Ramblings And Musings

I just managed to get my Tier 1 visa approved a couple of weeks ago.

For those who don’t know what that is, Wikipedia has a short description about it.

It was a painful experience, one full of anxiety and frustration. It’s not down wholly to the application process, Royal Mail added their incompetence to it and made the whole process that much worse.

I applied back in November 2008 and it took a whole 10 weeks before I got the letter and my passport back. During this time, I did not manage to get hold of anyone from Home Office (BIA) to get an update on the progress of the application.

Job Security

Now, some of you may know this, but I work at an investment bank. Right now is the worst possible time to have a bank as an employer and your visa sponsored by the bank. If the bank goes belly up, you’re out of a job. You have a month (I think) to get a new one, or you’re out of the country. Good luck getting a new job in the banking sector in this climate (I heard rumours of 200:1 ratios for job openings, scary stuff).

Having the Tier 1 visa puts less pressure for me to get a job if the bank was ever to go belly up.

“Sorry You Were Out” Card

Anyways, so, it was 10 weeks pulling out my hair, wondering WTF happened to my application.

Until…

Until the fateful day that was Thursday, 5th February 2009. When I got home from work, I received a card telling me that Royal Mail tried to deliver a letter to me, but I was not at home. Yes, one of these:

The card said that I could collect this letter in 48 hours from a post office nearby (a 5 minute slow drive from where I stay). So, on Saturday (7th Feb) early morning, I went there to collect the letter, and I was really eager to get hold of it (for the reasons mentioned above).

However, the letter was not there. Apparently the post man responsible for the delivery had not returned the letter to that office. I was turned away with the phone number for one of the branch managers. They took my phone number and said that they will call me once they have the letter with them.

Tracking the Letter

I had a tracking number and went to Royal Mail’s website to find out where the letter was, and this is the response that they had on the website:

Recorded Signed For™ items are only tracked after the item has been delivered. Depending on whether the item was sent first or second class, this may be a few days after posting. Please try again later.

Information on your item is not yet available online.

Now, forget the fact that my letter was just a “Recorded Signed For”, which may not come with on-the-dot-accurate tracking. But how useful is a tracking system that only “tracks(ed) after the item has been delivered” ?  I’m not entirely sure which planet they come from, but here on Earth, tracking an item means seeing where the f*ck it is en-route between source and destination, and not after the fact that it has been delivered. That’s not a tracking system. It’s not tracking anything at all! It’s a reporting system.

Customer Service, Anyone ? Royal Mail Do Not Need It

I returned back on Tuesday 10th of February, thinking that it might be worth trying my luck. Still no letter, but the 5 minute trip to the post office was worth it. I learned a few things about the Royal Mail:

1. Apparently ALL letters go to the head office before getting routed to the branches, even for letters that failed the first delivery attempt has been made.
2. Being rude to a staff member of the Royal Mail is bad, frowned upon and there are signs everywhere to tell you not to do it. But, a Royal Mail staff being rude to a paying customer who is speaking softly, slowly and politely is perfectly fine.

During the conversation (where I was treated like I had the plague), all I wanted was clarification on a couple of things:

1. The branch phone number, including the manager’s phone number is  either engaged or rings endlessly.
2. In the past when I gave them my phone number, no one bothered to contact me when the letter/parcel had actually arrived.

Now, I was not looking for a dossier on these two facts. All I wanted was a “We’re sorry, but we’ll try our best next time. Thank you”. Instead I got a “so, whatdoyouwantmetodo ?” which was very appealing to hear at 7.45 in the morning. I was turned away again.

The Lie That Reveals Everything

For the rest of the day and following day (10th Feb) I checked the status of the letter on their tracking site every few hours and was told the same thing – “Items are only tracked after they have been delivered”.

However, on 11th Feb morning, the message changed on their tracking website:

We have tried to deliver your item from our ROTHERHITHE Delivery Office before 09:43 on 11/02/09 and we have left a while you were out card.

You can arrange a redelivery online,  call the number on your card to arrange a re-delivery, or collect  the item from your local enquiry office by bringing your card and proof of identification and address.

So, now it can track items before they are delivered. They’ve lied! And guess what ? When I got back home that day there was no “while you were out card”. A second lie!

At this point I had a hunch – that status on their website might indicate that the letter has been delivered to their local post office, and it was actually there physically.

<Geek talk warning>

See, plenty of these tracking systems are essentially the same in the core. There is a finite state machine which reflects the status of an item in the real world, and you need some intervention to move between the states. So, you could have the states “Dispatched”, “On the way”, “Delivered”, etc and on each state have a location attached. You could have a fully automated method to move between the states, or just a manual one.  Most of the time you’d use a bar code scanner to reduce the manual data entry task.

Moreover, most of these systems have a fallback state which gets reached in dire circumstances – human error, system crash, etc, to be able to recover.

My theory is this (there’s no way to prove it): The message I was getting initially which said “items can’t be tracked” on their tracking website is a generic way of saying “we have no f*cking idea what is going on”. The second message which said “we tried to deliver it” was the human intervention that recovered the state of the letter in the system. It probably was someone checking/scanning in the letter at the delivery office and tinkering with the state to say “We tried to deliver” rather than the actual “We have it at our delivery office”.

</Geek talk warning>

And guess what ? I went back to the delivery office the following day, and the letter was there!

It does not end there, and here’s the punchline: while driving back home from the post office, I got a call from them saying that there was a parcel for me. OK, so, they do call and I was wrong. But they called the wrong person. They attached my phone number to the wrong letter.

Lessons Learned

Here comes my analysis of the Royal Mail disaster described above:

1. It took them 1 whole week to take a letter back from destination to local delivery office which is a slow 5 minute drive.
2. They (including the systems) were utterly clueless on what’s actually going on.
3. Being rude to paying customers is perfectly fine.

It all boils down to one word: incompetence. It’s incompetence in every single stage. Incompetence in management, the delivery post man, the lady behind the desk, their phone systems, the works.

Now, I have read Allan Leighton’s (current Royal Mail CEO) book “On Leadership” and in there he goes on about putting the customer first, leading from the front and working as a team. All abysmally executed here. He even has a website dedicated to leadership. I do respect and admire what he has done for Asda in the past and it was a difficult task of bringing one of the sluggish retail brands to one of the top 3 largest ones in UK. He executed that wonderfully. But he has failed when it came to the Royal Mail. My only hunch is that in Asda, it was easy to convert the team culture to one that was more productive. However, with the Royal Mail, their culture is so ingrained that no human being could possibly save it.

The Times reports that Royal Mail is due to slash 16000 jobs to cut costs. They only have themselves to blame. I think its good that they want to cut costs, but I don’t think its enough. For the Royal Mail to be able to delivery more value with less workforce is as good as asking the sun to rise in the west, i.e. “no f*cking way”. It needs more than a job cut. It needs to be revamped and it’s culture re-energised with some grain of simple business principles.

It needs to get rid of incompetence at all levels.

Update: Apparently there are plans to part-privatise the Royal Mail. I, for one, am happy to see some improvement. Time to kick some incompetence out!

Update 2: BBC have an article on the row over privatisation of Royal Mail as well.

Update 3: Andrew Ellson from Times Online writes about his frustrations as well.