Deliver Us From Delivery Errors

I returned home recently to find two packages waiting for me. They had been delivered while I was out. One was something I was expecting. The other was not – it was addressed to someone else. And at a completely different address (except the house number). How did that happen I wondered? I called the courier company. After waiting 15 minutes to get through, the representative listened to the problem and was clearly perplexed as the item had been signed for on the system. Eventually he started “Here’s what I can do for you…” and went on to explain how they could pick it up and deliver it to the right address. Problem solved.

Except that. It caused me inconvenience (e.g. a 20 minute call) for which no apology ever came. Their customer did not receive the service they paid for (the package would now be late). The package was put at risk – I could have kept it and no-one would have known. There was no effort at trying to understand how the error was made. They seem to be too busy for this. It has damaged their reputation – I would certainly not use that delivery firm. It was simply seen as a problem to resolve. Not an opportunity to improve.

The next day, a neighbour came round to hand over a mis-delivered parcel. You guessed it, it was the same courier company who had delivered a separate package that was for us to a neighbour. It’s great our neighbour brought it round. But the company will never hear of that error.

So many learnings from this! If the company was customer-focused they would really want to understand how such errors occur (by carrying out root cause analysis). And they would want to learn from the problems rather than just resolving each one individually. They should take a systemic approach. They should also consider that data they hold on the number of errors (mis-deliveries in this case) is incomplete. Helpful people sort mis-deliveries out for them every day without them even knowing. When they review data on the scale of the problem they should be aware that their data is an underestimate. And as for customer service, I can’t believe I didn’t even get a “sorry for the inconvenience” comment. According to a recent UK survey, 20% of people have had a parcel lost during delivery in the last 12 months. This is, after all, a critical error. Any decent company would want to really understand the issue and put systems in place to try to prevent future issues.

To me, this smacks of a culture of cost-cutting and lack of customer focus. Without a culture of continuous improvement, they will lose ground against their competitors. I have dealt with other courier companies and some of them are really on the ball. Let’s hope their management realises they need to change sooner rather than later…