中文Picture this. You’re waiting for a parcel that was supposed to arrive yesterday. You try to call the courier. Nobody picks up. You check the tracking — it says “delivered,” but the photo shows a box balanced on your neighbour’s fence. Sound familiar?
If that story made your blood boil, you’re not alone. Ofcom — the UK’s communications regulator — just dropped its fourth annual parcel survey, and the headline number is ugly: overall customer satisfaction has slipped 3% to 75%. That’s the first drop in three years. It’s a quiet warning sign that the machines we’ve built to move our stuff around are creaking at the seams.
But here’s the number that really stings. When it comes to actually contacting a delivery company — you know, the moment something goes wrong and you desperately need a human — satisfaction collapsed from 47% to 43%. Nearly half of the people who were unhappy about contacting a firm said the simple reason was heartbreakingly basic: they couldn’t reach anyone by phone.
Think about what that means. We live in an age where you can summon a car with your thumb, but when a £40 birthday present vanishes into the void, you’re met with a chatbot that loops you back to the same useless menu.
The league table Ofcom published tells its own story. Amazon sits pretty at the top with a 56% satisfaction score and only 15% dissatisfied — proof that when you care about the last mile, people notice. At the bottom, for the fourth year running, is Evri, scoring just 26%. That’s barely more than half the industry average. Evri pushed back hard, pointing to 4.4 million five-star Trustpilot reviews and an internal study showing 99.4% of 1.3 million parcels delivered within seven working days. Fair points — but Ofcom’s data is about experience, not volume. Handling a billion parcels a year is impressive; making each of those customers feel heard is the harder job.
The everyday headaches are predictably human. Seven in ten people reported some problem with a delivery this year. The most common? Delays (32%), followed closely by parcels dumped in the wrong place (28%). Drivers not knocking loudly enough. Not enough time to reach the door. Boxes arriving battered.
And the gap that should shame the industry: disabled respondents and those with limiting conditions were more likely to report issues (76% vs 68%), and both figures crept up 3% from 2025. When your service fails the people who need it most, that’s not a glitch — it’s a design flaw.
Fergal Farragher, Ofcom’s policy director, didn’t mince words: “Companies need to put customers first and improve performance, or we will consider further measures to make sure consumers are properly protected.” That’s a threat dressed as a polite sentence. The survey, run by Yonder Consulting across 4,179 UK adults in January and July 2026, carries real weight.
For the print and packaging world, this is more than a consumer gripe. Every one of those parcels is wrapped, labelled, and boxed by someone in our industry. As e-commerce keeps eating retail, the quality of that packaging — readable labels, tamper-proof seals, damage-resistant board — is literally the only physical handshake between a brand and a frustrated customer. Get it wrong and the courier cops the blame; get it right and you’ve quietly saved a sale.
The takeaway is simple and a little uncomfortable: the race to the bottom on delivery cost has a human bill, and it’s now being itemised by a regulator. Listen to your customers, or someone will make you.
Source: Printweek (Ofcom fourth annual parcel survey, published 27 October 2026).
