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Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Shipping & Courier

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At a glance

Real-time count of DPDLocal compensation claims that are open and unsettled. Each claim represents a damaged, lost, mis-delivered, or significantly-delayed consignment where the merchant is seeking financial recovery from DPDLocal under the carrier’s liability terms. Cash trapped + customer trust at risk.

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your DPDLocal data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A UK premium-electronics DTC retailer ships ~3,000 DPDLocal NextDay parcels per month, AOV £180. Reading taken at 09:00 GMT on 12 Mar 26. The card reads 11. The alert fires because 5 claims (the under_review and awaiting_evidence rows) are >7 days old. Three things to notice:
  1. The 5 ageing claims are roughly £880 of cash trapped. At 11 open claims with average value £175 the total open exposure is ~£1,925; the >7d cohort is the actionable subset because the 14-day resolution SLA is at risk.
  2. awaiting_evidence is on the merchant, not DPD. Two claims are stalled because the customer has not yet sent damage photos via the CS workflow. A nudge email and a 7-day deadline-or-withdraw policy clears these. Pair with Open Claims Without Jira Ticket to surface CS-coverage gaps.
  3. Premium-electronics merchants run claim rates 2 to 5 times higher than average. High-AOV, fragile goods see more DAMAGED claims. The threshold should reflect category baseline; 11 open is healthy for this merchant, would be elevated for a fashion DTC at the same volume.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in DPDLocal’s own dashboard: MyDPD Business Portal → Claims. Each claim has a status (open, under_review, awaiting_evidence, settled, denied, withdrawn). Filter on the open statuses to compare against this card’s count. Why our number may legitimately differ from MyDPD: Cross-connector reconciliation:

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

A claim has been “open” for 30 days. What can I do? Three escalation steps, in order. (1) Account team email quoting claim references and ages. (2) Quarterly business review (QBR) escalation with operational stats summary, claim resolution time as KPI. (3) Insurance route, if your account team will not move, your own goods-in-transit insurance may pay out faster while you continue to chase DPD; insurers have leverage with carriers because of inter-carrier rate agreements. Why is “Open Claim Value” higher than the count × my AOV? Two reasons. (1) High-value claims drag the average up. A single £1,500 lost-laptop claim shifts the open value materially. (2) Claims include consequential costs (re-shipment cost, customer compensation paid by the merchant pending recovery from DPD). Open Value reflects total recovery being sought; the per-claim mean is often higher than per-order AOV. Should I file a claim or just refund the customer and move on? Both, on most damages and losses. Refund the customer immediately to protect NPS; file the claim with DPD to recover from the carrier liability cover. The two workflows are independent. The merchant who only files claims when they cannot afford to refund is leaving margin on the table. A claim was denied. Now what? Read the denial reason. The common denied categories are (a) declared value missing or below the goods value at label print time (DPD’s liability is capped at declared value), (b) packaging deemed insufficient for the goods (the carrier liability does not cover a damage that “ordinary handling” should not cause if packed correctly), (c) claim filed outside the 14-day window. The first two are operational fixes for future shipments; the third has no recourse. Why does the card show RT, not a window? Open is a state, not a count over time. The card always shows “how many claims are open right now”. For trended views (filed-vs-settled per week), use the Claim Resolution Time card and historical claim filings. My open count dropped suddenly. Should I be worried? Sometimes. If DPD denied a batch of claims (e.g. sold-as-fragile-but-not-insured-at-declared-value claims rejected en masse), open count drops without you receiving cash. Check Claim Resolution Time and the denial-reason mix; settle-vs-deny ratio is the right read. Is there a per-merchant cap on open claims with DPDLocal? No formal cap, but DPDLocal will commercially escalate (rate review, contract review) if open claims exceed ~0.3% of monthly volume sustained over 90 days. The relationship is genuinely two-sided here, the carrier has its own claim ratio metrics on you.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Open Claims is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across DPDLocal and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.