On our blog we have mentioned a number of times about the postage options we offer and try to help our customers. This week we have seen a number of emails that have given us the run around and not our fault. Have this little flurry of emails been saved up for the first week of June?

WebShop

This week we are going to give you a little insight to what we are dealing with last week. One of which has cost us a fair chunk of money at the same time.

Context: let us paste a little bit of information from Parcel Force’s (or should we say ‘Parcel Farce’?) own website;

Source: https://www.parcelforce.com/help-and-advice/sending/saturday-parcel-delivery

“A Saturday parcel delivery service is available to the majority of UK destinations for an additional fee of £9.00 per consignment (for non-account customers). Deliveries are typically between 7.00 am and 1 pm.”

Note the word; “typically“. Although you pay for a service it’s not guaranteed by the provider that offers the service in the first place. We can only do what we can within the guidelines that are given to us for the services we offer on their behalf. Reading through many courier and mail delivery companies they say things like, ‘due to covid……’ to explain some of the possible delays.

A few case studies for you, worryingly for us these are genuine cases.

Case 1.

Cause: a customer wanted a set of service parts for his car, nothing special just the usual spark plugs & filters on a newish Mustang (without giving to much away and keeping this customer anonymous). So he orders the parts the day before for a 24hr delivery. We packaged the parts and they left us within a couple of hours as the parts were ordered before the cut of point. The parcel was delivered around noon. The customer was on email hammering us to say it wasn’t good enough as the car was at the garage waiting for the parts! He even tried to get us to give him the parts for free for compensation.

Response: the fact that this was a 24hr service once it leaves us – it’s really not our fault as we use a service in good faith. We called the customer and asked why he didn’t order the parts earlier to make sure this didn’t happen. He had now answer and parts were a couple of hours ‘late’ to the garage.

Result: this customer is just a messer, and never used us before and will not be using us again – “C” button applied. (Remember “C” button is for ‘cancelled’, not anything else as it has been suggested!) 😀

Adam’s response. ‘Please order your parts in good time to avoid this happening in the future. It’s a simple case of common sense and forward planning.’

Case 2.

Cause: a regular customer ordered £300 worth of parts to be delivered next day (Friday). Nothing wrong with that and all was fine. The parts were ordered on time and picked up on time. We then emailed the customer with the tracking number for his reference. Late Friday afternoon we got an email to say the package had not arrived.

Response: the tracking had not entered the system and was technically ‘lost’. We eventually found out that the collection driver was not doing his job and didn’t scan the package at collection from us, even though we had the stub from the label. This means that we could not prove the package was even picked up from us. Parcel force refused to accept responsibility for a) the parcel being lost. b) The driver not doing his job. We could wait 16days to see if the parcel turned up. This is totally unacceptable to us, let alone the customer.

Result: we picked another £300 worth of the same parts to fulfil the order and paid out of our own pocket £35 to have the parts delivered before 9am on a Saturday service as this was clearly not the customers fault. The package turned up 9 am on the following Monday. We again complained to Parcel Force who gave us £14 in compensation and nothing else what so ever. We had an unhappy customer (who fully understands now that it wasn’t our fault). we are down £321 in total due to the Parcel Force driver not doing his job properly. Now we have to stand and watch the Parcel Force drivers scan every parcel before it enters their van to make sure that they are doing their job correctly. That is obviously not a waste of our time!

Case 3.

Cause: (although this labelled as single case, this is comprised of multiple instances of the same thing). Customers have ordered parts for collection ‘next day’. We pick the items from stock, package the orders up and then we store them in our offices ready for their collection. At one point there were double figures of parcels waiting for customer collection.

Response: most of those packages are still sitting in our offices two weeks later. We are now having to move them out from the reception office back into our packaging room as we didn’t have enough room to deal with our other customer’s hospitality, payments and booking in work requests.

Result: if we had delayed sending the parts out for two weeks we are sure the world would have stopped spinning and it would have been our fault. What else can we do? Stopping the collection service would limit the options of customers who want to collect their parts fast, like our trade customers who can get their parts almost on a walk in service.

Case 4.

Cause: customer ordered some parts via a 24hr tracked service, wanted urgently for next day delivery. We got an irate email the next day to say he hadn’t got his parts.

Response: we checked the tracker log and the parcel was ‘attempted delivery’ on time the next day just before 10am. A card was left at the customers address to say that they were unable to leave the package and would attempt delivery the next day. This wasn’t good enough according to the customer.

Result: the customer had gone out shopping and didn’t think the parcel would turn up. Most of the time the system works, as in this case. This customer will not be using us again and “C” button applied.

Case 5.

Cause: customer orders a couple of small parts via Royal Mail to save money and used the second class postage option. Nothing wrong with that and makes good sound sense.

Response: customer emails us a day later to say that the parts had not arrived and we had disgusting customer service.

Result: we checked the automated ordering from the WebShop, the parts were indeed sent second class large parcel. We advised that the parts would be a least a couple of days due to his own choice of delivery option. Customer advised us that he wouldn’t be using us again as a result. The customer is 100% correct in this case – he won’t be using us again because the “C” button has been applied.

Case 6.

Cause: a new customer we have not dealt with before emails that he needs a part urgently.

Response; we tell the customer he can collect it today if he wanted.

Result: the customer arrived within the hour. He left with the part he needed and paid for it within five minutes. No email to say thanks or anything, not that we expected to be fair.

Please can you let us know if we are still unreasonable on our postage options. We listened that standard Royal Mail should be used; so we re-introduced it. We were asked for different courier options; we introduced them. It seems that we just can’t win sometimes which is disappointing for us. What else do we have to do to improve? You tell us.

On a positive note we are proud to say that we have a extremely high satisfaction rate for our customers. Once customers have used us they continue to do so to be fair. Perhaps these Covid lockdowns have affected some people in a negative way more than we thought. 😦

Onto the good stuff……

Customer Cars:

This week the ‘Green Goddess’ has been moved into the ‘panel shop’ for the start of the strip down. We suspect that most of it will be swept up and put into a bin.

Further investigation shows us what we expected to find; a Flintstone powered vehicle!

The rear of the car in the trunk area.

Are we worried? Nahh, considering some of the cars we have had to work on, there is quite a lot to be going on here. Nothing that we haven’t seen many times before.

This little lady will be as good as new. We will have to use a lot of sheet metal panels from our stock of course, but have allowed for that. 😉

Stay Safe & Take Care!