Royal Mail ranked among UK’s worst companies for reputation as delivery complaints continue
Major consumer study reveals Royal Mail was already among the UK’s least trusted companies… long before the latest delivery issues hit headlines earlier this week.
Royal Mail’s ongoing delivery problems should come as no surprise to consumers, according to a major UK study which ranked the postal service among the country’s least reputable companies.
The 2025AnnualCorporate Reputation Index from The Harris Poll UK, a Stagwell company, based on feedback from more than 10,000 UK consumers, placed Royal Mail 98th out of 100 of the UK’s most visible companies, highlighting long-standing concerns around trust, reliability and service.
The findings suggest that the challenges now facing Royal Mail are not new, but instead reflect deeper, ongoing issues that have been shaping consumer perceptions for some time.
A long-standing problem, not a new one
While recent reports have brought renewed attention to delivery delays and missed targets, the Harris Poll UK data shows that consumer confidence in Royal Mail was already extremely low.
Alongside Royal Mail, delivery firm Evri ranked 99th, placing both companies at the very bottom of the index and signaling widespread frustration with the sector.
The results point to a consistent pattern: companies that struggle to deliver reliable, transparent service are among the most likely to see their reputations suffer.
Reputation can be rebuilt but it takes consistency
The findings underline that while reputational challenges can develop over time, they can also be addressed through sustained improvements in customer experience.
For essential services such as postal delivery, reliability and transparency are key. Consistently meeting customer expectations and communicating clearly when issues arise can help rebuild trust.
Brands that perform strongly in the index demonstrate that focusing on customer needs, clarity and service delivery can have a positive impact on reputation, even in competitive or challenging sectors.
Steve Brockway, Chief Research Officer at the Harris Poll UK, said: “Reputation is a currency that can make or break a company in today’s UK market. Results from our corporate reputation study show that profit follows a clear and consistently well understood and delivered purpose, giving companies a sustainable license to lead their category. We’ve also seen that investing in your customer experience drives reputational ‘credit in the bank’, enabling a company to both endure and navigate their way out of a crisis. In today’s polycrises of cost-of-living challenges and global instability, consumers are seeking havens of easy in a sea of hard – so it’s more important than ever to be seen as ‘on the consumers side’ ”
The full Corporate Reputation League Table:
For more information, visit https://www.theharrispoll.co.uk/2025-corporate-reputation-index.
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About: The Harris Poll UK, a Stagwell company, is a leading customer experience and consumer insights company that helps some of the UK’s best-known companies understand what matters most to their customers.
The Harris Poll UK combines deep, sector expertise with advanced digital research tools, behavioural science, and agile research methods to deliver powerful, real-time insights. Its flexible service model enables companies to respond quickly to shifting customer expectations, drawing on over one million survey responses and 40,000 emotion data points each month. For more information, visit: www.theharrispoll.co.uk
Methodology: The 2025 Corporate Reputation Index is based on 270,000 datapoints from a nationally representative sample of 10,000 UK consumers.
The Harris Poll UK Corporate Reputation study uses an established methodology developed in collaboration with The Harris Poll in the USA and their Axios Harris Poll Corporate Reputation research, a trusted ranking that has been running for 25 years. This approach provides consistent, cross-market rigour and comparability.
In addition to the UK and US studies, The Harris Poll also runs the Canada RQ in partnership with Canadian Business. The second year of the Canada RQ will launch shortly — offering another benchmark for how corporate reputation is evolving across markets.