% of Express24 consignments delivered next working day - the contracted Parcelforce premium-service promise (~98% SLA).
At a glance
Share of Parcelforce Express24 consignments delivered by end-of-day on the next working day after collection. Express24 is Parcelforce’s flagship UK premium-express service: collect today, deliver tomorrow, signature-on-glass POD. Parcelforce’s published SLA is approximately 98%. Where customers paid the premium-tier carriage and consciously chose Express24 at checkout, this card is the contract.
| What it counts | COUNT(shipments WHERE service_code IN ('Express24','EX24') AND actual_delivery_date <= promised_next_working_day) / COUNT(shipments WHERE service_code IN ('Express24','EX24') AND status = 'DELIVERED') over rolling 30 days. |
| Service code scope | Express24 only. The only_when filter on this card excludes Express9, Express10, ExpressAM, Express48, Globaldirect; those have their own SLAs and dedicated cards (where curated). |
| Delivery success criterion | Driver POD scan or signature-on-glass event captured at the doorstep, returned via Parcelforce’s tracking webhook. Carded “Sorry we missed you” without subsequent same-day delivery is not on-time even if the customer was at fault. |
| On-time threshold | Promised next working day, end-of-day. Parcelforce’s working-day calendar excludes UK Bank Holidays and Sundays; Saturday is excluded by default unless Saturday-uplift is purchased (in which case the card folds Saturday-uplifted Express24 into the Saturday cohort). |
| Returns / RTO | RTOs excluded. Failed-and-redelivered consignments score against the first successful delivery datetime; a re-attempt that delivers on day 2 is late. |
| Money-back-on-late | Parcelforce’s Express24 service guarantee offers a carriage-charge refund on Parcelforce-fault failures. Filing window is 30 days from failed POD; recovery sits on par_open_claims. The 98% headline SLA is the contract; below 98% on a heavy-Express24 merchant is a documented account-team conversation. |
| B2B vs B2C | Express24 is overwhelmingly B2C / consumer DTC. B2B reseller traffic uses Express10 / ExpressAM. The card cohort is therefore consumer-facing; complaints map directly to customer-experience tickets. |
| Currency | N/A (rate metric) |
| Time window | 30D |
| Alert trigger | <98%, the gauge sentiment trips. Parcelforce’s published Express24 SLA is the threshold; missing it is a contractual signal, not a “merely operational” signal. |
| Roles | owner, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Parcelforce Worldwide data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A UK consumer-electronics merchant: £180 average-order-value, mostly Express24 DTC consignments with a small Express48 bulk cohort and a B2B reseller channel on Express10. The merchant’s checkout copy promises “next working day delivery” against a £8.95 Express24 charge. Reading taken at 09:00 GMT on 22 Mar 26 for the trailing 30 days (20 Feb 26 to 21 Mar 26).| Express24 cohort | Consignments | Delivered next working day | OTD% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Express24 | 4,820 | 4,672 | 96.9% |
| Of which: Saturday-uplift purchased | 240 | 232 | 96.7% |
| Of which: standard (Mon-Fri promise) | 4,580 | 4,440 | 96.9% |
- The card is firmly tripped. Customers paid the premium-tier carriage specifically for the next-working-day contract. 148 missed Express24 consignments translates into 148 customer-service contacts at minimum, plus social-media and review-site echo. Treat this as a contractual signal, not just an operational dip.
- Refund-eligible candidates: ~148 consignments. At £8.95 carriage refund per Parcelforce service-failure, that is £1,324 of recoverable carriage if filed within the 30-day window. Most merchants under-file this; pair with
par_open_claimsto track filing rate. - Saturday-uplift cohort runs at 96.7%, comparable to standard. The Saturday-uplift premium converts most Friday-cohort consignments to Saturday delivery on contract. If the Saturday-uplift OTD was significantly worse than standard, the uplift would not be doing its job; track separately on
parcelforce_saturday_uplift_roi. - B2C consumer Express24 is the cohort that loses customer trust fastest. Unlike B2B Express10 (where the customer is a procurement team with a contract), Express24 customers are individual consumers on a single-purchase relationship. A first-purchase Express24 miss often results in zero repeat business; LTV impact compounds.
