OBA customers with regular Royal Mail collections have a significant gap in the Tracked 24/48 tracking journey.

We manifest our parcels, place them into the correct Royal Mail sacks and hand them directly to the Royal Mail collection driver. However, until an individual parcel receives its first network scan, customers can continue to see “We’re expecting it”.

In some cases, that first visible scan is not until the destination Delivery Office several days later. To the customer, this looks as though the retailer has created a tracking number but has not actually despatched the order.

Royal Mail already has all of the information needed to solve this without requiring drivers to scan every parcel.

The collection driver could simply scan the A4 manifest at the time of collection.

All Tracked 24/48 tracking numbers attached to that manifest could then be updated to:

“Royal Mail has collected the consignment containing your item - individual item scan pending.”

Importantly, this does not need to count as an individual parcel acceptance scan. If Royal Mail needs the first individual barcode scan for compensation, operational or billing purposes, that process could remain unchanged.

The manifest event would simply confirm that Royal Mail has physically taken custody of the manifested mail.

This gives Royal Mail:

• one scan per business collection rather than hundreds of individual scans.
• no need to change the existing individual parcel scanning process.
• a more accurate customer-facing tracking message.
• fewer unnecessary enquiries to both retailers and Royal Mail.
• a genuine collection event within what is sold as a 'Tracked service from despatch/posting through to delivery'.

At present there is a large difference between “Royal Mail has not received this parcel” and “Royal Mail has collected the manifested consignment but has not individually scanned this parcel yet.”

The tracking should reflect that difference.

This would be a simple but worthwhile improvement for all three parties: the sender, Royal Mail and the recipient.