I have never, ever dealt with any above mid-sized company that handles customer service and delivery well. There seems to be a set of standardised industry practices that are completely and utterly customer hostile.
The moment regular company employees stop dealing with customer issues, delivery, etc., and hands it over to "specialists", it's basically a crap shoot whether you can get any issue resolved at all, because the systems they put in place make it nearly impossible.
For example: A courier claims they called at your house and got no answer, even though you were in and they didn't. You call customer services, but they have no way at all to contact the courier and tell them to go back and try again. Even if they're only two minutes down the road. The system deliberately puts a firewall between the reps and the delivery infrastructure, because any kind of ad-hoc action to resolve customer issues interferes with the logistics planning for the day's deliveries.
All the rep can do is rearrange delivery for the subsequent day, whereupon the problem often repeats itself, but this time with a different courier, and a different rep. I had this process repeat several times, over a period of weeks, until simply cancelled an order completely (one worth hundreds of pounds to the vendor).
I do wonder if higher level managers realise that delivery departments are optimising purely to make things easy for themselves, and what that's potentially worth in terms of wasted effort, lost orders and customer hostility. I guess they probably don't care, because it still saves them money on aggregate.
I ordered some circuit boards from Seeedstudio (good and cheap board fab, btw). I paid extra for DHL to get them quicker.
I submitted my boards to Seeed (Shenzhen) October 10. On Oct 16, said they were shipped to DHL. Awesome. Told DHL via their webapp and text messaging that "I do not need signature. Drop at doorstep". 10 boards were a whopping $5. Guaranteed delivery by 19'th, cause thats what I paid extra for.
So what does the fucknut idiot delivery driver do? "Did not deliver because no signature". I was fucking furious. I called their support line, and "we'll try to deliver tomorrow" ~~~ for WHAT? The idiot to say AGAIN that no signature, did not deliver? Uh huh, tell them to get their ass back right now and drop it off. Their claim was "They can only ask". BTW, their systems noted both my previous "I dont need signature" authorization, along with the text message responses saying the same.
Well, it turns out that Twitter is good for other things, like complaining loudly. So I reached out to the 4 contacts linked to DHL, and included my package#. I got one of their US VP's on there. Wouldn'tya know, they had the authority to tell the idiot driver to get back and deliver.
Who knows when I would have gotten my boards. But I certainly know how to bypass 'consumer firewalls'. I brought Seeed into it as well, by mentioning them with DHL. Evidently, squeezing the B2B may have worked, I really don't know.
I have had a similar experience once with UPS. To cut a long story short they really messed up, relabelling someone else's package with my address and this package was payment on delivery, which I paid. Trying to get them to come and pick up the package they relabelled in error and refund me for the payment was an absolute nightmare.
Many calls to the call centre and 2 days later I had enough. No amount of asking to speak to a manager or anyone I spoke to managed to resolve the situation. I found the email address of the CEO of UPS on https://www.ceoemail.com/ and proceeded to write him an email explaining the issue, the effort I have made to try to resolve it as well as the incompetence and inability of the staff to resolve the problem. Note this email was very professional and stuck to the facts, the only emotional bit maybe being me highlighting that I honestly expected better from a company such as UPS.
I did not expect anything to happen honestly. However 15 minutes later I received a reply from him saying it will get taken care of. 20 minutes later the manager of the distribution centre that caused the problem gave me a phone call apologising. 2 hours later a driver came to pick up the parcel and refund me the money I paid in error. I received 2 more calls from the distribution manager and that person provided their personal contact number in case I ever have any issues again.
I personally do not like going the social media route by default. I would only consider it if I have exhausted all other options and am honestly left with no other choice which seems to be the situation you were in and that is completely understandable. Maybe give the CEO email option a try next time as I believe your success was due to someone high up being forced to recognise your issue. If that then fails I would hit the social media option for sure.
I live in France and in the working hours of the delivery guys I'm at work in a different city. I ordered a number of things to my personal address, and the story is typically like: "package delivered" with some strange message from the delivery guy where to find it, or no message at all. Out of the last 3 things I ordered, 2 didn't get to me (I made a claim on Amazon and they reimbursed me, no questions asked - at least), and 1 other was delivered to a shop three streets from my place, and after 2 weeks when no one came to get the thing, a good guy from the shop noticed my phone number on the box and called me.
I try to avoid buying physical stuff in the internet now, way too much stress.
DHL is mostly subcontracted to local companies. Yes, drivers do that when they have a residential address, because they cannot pull the same trick with companies at factory/office hours, they hope it goes unnoticed with individuals.