- Compare against the Parcelforce-published ~98% SLA. Parcelforce’s network-average SLA for Express24 is approximately 98% across all merchants. A merchant at 96.9% is below network-average and the conversation with Parcelforce should focus on local-route performance (
par_route_otd) before merchant-side dispatch issues. Pair with the route-OTD card to identify a single underperforming depot.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Express24 is the merchant’s most-used premium service and dominates consumer-experience perception. Pair with these:| Card | Why pair it with Express24 OTD | What the combination tells you |
|---|---|---|
| On-Time Delivery Rate | The all-services aggregate. If Express24 is 80% of volume, the aggregate moves with this card. | When the aggregate dips, check this card first. Most aggregate-OTD slips are Express24 slips. |
| Late Shipments | The absolute-count companion. Express24 dominates the late count on consumer-DTC merchants. | A late count of 200 with 180 of them Express24 = customer-experience failure cluster. |
| OTD by Route | Splits Express24 performance by Parcelforce depot-and-route. | A single-depot underperformance is the most common cause of a merchant-level Express24 dip. |
| Saturday Delivery Uplift ROI | Saturday-uplift Express24 consignments are tracked here too; the dedicated card scores ROI of paying the uplift. | Saturday consignments delivering at 80% lift the standard cohort by recovering Friday-late parcels; if Saturday is at parity, the uplift is being wasted. |
| Open Claims | Each missed Express24 is a service-failure-refund candidate. | Filing rate vs miss rate = recovery efficiency. Industry benchmark is 50 to 70%. |
| Avg Shipping Cost | Express24 sits at the £9 to £10 cost band; if cost rises while OTD falls, the spend-to-service ratio is degrading. | Negotiation lever. |
| Parcelforce OTD by Sales Channel | Cross-channel split. If Express24 misses are concentrated in a single sales channel, the issue may be cohort-specific (e.g. Friday-evening Shopify orders missing dispatch cutoff). | Channel-mix in the misses guides ops triage. |
Cross-connector: shopify.fulfillment_lead_time | Upstream causation. Late Shopify fulfilment cannot make Parcelforce’s same-day collection cutoff. | A creep in Shopify fulfilment lead time predicts an Express24 OTD dip 2 to 4 days later. |
Cross-connector: shopify.refund_rate | Downstream impact. Express24 misses drive refund and dispute rate. | A 2 to 3 percentage-point drop in Express24 OTD typically precedes a 0.5 to 1 percentage-point rise in Shopify refund rate at 7 to 14 days lag. |
Cross-connector: apc.apc_otd_rate | Peer UK premium overnight. APC Overnight is the closest direct competitor to Express24. | Multi-carrier merchants run both; benchmark week-by-week. |
Cross-connector: dpd.dpd_otd_rate | Peer UK premium with predicted-window service. DPD’s network is generally larger than Parcelforce’s. | DPD’s “delivered within predicted window” SLA is structurally easier than Express24’s “by end of next working day”; calibrate the comparison. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Parcelforce’s own dashboard: Parcelforce ParcelManager → Reports → Service Performance → Filter Service: Express24. The closest like-for-like view is the Express24 SLA tile at the top of the service-performance page. Why our number may legitimately differ from Parcelforce’s portal:| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Time zone | Boundary | UK local time on both sides. DST-transition Sundays cause minor noise. |
| Working-day calendar | Either | Parcelforce excludes UK Bank Holidays from “next working day”. The card uses the same calendar (DEFRA / GOV.UK published bank holiday schedule for England, Scotland, Wales, NI separately). Edge cases: Scottish-only or NI-only bank holidays may cause off-by-one consignments. |
| Saturday-uplift handling | Either | Saturday-uplifted Express24 consignments are scored against their Saturday promise; the Parcelforce portal sometimes pools them with weekday Express24 (treating the consignment as Express24 first, Saturday-uplift second). The card folds Saturday-uplift consignments out of the standard-Express24 cohort. |
| Refund-eligible vs all-late | Ours lower | Parcelforce’s account-team often quote Express24 SLA performance excluding customer-fault. The card’s count is all delivered Express24 regardless of fault; that is what the customer experienced. |
| In-transit Express24 | Ours rolling | Consignments without final POD are excluded from numerator and denominator until the scan lands. ParcelManager may include “in-transit, predicted on-time” as a separate slice. |
| Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
shopify.fulfillment_lead_time | Upstream causation. Express24 cannot meet next-working-day if Shopify fulfilment misses Parcelforce’s collection cutoff. | App-install events, manual fulfilment overrides. |
