Whether it’s a birthday or Christmas present, company shipments from A to B or, of course, online shopping: the number of parcels is increasing and increasing. As well as the number of problems that this entails for the recipients. Official complaint figures now show how things stand between DHL and its customers.
More time at home, closed shops, restrictions on entry and exit – the year 2021 was marked by restrictions for many people. This was also clearly reflected in the volume of parcels, which has grown more strongly than ever before compared to the previous year. With the number of packages, however, is also the Number of disgruntled customers increased – and by a lot.
DHL and Co. will cause more trouble for parcel customers in 2021
Between January 1 and December 31, 2021, 3,752 requests for arbitration were received by the Federal Network Agency’s post arbitration board (source: Federal Network Agency). These are more than twice as many as in 2020. At the beginning of 2022, the numbers should be comparable. Compared to the number of packages, these are only a few cases, but only a fraction of those affected make the effort to seek arbitration.
Around 80 percent of the applications relate to parcel shipments. The absolute Most of the arbitration proceedings were related to DHL (81 percent), but Hermes still accounted for 10 percent. According to the Federal Network Agency, this also reflects the fact that these two have a larger proportion of private customers than other providers.
Reason for the disputes are mostly lost or stolen shipments (50.1 percent), 26.9 percent of the cases involved damaged goods. Around two thirds of the procedures in 2021 were initiated by the senders and one third by the recipients.
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Arbitrations for parcel deliveries are increasing: these are the reasons
As noted at the beginning, one leads the rise among other things on the Parcel boom as a result of the corona pandemic back. With more packages, more could go wrong. The rapid and strong increase in parcel volumes also required quick adjustments to the operational process, which also drove up the error rate.
However, there is another reason: According to the Federal Network Agency, the largest proportion of arbitration proceedings came up in April 2021 – directly after an amendment to the Postal Act came into force in March. Post and parcel service providers have been since obliged to participate in an arbitration procedure, if this is initiated by the consumer.