Delivery Failure (Parcelforce)

Member Name: pixie1902

Product:	Parcelforce
Date:	17/04/02 (991 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: an eye-opener into just how bad cusotmer service can be...after this everything else will be a delight!

Disadvantages: Parcel wasn't delivered - very disappointing for a parcel delivery company

Yet another tale of woe about Parcelforce (or Parcel Farce - a more accurate description).

My main gripe about this company is their being totally out of touch with the modern world. One Wednesday in March they ambled up the path to our house with a rather large parcel of items I had ordered from a specialist Peter Rabbit shop abroad. As it was a weekday and both my husband and I work full-time there was nobody home. Parcelforce seem to think that we only work on Wednesdays as they left a card to say that they would be back the next day. But we work full-time (as does a large proportion of the adult population) so their jouney the next day would be completely wasted. I tried calling them when I found the card on the Wednesday to save them the trouble of making an unnecessary journey to our house the following day but they were closed by the time I arrived home from work (8.00 pm).

So the following day I had to call them during work time and make alternative arrangements. I was advised to ask my neighbour (who is retired) to stay in all day aand wait for Parcelforce to re-deliver the item. I found this disgraceful. I said that if my neighbour happened to be home when they called, fair enough - ring her bell and ask her if she is happy to accept the parcel for me. But don't expect a third party to plan their whole day around someone else's parcel. The only answer I got was 'Well, isn't that what neighbours are for?' As they refuse to deliver on Saturdays (which would be a much more sensible solution) my alternatives were to either travel to Woking (without a car this would involve several hours of train and bus travel and plenty of additional expense) or to have the parcel delivered to the Post Office (not without an additional fee of 50 pence - it seems that they are determined to penalise people who work full-time). When I asked if the parcel could be delivered to the Post Office as this seemed to be the lesser of th
e two evils, I was told that the computers were all down and I would have to call back tomorrow.

Sometimes when you call Parcelforce you are answered by a recorded message that tells you that everyone is too busy to take your call and that you should try later. At which point the call is terminated with no option of holding being given. Surely when I am paying for the call and making the call in my time (they are paid to answer calls, I am not paid to make calls), I should be the one who decided whether I want to hold or not? Anyone who doesn't want to incur these charges can hang up but after trying more than six times to get through I wish they would just allow me to hold sop that I at least have the feeling that I might be getting somewhere. It is also infuriating that when they are too busy or lazy to take your call that you have to wait to be connected (and start paying for the call) to be told this.

When I finally got through it was arranged that the package would be delivered to the local Post Office but wouldn't be there for another 3 days (just how long does it take a parcel to travel from Woking to Surbiton?). So 3 days later my husband went to the Post Office (ironically he was off work for 2 days as he worked overtime throughout the weekend and so could have been home to accept the parcel there - although it would have meant waiting in all day for them so the Post Office option was more convenient). He went to the Post Office on two consecutive days only to find that the parcel had not been delivered there. In the end the man at the Post Office made a note of our phone number and said he would call us when it arrives to save us a trip to the Post Office every day. After another 2 days there had been no word from the Post Office so I called Parcelforce to be told that the package had been sent back to the US a few hours earlier!

The reason for this happening was apparently that we had made no contact with Parce
lforce to arrange a delivery and so was marked 'not called for' and returned. I explained that I had arranged for it to be sent to the Post Office (fortunately I had made a note of the woman's name when this was arranged and taken a call reference number) and he confirmed that I had called but that I had been advised that the package could not be sent to the Post Office as it was from overseas. Although they had a note of my number (given when I called to make this arrangement) and they also had our address, not once did they think to contact us to let us know that it was not possible to do this. I asked the man if he really thought that after spending $40.00 on postage and even more on the items inside whether I would really just leave them for 3 weeks in the depot and show no interest in them at all?

Unfortuantely he had been trained to read scripts out to complaining passengers and so I was simply bombarded with the text of Pre-determined Answer Number ... which says that for 99.9% of their customers things run smoothly and their parcels are received without any problems (funny that they themselves claim to lose 7% of all parcels so these figures do not add up). This enraged me as I am not interested in the 9 million other parcels they have delivered. If I belong to the 0.1% of the customers for whom things have gone wrong it's 100% disastrous for me. I wasn't waiting for the other 99.9% of the parcels, just mine. And in my opinion based on my experience they failed.

All of this could have been rectified if they would just deliver on Saturdays. Letters and small packets are delivered on Saturdays - why not parcels?

Summary: