Almost all yodel drivers are contractors in one form or another. They range from mum in her saloon car doing deliveries between school runs, through one man in a van self employed people to others who own and operate several vans and couriers.
Which courier type you get depends on how much you pay the sending company for the delivery.
Quite simply you get what you pay for. If a company offer free delivery and a rock bottom component price too they aren't going to pay £'s to get your parcel delivered. Many of the parcels the likes of pbk etc send out earn Yodel only a few pence each.
Yodel do all of the following bike related deliveries...
Probikekit
Planet X
Wheelies
Sis nutrition
Wiggle collect from local convenience store orders (collect+)
Yodel were formally DHL domestic but got sold. Yodel as it stands is a mixture of what was the DHL uk domestic parcels business and home delivery network.
Believe it or not, yodel are getting better. They have had a terrible start and have rightly been slaughtered for it but they have new approaches and new standards now when it comes to dealing with poor drivers and bad service. They pro actively monitor every delivery, including signature and gps coding to make sure a parcel was scanned at the delivery address and not elsewhere. All of these systems are automatic and cause a massive amount of back room work but the service is getting better as a result and the right first time performance figures where they rate how much gets dealt with correctly on the first attempt is running somewhere around 99% currently.
If you get a problem with a yodel delivery, do make yourself heard, but not to the driver. Call or visit the depot, ask to speak to the ops manager or service centre manager. They care and are judged directly by customer satisfaction. I read in one of the posts above that a manager delivered the parcel themselves in the evening. This is something that happens daily as they want the service to succeed.
Full disclosure, I'm a manager at yodel. I know the challenges we have had, I know that service has been terrible but I also see and feel the culture changes and know it's getting better.
That said, a bad reputation is hard to lose and rightly it will take a while for people to trust the yodel brand but I do believe it's moving in the right direction.
Happy to answer any questions about yodel procedures you might have.