Why Courier Companies Are Hated

I got a phone call from a courier company the day after they attempted to deliver a package. No one was home - for one hour. That's when they showed up. The call came from an automated system from the company's 1-800 number announcing that because I wasn't home when the delivery attempt was made, I would have to drive eight and a half miles to get my parcel - and past two retail locations of the store I purchased from.

I was not joyful that the company had called me to tell me that I would have to drive over eight miles now to get a parcel that was at my door earlier today. However, I would have been joyful had they called ahead to tell me a day or two in advance that my parcel would likely be delivered on one of two days. I would have been ecstatic that I didn't have to expend my time and money to retrieve a parcel that the courier company was paid to deliver. Besides, if I have to pick it up, it's not courier anymore - it's mail.

For those that may be unfamiliar with what courier companies do when they are unable to deliver a package, here's how it works. If a parcel is unable to be delivered, it must return to the depot where it is offloaded from the truck and loaded onto another truck to go to a retail location for pickup the next day. There is increased handling, wasted fuel (two trips with same package) and lost time for every parcel that can't be delivered because no one was home.

So, I began to think that if a courier company is able to tell you where your parcel is (tracking), which truck it is on at this moment, the hours that a pick-up location will be open and they already have your phone number to be able to generate the call, why can't they call ahead a day or two to announce when the parcel is likely to be delivered? That way, if I wasn't going to be home, I could make arrangements with a neighbor to accept the parcel for me and leave a note on the door for the courier to deliver next door.

The way I see it, the infrastructure already exists to automate calls so why not improve the delivery rate, reduce lost revenue from additional handling and substantially improve customer satisfaction by calling a day or two before? Any organization can call you to tell you that they didn't deliver. How hard would it really be to re-program the automated phone system to call residential numbers a day or two in advance?

Sometimes, all it takes to provide excellent service is to put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Are you forcing your customers to go out of their way to do business with you? Does your service policy and procedure benefit you or your customers? The answer to that question really is the difference between mediocrity and greatness.