Royal Mail to offer timed delivery slots

Royal Mail is set to offer timed delivery slots in 2022, according to the Mail on Sunday newspaper.

The postal operator is planning a three tier system where customers will pay more to send and receive letters and parcels on specific days and times.

The report comes from a video message sent to the staff of Royal Mail by chief commercial officer Nick Landon, where he says that it is stripping back its current range of services with plans to develop new options for its customers.

Landon said: “Longer term, we’re looking at what customers actually need and how we can reflect that in our products. And we want a three-tier product portfolio because three is a magic number. People always like to choose from three.” 

Though no name for the three products has been decided there are to be three tiers – ‘good’, ‘better’ and ‘best’. Landon explained, “We’re looking at a ‘good’ product, the base product, and this will be built around [the idea of]: ‘I’ll leave it to Royal Mail to choose how it comes to me’.”

The benefit of the three tier system is that Royal Mail can then move a parcel as efficiently as required through the network and thereby reduce its own costs, passing on the savings to customers.

Landon concluded: “We’re looking at [whether there are] some products where we’ve got different variants which probably had a very good reason for being launched at the time, but we can now simplify that product set down.” 

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