But I also have a DHL driver doing the opposite: you stay at home all day and nobody rings; then you notice that the parcel is marked as delivered on the website. What? You get outside and you see the parcel was thrown in your yard over the wall/fence/portal. You go back to DHL website and you download the receipt, to discover a beautiful fake signature of yours forged by the driver.
So he just didn't bother to ring the doorbell to save 20 seconds. He saves 20 seconds and you lose several hours waiting for him...
Also, in this subcontracting company, the drivers have very bad equipment, they do not have winter tyres (and we are talking about a mountain area...), they do not have enough large enough vans, so the drivers try to ditch as many parcels as possible in any 'possible' way because otherwise they have no room for pickups...
The driver even showed up one day with a regular compact car... He had to come back.
> But I also have a DHL driver doing the opposite: you stay at home all day and nobody rings; then you notice that the parcel is marked as delivered on the website. What? You get outside and you see the parcel was thrown in your yard over the wall/fence/portal. You go back to DHL website and you download the receipt, to discover a beautiful fake signature of yours forged by the driver.
IN cases like that, I would have a very hard ethical time in pushing that issue of fraud onto the driver. To be honest, I haven't done that... but the thought would definitely cross my mind.
> You go back to DHL website and you download the receipt, to discover a beautiful fake signature of yours forged by the driver.
Depending on carrier, this has hellish consequences for customers who end up having to file loss/damage claims against the carrier. Your signature attests that you received it and it's intact, so when the signature is forged attesting to such, any claims filed are summarily denied.
(Consumers usually get their money back from the shipper as a matter of customer service, but the shipper still eats the loss.)
It also happens in germany. I once talked to a deliery guy from DHL. He told me, he has 3 minutes for a delivery. That's insane. Just one red traffic light and the 3 minute windows is fucked up.
When you call dhl you only get lame exuses. "Maybe you doorbell isn't working?" Sure, DHL, sure.
In the UK we can get our money back if the goods don't make it into your hands. It's up to the seller / courier to prove otherwise although it's usually a battle arguing with them.
Royal Mail delivered a £560 multimeter to the wrong address and to a signature which wasn't mine. Never saw it again. That took a nightmare battle from hell to get sorted.
I actually found that in the UK at least, you get on twitter and call them thieving bastards repetitively until they are fed up with you and just give you the money to shut up :)
Some of the vendors allow you to select the delivery company. I like this.
It's pretty hard to get back to a seller and try to explain him the delivery company he is using is potentially scamming, especially as it only affects me (the receiver), not the shipper.
You don’t need to guess, it’s been documented. Most have impossible schedules. Ugly industry, and it would be costly to make it less ugly. So we all look away.
Amazon lockers are the best thing since sliced bread. They put the ball back in your court to pick it up, when you have time. Removes the stress completely and makes ordering pleasant again.
This kinda thing is extremely good and I'm surprised it hasn't caught on in a bigger way. Many (most?) purchases are made online these days, but when you do so you have to make one of a couple of awkward choices:
1. request a delivery at work, let the receptionists at your office sign for the package and very politely thank them each time (and don't do this too often)
2. place the order to be delivered at your home address, knowing that you won't be there and that you'll have to pick up the "you were out..." slip, and duck out of work and cross town later in the week to the post-office sometime during opening hours and suffer the queues there.
The reason I use the word "awkward" is that I feel like I'm misusing some facilities no matter what I do (expecting a receptionist to handle my packages, or making a postman bring a package all the way to my flat and then all the way back home and fill out forms etc).
> request a delivery at work, let the receptionists at your office sign for the package and very politely thank them each time (and don't do this too often)
Everyone in my office does this, although we don't have a dedicated receptionist and the job normally falls to the office manager instead. It doesn't even cross my mind as a misuse of company resources. Is this something that would be considered inappropriate in other places?
It depends, I think in a larger office it can get a bit out of hand. My previous workplace was a few hundred people and the pile of packages was a little shocking, especially around christmas time. My current workplace the downstairs reception is shared between a number of companies, so they're not even our employees which makes it a bit worse.
It could be that this is all fine and I'm overthinking it - so maybe take what I"m saying with a pinch of salt :-)
As a counter-example: we have a receptionist and a dedicated mailroom which is staffed for full business hours. I do imagine it gets nuts around christmas, but it's essentially an office perk / honestly I'd consider it something that should be expected by default - the alternative is, as mentioned, home delivery when you're not home, which is ridiculously ineffective and has problems with theft.
Fully agree. Unfortunately the lockers are not very popular yet in France. But I've seen a few added in the last months in my area, hope it catches the steam, because it's way better.
