmas.
“We are pulling out all the stops to deliver Christmas for our customers,” said Royal Mail’s chief operating officer Grant McPherson.
“It’s our busiest time of the year and we know how important it is for people that we deliver letters and parcels on time.
“By planning ahead and hiring more people, vans and trucks, we are well prepared to handle the expected increased festive mail and parcels and deliver the high standards of service our customers expect from Royal Mail.”
Image courtesy of Phil Hearing (@philhearing) on Unsplash.
