Guaranteed Delivery

I seem to have been ordering lots of things via the internet lately. In part it’s due to Christmas lurking up but I’ve also been ordering lots of things for the house as well. On the one hand, buying things off the internet is great because I really despise shopping. It really doesn’t have anything going for it: driving into town; trying to park in a car park the size of Bulgaria with spaces the size of a postage stamp; trying to avoid the general awfulness that is other people; useless shop staff; queuing up for stuff and having to lug it back home again: all this and I actually have to pay for the privilege. No, internet shopping can make the whole process bearable but it does have the downside of waiting for the stuff to be delivered.

Home deliveries used to be a nightmare for me. Our old house was stuck out in the middle of nowhere: not in a conurbation of any sort, in an unnamed road; in a postcode which covered several miles and in an old farm building that wasn’t even visible from the road. Other than the postman, I could not guarantee anyone actually finding the place. Any home delivery services we used were a bit of a gamble: some where surprisingly good and could find us without prompting; others would get so far and have to ring us for directions (which is fair enough); others would give up and leave it to one of their colleagues and the absolute worst one failed to deliver four days in a row – eventually, I got sarcastic on the phone to them and asked if it would be easier if I found them. They took me up on the offer and I ended up driving down to their depot in Cumbernauld and discovered that they had no idea of concepts such as Satellite Navigation, Road Maps or Scotland. They did show me their route planner which was a photocopy of some aged and ragged pre-Ordinance Survey map that indicated the whole of Stirlingshire with the words “Here be beasties!”

I would have hoped that the delivery situation would have improved with us having moved back to some sort of civilisation (well we have two Scottish league clubs – OK, one of them is East Stirlingshire so that doesn’t count). We now have a numbered house on a named street and a concise postcode. In fairness, home deliveries have improved but there is a quirk in our road in that the odd numbered houses start two thirds of the way up so we are No 9 but the flat opposite is 218. Also, as there are some new builds on the sites of the old foundries these have their own naming and numbering systems within the main street so it does add to the confusion. The problem I had this week was that the parcel which was being delivered had to be signed for. As I was off work on Monday I paid extra to get a guaranteed delivery date. This could have been at any time from 7am to 9pm (which I thought was a bit steep) but I waited in – nothing arrived. I checked the website of the courier firm, Yodel, and they had a note that a delivery attempt was made but no-one was in and a card was left – it wasn’t and nothing was left. I think it was at this point that my blood began to boil.

I have to say that I had never really heard of Yodel before but on searching for information about them I found a review site that did not make for pretty reading. On looking further it appears to be a monster of a firm that is buying out smaller operators and turning itself into some sort of Royal Mail rivalling behemoth. It looks like this started out as a renaming of the Home Delivery Network (who were pretty useless in the past) and have merged with other operators like DHL (who used to be really good). From what I can tell, they run their network using lurid green vans which then rely on free-lancers to make the final delivery in a similar way to how the Royal Mail relies on blokes with bikes. However, it does seem to be lacking the cohesiveness and consistency of service that the Royal Mail provides. I discovered this when I rang the Edinburgh office to find out what had happened to my parcel. I ended up speaking to someone with a dodgy accent who had never heard of the name “Maxwell” – it’s a pretty common Scottish surname so I am assuming that they weren’t based in Edinburgh. They eventually told me that they would deliver the parcel again on Tuesday. They didn’t.

When I phoned back on Wednesday I was about to reach critical mass. However, I ended up speaking with (what sounded like) an Indian lady who was very helpful and gave me the mobile phone number of a Mr Kelly who is their delivery man. It ended up being the number of a rather nice lady called Kelly. Sure enough it was the mismatched road numbers that threw her and after speaking to her the package arrived half an hour later. In fact, we saw Kelly several times as various purchases arrived. It turned out that she had phoned the head office as soon as she realised she couldn’t find the address and needed to speak to us to confirm the location. For some reason this is not what Yodel recorded. On the whole, I don’t think Yodel has a bad business model and it could complement the Royal Mail, who do daytime deliveries, by having someone with good local knowledge that can deliver parcels in the evening when people are more likely to be home. However, I really think they need to improve their communications. They appear to be laying people off all over the place to make cost savings but getting the job done right first time is the biggest saving of all.

I also had a delivery made to my work address this week. An order I made on Tuesday afternoon with a firm based in London was delivered at my office in Livingston before 9am the next day – I thought that was pretty impressive (the courier was UPS). I also ordered a cable last Friday from a firm offering “guaranteed next day delivery”. It arrived on Wednesday.