The problem though is that most of the time I can not choose the delivery company, and I've only seen La Poste having the lockers.
With the all the home deliveries that people have these days I think it should be mandatory for all new constructed condos etc to have delivery lockers. The item gets delivered to the locker the code is messaged to you retrieve when you get back home.
The current place I am living in has the security gate intercom dial my handphone. So for any package delivery I tell the guy I will open the door for him but I am not at home so to leave the item outside my apartment door.
We have a few Amazon Lockers in Paris and the suburbs. It's awesome. A lot better than the usual "Relais Colis".
Just flash the barcode from the email, and it opens the appropriate locker. It even lets you open multiple ones with a single barcode if you received multiple packages the same day.
I'm curious, is it uncommon to have packages delivered to the mailroom at your place of work? That's what I've done for the last 4 years and I've never had a problem.
It is not uncommon, but at a mid-sized company it is a bit problematic: when the receptionist has to handle private parcels for a couple of individuals, that is OK; but when there are 100-200 employees and they regularly order non-work related stuff at their company address, it becomes a burden on the receptionist, burden that is not part of what the company pays him for.
So :
* small company where everyone takes care of (his own) deliveries: OK.
* smallish company company where there is a receptionist: OK because it does not happen too often.
* middle-sized company: not OK.
* large company with a dedicated mail/parcel/delivery service: I guess it depends on formal work agreements.
-We solved this in a simple manner at a former employer - we just had everybody who wanted something sent to work have it addressed to such-and-such, room 40.
Room 40 was a bench behind the warehouse reception.
Of course, there are potential pitfalls here - say, assuming your colleagues to be honest, for instance - but to the best of my knowledge, we never lost a parcel in years. (Which is more than could be said for anything entering the murky depths of our ERP system...)
At AOL in late 2001 they insisted that employees cease receiving non-work packages at work. The legit concern was the anthrax being mailed to DC area offices. That was also just past "peak AOL" so I was soon freed from this problem, with a decent sverance to boot.
I have found ordering from B&M's via their websites and picking the thing up at the store bypasses this whole problem.
I experienced the receptionist losing track of my stuff once and it was a really uncomfortable situation because, obviously, you're still colleagues and you don't want to get too pushy, but at the same time, where the hell is the stuff I paid for? After that I stopped having stuff delivered to my office.
And anyway you may not want everyone to know what you are buying.
I've rented a mailbox at a private post office for years to do this. It's basically a subcontracted receiving department, and they can deal with parcels from any vendor or courier for me.
Maybe... I've used them three times, I think. Once everything was good, the next time I couldn't retrieve the package because the touchscreen and barcode reader were malfunctioning, and then the third time I got someone else's package and mine vanished into thin air. (I was able to dox the other person and leave their package where they could get it though.) The company where I work has essentially the same thing, and seemingly more reliable, if I'm willing to wait an extra day for it to get through their system.
I almost never have to return anything but the one time I had a defective item I decided to use a locker for the return exchange and it never worked, they were always all full (London, UK) so then I had to end up going to a post office anyway.
It has been my experience that if you order with a credit card and the item is not delivered you will not be charged. I usually let the credit card company handle it to avoid the hassle.
Also being in France, I find that the most reliable and practical way to get something shipped is to use a "point relai" (when delivery at work is out of the picture because of company policies). Delivery services generally know better how to find them and deal with them, since other people use them too.
When your package is damaged, some will even offer to add a note to your delivery, without you asking, in case there's a problem later.
I order very regularly from Amazon, and I think I have never had a single problem receiving packages this way, and it's pretty easy to find one on your way from work or somewhere that suits you.
Some of them are even open on Sunday, depending on what their main business is, very convenient ...
Yes I'm trying to use point relais right now whenever possible. However oftentimes Amazon says to me that the items I want to buy can't be delivered to point relais (probably there are restrictions on size and type of products).
It seems to me that being an expat in Japan is a win win with no downside, as one can enjoy everything that works within their society while avoiding all the social pressures the Japanese suffer.
We are planning a trip soon to investigate our insight.
Haven't been there, but anecdata from my friend who spent 2 years there says yes, but you have to probably work remotely, because Japanese companies are very rigid, hierarchical and conservative - culture clash might be hard and you might be suffocating.
Agreed. But working remotely from Japan can be a great lifestyle if you can pull it off. Almost all of Japan's downsides come from working for traditional Japanese companies.
Isn't the point of the signature to protect them? You can't just say "I don't need a signature, I promise not to sue you." and expect them to just be ok with that, or have I got the wrong end of the stick here?
