Quality of letter mail service in Europe continues to far exceed both the European Union’s speedobjective of 85 per cent of intra-EU mail delivery within three days of posting, and its
reliability objective of 97 per cent within five days, according to new figures from theInternational Post Corporation.Performance recorded by the IPC UNEX measurement system in 2014 exceeded these objectives forthe 17th consecutive year, the association of 24 Posts in Europe, North America and Asia Pacificsaid.
In 2014, 90.6 per cent of international priority and first-class letter mail was deliveredwithin three days of posting and 97.8 per cent within five days. Average delivery time was 2.4days. These results cover a total of 31 countries: the 28 EU Member States together with Iceland,Norway and Switzerland.
Commenting on the results, Herbert-Michael Zapf, President and Chief Executive officer, IPC,said: “In the 20th anniversary year of the UNEX measurement, 2014 was the 17th consecutive yearthat the end-to-end performance for priority letter mail in Europe exceeded both the speed andreliability objectives set by the 1997 Postal Directive. The consistent high level of performancedemonstrates that postal operators continue to work hard to maintain the same reliable high qualityservices for customers, even if letter mail volumes are under pressure.”
Quality of service performance is measured by IPC’s UNEX end-to-end monitoring system whichis conducted independently by external research firms. The results for 2014 were based on 263,000test letters of which more than 60 per cent contained Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags.
The passage of a test letter at a specific point in the mail pipeline is recorded by RFIDreaders. The test letters move anonymously through the international mail processing system, fromposting to delivery.
