Sunday, June 20, 2010

A courier service nightmare

How sure are you of your courier service? A friend of mine was recently caught up with a fiasco with WWW Express- the local affiliate of renowned international courier and logistics provider, DHL Worldwide Express in the Philippines. She was surprised as to how the company dealt with her problem as she was confident with the thought that with DHL’s good reputation in the industry, her parcel will arrive at the destination quickly and well taken cared of.

A lost parcel in transit + bad customer support = A customer’s nightmare

It turned out her fears were brought to life as her parcel containing a Nokia N-series N93 cell phone which she intended to send to her brother in Metro Manila went lost while in transit.

The said item was sent last May 10 but she was informed that her parcel was lost on the 17th?! For reasons there was no way bill number as parcel was not scanned, possibly by one of the staff which may have had a personal interest on the item.

As the story went, my friend called up the said company to follow up her complaint but was met only with words from the staff that only their supervisor is the one that can help her out with her problem. Despite constant follow ups, she was told that she will only receive one email feedback per day as the establishment practices a ‘black and white’ policy. In one of her follow ups, she was even told by the manager that their system was down; hence he failed to update her on the problem.

In a further follow up, she was led on a ping-pong trail as the WWW Express Manila branch claims that the said item was lost in Cebu, while the Cebu branch on the other hand, claims the item was lost in Manila or in transit at the airline. Until now, she still hasn’t received an incident report so she’s still clueless as to what happened to her item.

After a consultation with her family, she made a decision to have the liable company replace the said item instead. Her offer was met with positive response as the manager she talked with gave her assurance that they will replace the said item. However in recent follow ups she was told that the company will not replace the said item but will instead pay her 8,000 Php as this was only the insured amount for her damage claim. Naturally she refused for the market value of her Nokia N93 costs around15,000 to 16,000 Php.

Until the time of this write up, she still hasn’t received a positive result to her problem which led her to resort to blogging in the hope that the proper authorities at WWW Express or DHL will get to see her complaint and shed light on the matter. Somewhere along the lines, there is clearly a system or personnel flaw here that needs to be addressed right away to prevent untoward cases such as hers from happening again to anyone.