Why not? You say that with some authority, as if it's well known that this option doesn't exist. Why, then, do all the delivery companies give you the mechanism to waive the signature?
Sure you can. Many offer this option officially. For example, when I've ordered iPhones from Apple, they let me "pre-sign" online before delivery, which means the delivery person will drop it off if I'm not home.
Of course, the tradeoff is that if your package gets stolen, they're no longer responsible for it, which is why I've never actually done this.
Absolutely. If I were ordering bigger ticket items, you can be sure I'd tell them "I want to pick it up at the shipping office".
But in my case/story, it was $5 set of PCBs I had fabricated. Shipping was $20 for what amounted to an ePacket. I took the chance of having someone steal them (unlikely) to tell them to just drop it off at my dorrstep (in reality, a screened in porch).
Yeah, it can be totally reasonable to waive the signature in exchange for assuming liability. Depends on where you live, what you ordered, how you feel that day....
I've done it a lot but I'd be given pause for something worth a thousand bucks. But like, I'm not taking time off of work to sign for a PlayStation game.
I live in a 130,000 person city. UPS will not drop packages off to your neighbor period, even though that is an option on the "Sorry we missed you slip." UPS will not drop package without signature. UPS took 2 weeks to deliver my replacement part for my vacuum. When I see the UPS driver I tell him UPS policy sucks and is anti-city and his response was maybe there were too many packages taken. "I've lived here for 10 years and never had a package taken and this part is $10."
United States Postal Service allows drop offs without signatures and dropping off at neighbors. I constantly request that my packages are not mailed by UPS.
Unfortunately package theft is common. Our neighborhood suffered several thefts and eventually the police put fake packages with GPS trackers into the delivery boxes then waited to see where they went. They ended up in the house of the person who delivered the newspaper..
Happens here in London, UK. Amazon like to leave packages on my doorstep. Stolen every single time. To fix this they appear to have left instructions to "sling it over the back fence" or "jam it in the letterbox and destroy it".
That seems rather risky. I see lots of people rummaging through recycling cans on the street for the recycling value of the cans and bottles. Or someone could just throw a big gross thing on top of it.
I was amazed to learn that the USPS leaves packages on the door step, always. I mean this was a surprise to me because I grew up in the UK where said package would be stolen in short order, and then for the past 20 years living in the US I was in either apartments where there is no doorstep, or out in the wilds where the postman doesn't come within a few miles of your doorstep. I'd never been in a situation where the post office were able to leave a package on my stoop. But now we have an office location in town with a bone fide door step, right on a busy street and they leave packages in plain sight. When I expressed surprise I was told this is standard procedure for the USPS everywhere. I have a security camera pointed at the door step and so far no thief has stepped forward to have their picture taken...
This reminds me of a segment on Top Gear (the BBC TV show for those unaware) in which Jeremy Clarkson is lamenting that having a pickup truck in the UK would result in your belongings in the bed being stolen when stopped.
For what it's worth, I have ordered many online items (100+) over the last several years, and every one has been left on my doorstep by USPS or UPS. The only time I have had a package stolen was during a summer I spent in a notably dangerous area. The rest of the orders were safely delivered, in my case to a college-town apartment or a suburban family home.
Fair enough, but counterpoint: I live in a vintage building on a busy street, and the USPS carriers never leave packages on our doorstep. Each apartment has put up a little sign on their front door indicating how they'd prefer packages left (on the stairs, out back, whatever), which the postal workers all adhere to.
I see them walking past my window, from the front of the building to the back, all the time.
I got dire warnings from my neighbor when I bought my house that package thieves were on the loose (along with warnings about coyotes and heroin addicts). So far the packages have been fine and I haven't seen any coyotes or heroin addicts either, so hopefully my run of good luck continues.
I mean I'm sure all that stuff is going on somewhere, but, irrational as it may be, as long as I personally haven't encountered it I don't feel compelled to take any particular countermeasures.
I would never allow them to leave my package at neighbors house and if they do I would write a note to the support. This is my package and I want it delivered to me. I can't understand what is the problem of rescheduling the delivery for the time that suits me the best. Or scheduling the best time in the first place. Why Japan can do this? Even Japanese Post (not only a courier) allows you to define when you'd like to get your delivery and they deliver even at 21:00. Why other countries can't follow is beyond me.
For most people, it's more convenient to go to their neighbour and collect the package right away than it is to try and reschedule a delivery for some other time.
The bigger and more dense the city, the more hostile and private the neighbors.
