An old bird is not to be caught with chaff
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Royal Mail online postage services is offline
A WEB SITE run by the Royal Mail to help people and small businesses send letters and parcels has failed due to technical issues, just a few weeks before Christmas.
Christmas is a key time for retail and mail order sales, of course, so that downtime is the source of frustration for users. Fear not then, as the service is working on resolving the problem, and has been since late last week.
"I am sorry that there continues to be some problems with parts of our website following difficulties experienced by some customers since the beginning of last week. I wanted to update you on the latest position while my team and I continue to work hard to resolve outstanding issues as quickly as possible," says a statement from Nick Landon, director of customer experience at the Royal Mail, which the INQUIRER received today.
"The initial problems some customers experienced followed technical difficulties that arose after the migration of part of our website to a new platform. As soon as we identified the problems, my team and I worked hard to resolve them as quickly as possible."
Uh oh. A move to a new platform. This rarely goes well. Perhaps you could say this change was mis-timed. But at least they were working 'hard' to fix the problems, albeit not effectively.
"Some customers continue to experience technical difficulties with parts of our Online Postage and SmartStamp services. We are working around the clock to fix these individual issues as they arise," added the customer experience director.
"I know how important it is that we restore full service for all users as quickly as possible and apologise for the inconvenience this is causing. Our Pricefinder application remains unavailable but we are hoping to restore the service very soon. We have placed a price guide on the website until that is the case."
The alternative is a link to a PDF file of prices and information, which is not quite as neat as a resolution for an online application that doesn't work.
This is not the only online problem to befall the Royal Mail's online users, and Landon said that the service will be reaching out to anyone that experienced problems with an online redirection service that wasn't working last week.
Landon added that all services other than Princefinders are now live. µ
Tags: Internet
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What a awful service, roughly 50% of the time I login to use their services the site is 'temporarily unavailable' but this is usually for hours. You'd of thought with their Xmas fiasco they're would be little or no down time.. but oh no, they are down more often than James Brown.
Sort it out RM once & for all!! for God's sake..
There have now been problems with Royal Mail's Smartstamp and other services for about three weeks now. The whole episode smacks of amateurisness on their part for not anticipating things could go wrong with a system upgrade and, instigating it so near Christmas.
Royal Mail still have a monopoly with their Post Office outlets and letter and small packet delivery services. It would be an anvantage to businesses and consumers if stamps could be issued by another company beside RM, which could be sent through RM's network.
There are other online services out there that exist to make the whole process of working out how much postage you need for your letters and parcels much easier. This is beacuse, even when working, the Royal Mail's site and associated online tools are not easy to use let alone to find. One such popular service is PostageRates.org.uk - it has been around for a few years now and is quick and easy to use - the website address is: www.PostageRates.org.uk