apc.apc_otd_rate | APC Overnight is the closest peer service. | Different consignments. Benchmark, not reconciliation. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why is the alert at <98% specifically? Parcelforce’s published Express24 SLA is approximately 98% (network-wide average). The threshold matches the contract: below 98% means you are receiving below-average service for the premium-tier carriage you are paying. It is the conversation-trigger threshold, not the panic threshold. A merchant at 96% will not lose Parcelforce as a carrier; they will start a justified service-level conversation and may negotiate a small rate-card concession or service-recovery commitment. The customer received the parcel “next day” but Parcelforce shows it as late; why? Two usual reasons. (1) End-of-day-of-next-working-day. Express24’s promise is “by end of next working day”, not “by 17:00”. A 19:30 delivery is on-time by the contract; the customer might perceive it as late. (2) Working-day calendar. Express24 excludes weekends and UK Bank Holidays. A Friday-collected consignment is promised by end of Monday (assuming Monday is not a bank holiday). The customer who received it Tuesday morning is technically late by ~12 hours. Saturday delivery: how does the card handle it? Saturday-uplifted Express24 consignments are scored against their Saturday-cutoff promise (still end-of-day on Saturday). The card lists them in a separate Saturday cohort but folds them into the headline if you do not filter. The dedicatedparcelforce_saturday_uplift_roi card scores whether paying the Saturday uplift is recovering Friday-cohort Express24 misses cost-effectively.
Why is our Express24 OTD lower than DPD’s published 99% benchmark?
Different SLA definitions. DPD’s “predicted-window-delivery” SLA is structurally easier than Express24’s end-of-next-working-day promise: DPD predicts a 1-hour window per consignment and credits success against that window, which absorbs network variability. Parcelforce’s promise is a fixed end-of-day. Calibrate cross-carrier comparison via the dedicated peer cards rather than the marketing numbers.
B2B reseller orders accidentally booked as Express24 instead of Express10; do they show here?
Yes. The card filters strictly on service_code IN ('Express24','EX24'). If a B2B Express10 booking was mis-labelled as Express24 (a checkout flow bug, perhaps), it appears here against the Express24 SLA. Operations should fix the mis-labelling at source; the card cannot infer intended-but-mis-coded service.
Failed first attempt then re-delivered same day: on-time or late?
On-time if the same-day re-delivery POD is captured before end-of-day. Late if the re-attempt happens day 2. Parcelforce drivers will sometimes re-attempt later in the same day if the route allows; this is a recovery path the card honours. Pair with par_failed_delivery_count to see how many Express24 consignments needed a re-attempt; that count can be high without the OTD card moving.
The headline is at 98.4% but customer-service tickets feel heavier; is the card lying?
Two reasons. (1) Complaints concentrate on premium-paid cohort. A 1.6% miss rate at 4,000 weekly Express24 consignments is 64 misses per week, which might generate 100+ contacts when escalations and returns flow through. (2) Recency bias: customers who experienced misses last week dominate this week’s complaint volume. Pair with par_late_shipments_count for the absolute count, not the rate.
Globaldirect international Express equivalents: are they here?
No. Globaldirect has its own SLA structure (country-specific transit times) and its own service codes. The card filters on Express24 / EX24 only. For Globaldirect performance use par_otd_rate aggregated and filter by international destinations on par_shipments_by_destination.
During Q4 peak, Express24 OTD typically dips 2 to 5 points; is that allowed?
Allowed in the sense that Parcelforce’s network is universally strained; not allowed in the sense that customers paid the premium tier specifically to avoid Q4 chaos. The conversation with Parcelforce should focus on negotiated peak-capacity (some merchants pay a peak-period premium for guaranteed capacity); set checkout expectations accordingly. The card will tell you the truth; manage demand and customer-comms around it.
How do we use this card to renegotiate our Parcelforce rate card?
Bring three cards to the account-team review: this card (Express24 SLA performance), par_avg_shipping_cost (per-shipment economics), and par_open_claims (filing rate showing operational discipline). A merchant running >£5K monthly Parcelforce spend with documented sub-98% Express24 OTD across 60+ days has the strongest negotiation position; expect a 5 to 15% rate-card improvement in exchange for service-recovery commitments from Parcelforce.