Suggested brilliant new business strategy, ParcelForce; hire people who can read

Watch out, f**kwits about! How come delivery people tend to be so bad at delivery?

Last year I was invited to an event where the new boss of the Royal Mail was speaking. The whole thing was a waste of money. I had no more idea what the event was about when I left than when I arrived.

The boss in question, being American, managed to spew out an extraordinary volume of dreary jargon in a very short time – which probably impressed whatever committee of deadbeats hired her.

But luck is everything. Like the Bank of England man who looks like a thuggish version of George Clooney, her timing is good.

The growth of internet buying means the ParcelForce part of the business can hardly go wrong.

But this will not be for want of trying.

Like almost all the other firms in this business they are bloody useless and expect the customer to do all the work. I wrote about this four years ago, and as my pieces get recycled, that one produced the following yowl of anguish two days ago

Hello Drayton,

After reading your “For the deaf and hard of hearing” email, I thought you’d like to hear about my recent ParcelForce experience.

My Chinese wife wanted to send 7 pairs of Clarks shoes to a relative in China by air. The package weighed 8kg. The ParcelForce website explains the concept of “Volumetric Weight”. Clearly it would cost more to send a 5kg box of feathers than a 5kg box of steel parts because of the space the former would occupy in the plane’s hold.

I did the calculation and it turned out the 8kg package of shoes had a volumetric weight of 12 kg. But at the post office, even the manager had never heard of volumetric weight, so we were charged for 8kg. She also gave us a ParcelForce booklet of international airfreight charges. There is no mention of volumetric weight; not a word.

So I wrote to ParcelForce to point out the discrepant information and asked which is right, the website or the post office and booklet.

24hr or so after a promisingly swift auto responder acknowledgement, the answer arrived.

“Dear Peter Sharples, Thank you for your email. Unfortunately we are unable to confirm a price via email due to the various services and options you have available when sending an item. The weight and size of parcel plus the contents need to be checked that they are able to travel through the postal network.

Here are some links to our website that you may find useful”.

I wrote back to tell them I hadn’t asked for a price and if the answer to my question was on their website I wouldn’t be writing to them, and I repeated my question.

In due course the answer arrived.

“Dear Peter Sharples

Thank you for your email.

Please accept my apologies for the problems you are experiencing when booking a collection online………………………..”.

I have now written to say I don’t want a collection and to ask if anyone in the organisation can understand my original question.

Being follicly challenged I can’t even tear my hair out, but this abysmal standard of customer service does cause intense frustration.

Peter Sharples.

To be fair, ParcelForce are no worse than nearly all the others.

In the last week we got one message which misspelt my partner’s name. And another with no name on it at all, so we had to guess who in this building the parcel was for.

The reason is that all these people hire on the same principle: pay as little as possible, and to hell with the service – and the customers.

Meanwhile at head office the big bananas sit in their fancy offices calculating their bonuses and honing their jargon.

By the way, why has no banker been prosecuted? And why have the rogues at Barclays been given bigger bonuses when profits are down? On that basis if the whole ramshackle enterprise went broke they’d get a million each.

It doesn’t work that way in my business. How about yours?