I take packages for all my 10 neighbors, they are happy with it, but we live in a civilised city and all our delivery drivers are extremely competent and nice
I have never noticed this in my life. Center City is where neighbors know each other and actually help each other out. The suburbs have always been hostile and anonymous.
I went to college in Minneapolis and I knew all my neighbors and most of the homeless people. When I visit my friends in the suburbs they have no idea who their neighbors are unless there is open hostility. Look at Senator Paul.
I just notice that their is a HUGE bias to bash cities all the time. When you live in a city you actually get to know and live with a wide diversity of people, hence the normal more liberal bias. My father inlaw almost dies inside anytime he visits us and can't ever say anything positive about the city (They live in the country in West Virginia and he is a successful contractor). He thinks everyone is on drugs and lives off of $45,000 for the Government. No one knows how much the working poor works these days and West Virginia's drug problem is 10x that of my city. It's just a anti-city bias.
Wow, yea, some of these responses are crazy! If I had those neighbors I'd GTFO and move to a sane neighborhood. Next time someone accuses me of being a NIMBY because I don't want low cost crack housing built next door to me I'm going to remember this thread.
You ever hear Merle Haggard's "Big City"? It's a classic and the story behind its composition is almost too good to be true. The story goes, he was on tour and his bus driver just lost it at some point and said "I'm tired of this dirty old city! As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather be somewhere in the middle of Montana!" and Merle Haggard was struck with inspiration and wrote the whole song (of which the thing about the dirty old city and Montana is a motif) almost on the spot. Then he supposedly shared the songwriting royalties with the bus driver.
"The song was inspired by a remark by Dean Holloway, Haggard's lifelong friend and tour bus driver. At the end of a packed two-day recording session at Britannia Studios in Los Angeles, Haggard went to the bus to check on Holloway, who had been minding the bus, and asked him how he was doing. Holloway responded, "I hate this place. I'm tired of this dirty old city." Haggard immediately saw inspiration, and began writing the song, based on Holloway's remark, on a nearby pad of paper. "I'm tired of this dirty old city" became the song's first line. Haggard decided that the chorus should include the narrator talking about moving elsewhere, and asked Holloway where he would rather be, to which Holloway responded, "If it were up to me, it'd be somewhere in the middle of damn Montana." "Somewhere in the middle of Montana" became part of the chorus. Haggard rushed back into the studio, where the band was packing up, and told them to unpack their instruments in order to record one last song; the band recorded the song in one take, with no rehearsal.
Haggard credited Holloway as a co-writer, entitling him to half the royalties for the song, which amounted to around half a million dollars for Holloway."
When I was a student I lived in a large student apartment building. Packages were regularly delivered to whoever was walking into the door at that moment or the first doorbell to answer, if the intended recipient was not home.
Then the person who got the package posted on an internal facebook page: "I've got a package for 304 in 605" and they would be collected.
The system worked perfectly and there were a lot of packages, I guess many potentially worth a lot.
Most neighbours round me are also out during the day.
The only 24/7 occupied house is across the road, and it's the local drug-dealing hangout, so that's a nope as they'll either fence the package or try to snort or inject it.
Most of the transient 'residents' wouldn't remember the day of the week, let alone whether they had been gifted a package.
No you have to Opt In. You write a note to leave the package at my neighbor. That is the best option for people living in cities without an Amazon Locker. My grocery store has a UPS locker system for pickup but they don't allow you to send your Amazon packages there.
I suspect this is a combination of delivery services being simultaneously an oligopoly and heavily unionized. The combination of little competition and high wages makes it difficult to justify going the extra mile.
For what it's worth I know at least UPS has a premium service where you can schedule your delivery to a specific time during the day.
The thing is, in Japan it's nothing special. Even post office would do it. More, if you wish they would lleave the package in nearest combini so you can collect on the way back from work. Combini is a convenient store available almost on every corner. It's just their customer service is on a different level. Keeping good reputation is important for them, event if sometimes cost a little bit more.
My biggest beef is that I can't seem to get UPS/Fedex/USPS to just open my front porch door and leave my packages inside anymore. My philosophy is to generally never lock anything if I can help it; if somebody wants to get in and steal my (largely worthless) stuff, all a lock is going to do is mean they kick down my door and then I have to replace the stuff AND the door.
So instead I end up with packages left out in the rain, or slung in the snowbank during a blizzard that I don't find until spring comes...
I can’t remember the last time I’ve signed for a UPS package. When we had a regular driver, back when I was racing bikes, he once said “you’re supposed to sign for this ($10 package), but I’ve dropped thousands of dollars worth of bike parts on your doorstep and you haven’t complained yet.” True, in seventeen years we’ve never had a package stolen from our doorstep here in Redmond, WA.
