Courier Issues - covid19

[Jonboy]

As mentioned elsewhere my employer have closed up shop for the near future due to the Covid-19 situation.

 

On the day we closed we had around 200 live courier consignments out and about with three of the major networks. 90% of those have gone without a hitch. The other 10% have been a pain in the butt to resolve and i thought i would share the experience in case anyone is expecting deliveries from smaller businesses.

 

The main issue we have experienced is that the courier contact centres have mostly closed without any planning for a situation where they would all do so at the same time. Plenty of resilience planning to roll calls from one to another, but not for a full shutdown of phones across multiple centres. This means we are back to emailing specific dedicated email addresses for certain functions, who are now operating from home.

 

These staff then pick up the requests for redirections, change of address, return to vendor etc etc one at a time and action them with the relevant depot. They are suddenly getting more requests that at Xmas peak.....

 

If you as the receiver use the publicly published contact details, live chats etc you get a different team, who cannot see the requests, until the team we deal with have actioned them, which has been up to five days later in 2 cases this week. I have been called a liar three times this week simply because I have followed the usual email processes (phone being unavailable) and the carriers customer service team are deluged with alterations.
 

If you do make such a request for any alterations or encounter lost or delayed parcels with any seller, big or small please bear in mind it is not business as normal in the back end and stay nice.

[woodenhead]

This won't be the only situation where contacting companies is now difficult.

 

Last night for example Esure shut it's call centres and it was asking for people to only contact via chat if they really had to - I sat in a queue for 50 minutes last night regarding my annual renewal, glad I did as my card had expired and had I not called about multi-car I would not have known the payment card had expired as the renewal notice just said auto renewal would occur.