I DELIVER my accounts to my accountant by hand, usually. But, on Tuesday of last week, I asked my local Post Office branch to send them by Royal Mail’s guaranteed-by-1 p.m.-next-day Special Delivery. Without asking me, the person behind the counter decided to send them by DPD. The saga began.
DPD, it turns out, has an app that allows you to keep a track of your parcel. Instead of sending my envelope 17 miles to the north-east to my accountant, they sent it 20 miles west to Warrington, then 90 miles south to Leicestershire, where it encountered what the app called “a delay at our sortation facility”.
Two days later, DPD messaged to say that the package would be delivered between 18.14 and 19.14, and informed me that “your one-hour timeslot can’t be changed”. The app and website were filled with cute videos of little robots and handy proclamations about diversity and sustainability — but lacked any way for me to point out that accountants worked business hours, so there would be no one there after 5 p.m. Delivery was eventually attempted at 21.20, and DPD helpfully took a photo of the darkened office to prove that they’d been there.
Last Friday, a message arrived just after 6 a.m. to inform me that my parcel would be delivered between 07.37 and 08.37 — before the office opened. Fortunately, this time the driver had an outbreak of common sense and pushed it through the letterbox, genuflecting to DPD rules by claiming that he’d handed the parcel to Michelle (who doesn’t work on Fridays).
I am not alone. A survey last month by Which magazine reveals that one quarter of those who placed an online order encountered at least one problem last Christmas. Parcels arrived later than promised, were damaged being thrown over the garden fence or left out in the rain, despite being small enough to fit through the letterbox. Instructions about safe spaces were ignored, and couriers left parcels with the wrong neighbours. Some £666 million worth of deliveries were stolen from doorsteps, according to new police data.
Under the Consumer Rights Act, if you specify a safe space or give consent for your delivery to be left with a neighbour, and the parcel then disappears, you do not have a right to a refund, Which reports. That said, “it’s the retailer’s responsibility to correct the issue, not the courier’s.” Which has an online tool on its website to help members to complain.
Most of us need more than that. Trapped in the vicious circle of dropdown menus, FAQs, and chatbots, we are victims of algorithms that know no mercy. There is no phone number, no human being, and no obvious route back to sanity. Modern customer service is not just bad: it has been deliberately eliminated. Online firms pitch this as efficiency, but innovation is often just a disguise for indifference. “Your issue is important to us,” they insist, but not important enough to employ staff who can pick up a phone.
Four in ten people who had a delivery problem last Christmas didn’t contact anyone, shrugging that they didn’t think that complaining would achieve anything. “Would you like to ship regularly with DPD?” the courier’s website asks. But if you click on the link, it gives no option to say “No.”