That said, I work from home on iPhone delivery day. Were I a thief, that would be just way too easy, knowing the day of delivery and an approximation of what the package looks like.
Does no one sign up for UPS My Choice? Very handy. I have them leave packages at the UPS store down the street from me pretty frequently, pre-sign, etc. They do all of the things they don't for you.
I think home package drop off vaults are going to grow in popularity. Getting one at my office to handle late package deliveries was really useful.
Does this usually work with any Twitter account? Even a new one with no followers? Or do you need to have followers or fame or something for the tweet to carry any weight in practice?
There should be a service where you can rent the use of a Russian troll twitter account to make customer service request tweets, taking advantage of its millions of crazy alt-right wing nut job follower parrots who will mindlessly retweet your message and threaten to boycott the company and make death threats and show up with automatic weapons at the offices of the company that didn't give you good customer service. Just mention the customer service rep's name was "Hillary".
I’ve only got a couple hundred followers and rarely tweet and it’s been massively effective a couple of times for me. It helps to work in a popular or trending hashtag for good measure.
Any account. I’ve had good experiences reaching out on Twitter to Comcast, TMO, and airlines. I complained about having a problem, but also was not rude.
I've found that the inverse is true. If you are polite, Royal Mail will ignore you. If you call them thieving bastards, you'll have your refund sorted by the end of the day.
Hard disagree on the 2nd point. It seems that needing to reach out to social media to get normal business processes to work has become the default.
Now I need to actively be registered on N social media sites and harass the company in question until such time as they bother to respond, instead of having just had to connect with the company and directly resolve the issue.
I’ve had similar experiences with delivery companies (UPS seems to be the worst for me) over the years, and sort of just accept now that this happens from time to time. After all, the “fucknut idiot” delivery driver is just a person who can makes mistakes like the rest of us. If they don’t deliver on time, I reach out to customer service and ask for a refund (works well, if you can put up with the hassle of calling)
Making a mistake is getting the house next to yours. You know, making good-faith attempts that are a mistake. This wasn't a mistake. At all.
"Making mistakes" and malicious compliance of literally driving by and not stopping are 2 very different things. Shows up on their GPS they were "there".
I was at the house, sitting on my screened-in porch when DHL 'updated' to "Sorry you didnt sign". First, I said no sig needed. Then they didn't even bother to stop. I WATCHED THEM DRIVE BY. They didn't do their fucking job.
My mom ordered something for me off Amazon, but typed in the wrong address. I walked to that address and they denied receiving any packages. From their support page, they'll call you and you'll be speaking to someone within 20seconds. They sent a replacement without question and without charging (the item was less than $50). Other times, with other issues, they'll ship you a replacement and ask you to keep the original.
I bought an Apple laptop recently. It shipped with Sierra, but I wanted to start with a clean install of High Sierra. After installing stuff I had a suspicion something wasn't compatible with High Sierra and wanted to downgrade. Frustratingly, they removed the download in the App Store. The first person I talked to on the phone walked me through an Internet Recovery--and knew the difference between installing from the Recovery Partition (which is the OS installed, High Sierra) and Internet Recovery (which installs the OS the hardware shipped with, Sierra). That, and the ability to talk me through a series of screens (including partitioning) over the phone is no easy task. The same person called me back 2 hours later to confirm everything finished installing.
I think for most other larger companies, support is a huge expense with little upside. It's cheaper to waste your time then their's. The most cost effective thing to do is hire a small number of very polite people and give them the power to do nothing.
I tried to sell a modem which I had previously purchased through Amazon. The modem came both as a bundle and by itself. I listed it correctly as purchasing the modem only, listed it "like new" (when really it was basically new, not removed from the box). It was actually the lowest price you could get it used.
Someone bought it, shipped it to them faster than necessary. About a week later I got a notice from him saying that he wanted a refund because he had thought that he was getting the bundle (not just the modem as it was listed). Why they thought they were getting the bundle like new for that price is beyond me, but whatever. I rejected the refund because it was their mistake and it would have been too much work to be worth it. Sensible, yeah?
They initiated a claim against my account and Amazon withdrew the money (it was actually great timing - overdraft). The claim said the the item condition was wrong (it was not). You are able to contest any claim like that so I took the time to explain what had happened and why the issue wasn't even about the item's condition. I don't know if they just didn't bother reading it or if all responses are handled with robots because I get a very superficial answer that didn't even acknowledge what had happened. I repeated the process in order to try to talk to another person, wrote up another account of what happened (including the new non response), and got the same kind of non-response (you must list items under the correct condition, blah, blah, blah) from a different rep. Basically, they just didn't bother answering me. I'd already wasted way more time than necessary on what I thought was gonna be a little extra cash, so now some dude in Minnesota got my modem for free, and I got an overdraft for my trouble. That's a cool trick.
