Eloise let’s out a vaguely audible harumph. We have an agreement with our business that she deals with the admin problems, I do all the packaging, it is a very agreeable agreement for both parties. Eloise is normally very good at saving me from more madness inducing problems but this was super tricky.
A lady had bought a lovely Victorian fire screen for £240. We promptly sent this via, for ‘legal reasons,’ an unnamed courier. Well they are all as bad as each other so no point in getting blacklisted!
The customer had already contacted us to say she hadn’t received the package yet. We had got back to her to say that according to the tracking she had received it and indeed the tracking had showed her signature. So organised were the couriers that because she wasn’t in at point of delivery, they had taken a photo of the parcel by her front door.
You guessed it, it wasn’t her front door. In order to chase it up we asked the customer to forward a photograph of her actual front door. It was beyond clear that the door where the photograph was taken with the package bore no resemblance whatsoever to the customer’s front door as she lived in something close to a mansion!
It is always incredibly frustrating when things go missing with the small parcels couriers. Breakages you just price in, they happen. Cost of doing business. They shouldn’t happen of course, it’s really is just down to completely crazy schedules the poor drivers are given such that they just do not have the time to do things properly. Couriers nimbly cover themselves for lost packages but in this case it looked like something criminal had happened and the parcel had been stolen.
It looked like £240 lost. But hang on how come it had been signed for? Had the driver simply thought this package looks nice, it was a big package going to a posh house, and fake the signature and kept it for themselves or was it a more simple explanation.
Eloise put her boxing gloves on in preparation for a fight for an explanation. We were so fortunate though. A lot of customers shrug their shoulders, that’s life and fair enough. We were lucky in that the customer was very tenacious and clearly peed off. I’d be the same. Clearly something had gone wrong and the customer wanted answers.
She went around her neighbours and the care home opposite her house. No luck. She phoned the couriers who kindly passed on the telephone number of the driver concerned. Put on the spot he remembered that he had not actually delivered it to the address on the label but to the care home opposite. Odd she thought, because she had already been to check in on that care home and was told no such package had been delivered.
She contacted Eloise with the conundrum who told her it’s worth going back to check again because some staff are more helpful than others. Long shot I thought. Indeed this proved to be the case, the customer returned and enquired again to a new staff member who took the lady to their storeroom around the back where the parcel was. She said there are lots of other unopened parcels!
The mystery remains of how it ended up there with her signature. It obviously wasn’t her signature but whoever had signed it had just seen her name on the label signed it and for some reason it ended up in the storeroom in a commercial building opposite to her address.
So there was nothing criminal apart from criminal customer service. I can only surmise that she was not in when it was originally delivered and the driver just dropped it off at the care home opposite, in the hope that the customer not receiving the large package would ask the neighbours if they had received it. I’m very sympathetic with these drivers many of whom I get to meet through running our type of business, they are hardworking people and generally frantically behind their set schedule. I wont forget their amazing work and fortitude during Covid.
Yes it was very poor practice on behalf of the driver, but the bottom line is the buck stops with the leadership of the small courier firms who routinely set their drivers such awful punishing schedules. This is clearly one of the many tricks up their sleeve to make it work for them. There’s nothing sinister about it was just a bodge!
The Rights of Fans. 