UPS and annoying your customer
I ordered a new monitor, as I mentioned before. It was shipped via UPS (I had no choice in the matter). Since nobody was ever going to be able to sign for it, and I wasn’t about to let it sit out on the front porch, I called them to have them just hold it and I’d pick it up.
After a long struggle to just get access to a human (keep saying ‘agent’ over and over, even after it tells you they won’t actually help you), they told me that they can’t hold the package until after they’ve failed a delivery attempt. So basically, I’m telling them not to waste resources on delivering, offering to save them money, and they’re telling me that they can’t do that. They must fail. It is imperative to their business model, apparently.
So now, it’s failed delivery, and now I can have them hold it. But, not today. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I can go pick it up, but not tonight. This kind of thing is annoying, and I have experienced it for 3-4 years now with UPS. I can’t imagine I’m the only one, and the only answer is that they simply don’t give a damn about their customer’s experience at the end of the day. Pulling a package off before it goes onto the truck can’t be that hard. If it is, they’ve got a broken system.
This entry was posted at 11:23 am on 30 October 2006 and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
Actually, a friend of mine works for UPS … I don’t remember what department he works for, but he also agrees: do not ship with UPS.
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You CAN talk to humans that can help you, IF you can find the phone number of the UPS shipping facility where you will actually pick it up. I have had great luck talking to those folks. I had a late shipment that I needed the next day. They let me come into the warehouse at 10pm to pick it up. To them it was no big deal. Getting that phone number may be impossible, this was a few years ago so I can’t remember how I got it, but I used it more than once when I was shipping and receiving merchandise every day with UPS.
Maybe it helps if you have a commercial account, but I think if you could talk to the guys at the warehouse, they’d let you pick it up.