Got no clue what's going on over there but I'll never sell anything there again if I can avoid it. Worst customer experience ever.
The day that I became a lifelong Amazon customer was when I mistakenly ordered a mattress to the wrong address via Prime. I noticed the mistake some 28 hours after placing the order. I nearly said that I called them to tell them about my mistake, but that isn't true. I typed in my number online AND THEY CALLED ME when an operator was available. The operator quickly calmed me down and told it was "nothing to worry about". She cancelled the shipment of the mattress going to the wrong side of the US and placed an order for a replacement within 2 minutes of learning about the problem. On top of that, without being asked, she upgraded my replacement to 1 day shipping FOR FREE so that my order would still arrive by the original delivery date.
Since I screwed up in such a ridiculous way, that I would have fully expected to have gotten slammed with a return shipping fee, a shipping fee for the replacement, and even some kind of BS replacement fee. But Amazon took the bullet and provided me the the best customer service I ever could have hoped for, which prevented me from having to sleep on the ground for even one extra night.
> Sellers just have to assume a 10% loss of gross margin due to issues like this. It's not the end of the world, but that's where the cost is.
This explains why individuals selling individual items, or a small number of items, can get so burned too. You need sufficient volume to cover all the inevitable bullets you have to swallow.
>Sellers just have to assume a 10% loss of gross margin due to issues like this. It's not the end of the world, but that's where the cost is.
Cost of doing business. Reminds me of the book "What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars" where Jim Paul describes how someone trading in lumber doesn't cry about 20% of the wood being useless, he knows 20% will be useless and he writes that up under cost of doing business. Just like refunds and customer support are a cost of doing business.
Amazon support is absolutely terrible. Amazon seller support is even worse.
I mean, the worst. Only matched by health insurance companies.
The huge problem with Amazon support is everyone I've ever interacted with (besides that one time I got forwarded to a supervisor) either have a fundamental lack an understanding of the English language or lack reading comprehension (or listening if phone support). They also won't or can't spend any significant time on any one customer inquiry, they need to move onto the next.
On the buyers side they understand how to refund an order which they do readily, ship items, say you can keep items that are errors, maybe some account stuff, and that's basically it. If you need them to do anything else that requires them to understand your inquiry it's an uphill battle.
Basically, you get terrible support if your inquiry can't be solved by quickly pressing the "refund" button or the "ship item" button. I guess most buyers usually only need those two buttons though.
I actually think that's part of why they have such a big problem with counterfeits (and other issues). If someone complains about a counterfeit some low paid employee who doesn't really understand the problem just presses "refund order," the customer stops complaining, and the systemic issues remain.
I have a nightmare Amazon seller support story, but I won't go into it for fear of spiking my blood pressure to dangerous levels. It was only resolved by me finally getting forwarded to a supervisor, who, finally, understood English.
Yeah, that's absolutely the problem they have. One time I ordered some road bike tires. Amazon sent mountain bike tires by the same manufacturer. I told Amazon. They sent me two more of the wrong tires. I told Amazon. They sent me two more of the wrong tires. I gave up. They don't read anything you write to them, they just either send you something or give you your money back.
I guess most people value money over anything else, but if I take the time to help them correct their inventory problem, it would at least be nice if they fixed it.
Very similar thing happened to me about 12 years ago.
I ordered some glassware, very fragile. It was packaged incorrectly, basically shoved in too big of a box with no padding or anything. Or if there was padding it was very, very minimal. It arrived broken, of course. It would have been nothing short of a miracle if glassware survived that packaging.
Told Amazon the item broken due to poor/incorrect packaging. They sent another packaged identically, broken.
Told Amazon, same thing, they sent another packaged identically, broken.
I tried one more time begging them to package it correctly and got another packaged identically, broken.
I just gave up and decided I didn't really need it, got a refund, and continued to drink out of dollar store plastic cups. There was absolutely no getting through to them what they problem was. I ended up feeling defeated with 4 sets of broken glasses.
Another "they don't read anything you write to them" story... Several years ago I sold a memory card via FBA. The buyer returned the card, they said they were returning it because of a defect, they said "card slows down significantly after it gets half full." Amazon's wearhouse receives the return, they mark it as sellable, and then sell it (as new) again!! Clearly its not new, the problem was evident only from using it! The new buyer didn't complain or ask for a refund, thankfully for me, but the card might have been commingled (I don't recall) so another seller might have been dinged if Amazon shipped out the used card to their buyer.
