Another Postie here. (Caveat: I’m only involved in the delivery side of things, so my views may not be completely fair).
TL:DR
RM is an incompetently managed, dysfunctional organisation which would waste a tenner tomorrow to save a penny today. But please be nice to your postie ‘cos it’s brutal out there at the moment and we hate the service we’re giving as much as you do.
Full version:
It seems to me that RM tracking is not in any way designed for the customer – it’s solely for RM’s benefit.
If you go to the post office to send a parcel then you pay the Post Office for the service. But all they do is take your money and put your package in a bag behind the counter.
RM is a completely separate company. We collect the outgoing mail from PO, process it, move it around the country and deliver it. Eventually.
RM bills PO for this service. In the case of “Tracked 24” or “Tracked 48” items, an audit trail is required to “prove” delivery (and claim payment). This is why the only update to the system will often be after it’s been handed over / left. There’s no financial benefit to RM in updating anything along the way.
This is why – whatever is said publicly – tracked items are prioritised over untracked (at least in our delivery office).
Not helped by RM being a dinosaur of an operation seemingly operating without any management insight of what’s involved (e.g. we’ve hired extra agency staff to help with the Christmas rush, but as we neither have enough vans nor scanners we’re sending them out in pairs and they take it in turns to deliver items).
You always get the odd slacker, but 90% of my colleagues work really hard in pretty unfavourable physical conditions, for not much money, and hate that we’re letting people down every day. We don’t get much (any?) support from our employers – I’m supposedly on re-hab from a broken bone in my foot, but have been doing 12-15 miles per day this week. A typical round in my office has 720 addresses to deliver to daily, and we’re taking out upwards of 150 parcels on top of that.
On the upside, our customers are mostly lovely and very understanding (the British public is way better than the press would have you believe). But it’s cold, dark and wet for way too much of the time to be fun.
Sorry, this has turned into a rant which has in no way answered your question OP. The bottom line is that RM tracking is only there to enable the company to recoup its costs from PO. As such, the technology is the lowest cost option and all processes are flexibly ignored until the delivery point (which is sacrosanct).