If the return reason is "defective," why would mark as sellable ever be possible?
>If the return reason is "defective," why would mark as sellable ever be possible?
Because customers don't always tell the truth, as in your perception of truth might be different from my perception of truth, meaning what's considered defective to you might be perfectly acceptable to me and to other customers.
That's my experience as well. As long as all you want is return faulty/not-needed-after-all articles then Amazon is great. Never ever had a hiccup in 10 years and I order a lot of stuff.
However if your request is a little more specific and doesn't fit neatly in whatever scripts they're using then it's a bit of a mess. I mainly use amazon.fr so I've interacted with the french support but like you they had a rather thick accent and seemed to have trouble understanding me at times even though I did my best to speak slowly and clearly. In the end I could see that they kept reverting to the script and where a bit lost when I tried to steer things away from it.
I just wanted to complain about a transporter who kept failing to deliver my parcels so it wasn't a big deal but I think it would've been pretty difficult to interact with this (nonetheless very kind) person if I had something a little trickier and more important to figure out with them.
> I've interacted with the french support but like you they had a rather thick accent and seemed to have trouble understanding me at times even though I did my best to speak slowly and clearly.
That's the one advantage of living in a tiny country (the Netherlands) that speaks a language hardly anyone else does. It's impossible to outsource customer support to low-wages countries because you simply can't find anyone there who speaks Dutch.
There are lots of low-wage Afrikaans speakers, and Wikipedia says there "is a large degree of mutual intelligibility between" Dutch and Afrikaans. So there must be some other explanation for why you get native Dutch speakers for customer support?
Afrikaans is not similar enough for customer support roles. If you hear Afrikaans as a Dutch person you can sort of get the meaning of what they are saying if they speak slow enough, but it's not like it's just a dialect.
It's a bit like the difference between English and Jamaican Creole.
Actually there are companies doing that type of outsourcing in Serbia. Wages there are still low and they have enough employees who can speak even the smaller European languages.
I think the main industry there is tourism. If there are any Dutch speaking callcenters there they aren't very common, I've never encountered it in real life (you'd instantly notice by the accent).
I don't doubt you're right about the "anything but basic refund/reship is a nightmare", but I think the reason people are praising Amazon (and I would too) is that most other companies (big OR small) don't even do that, even though it resolves like 90+% of the customer support issues and leaves happy customers behind.
As for sellers, yes, it's obvious they're getting screwed.
>I actually think that's part of why they have such a big problem with counterfeits. If someone complains about a counterfeit some low paid employee who doesn't really understand the problem just presses "refund order," the customer stops complaining, and the systemic issues remain.
I really don't understand why individual people try to sell small items through Amazon or eBay anymore. The chance of getting cheated is just so high that unless you're a high-volume seller making a business out of it the risk/reward ratio just doesn't make sense. Better to sell for cash on Craigslist or Nextdoor (with the transaction done in the police station parking lot for safety).
> everyone I've ever interacted with either have a fundamental lack an understanding of the English language or lack reading comprehension (or listening if phone support)
The place is staffed by Indians, what did you expect? Have you ever spoken to someone in a NOC?
Probably my worst experience was with Amazon. Ordered a big sofa sized furniture. Got wrong color which was cheaper. Asked them to adjust the price since I didnt want to go through the hassle of shipping it back. No. The guy just said "we dont price match, you can sent it back and order again". Not even a sorry. I got so frustrated at his response, it ruined my day. Tried twice more with similar response. I sent it back, ordered again (at a lower price than my original order).
In Amazon's defence, this items price was dropping heavily during that period. But I wasnt asking them to give me new price.
Because of this incident plus Amazon taking 4-5 days to just start shipping and the news about fake goods, Amazon is no longer my first preference.
I ordered a small item 5 dollars item came was different tried to refund but wanted me to pay to ship back the product which costs more than the product. I gave up.
For me, Amazon by far has been the worst. Closing my account for buying too many things (and inevitably returning a tiny fraction of them because they were fake/shitty quality as most Amazon products) is the most insane thing I've ever experienced. This while I was paying for Prime. The only thing they didn't do is threaten to sue me, but stealing my membership fee is pretty on par with that.
Only if everything goes into the two categories: 1.) send again 2.) reimburse/take back
Everything else doesn't work at all.
I had a phone from Amazon, empty box delivered, they had no way to stop the contract, weeks of pain, my threat getting the police involved solved the problem.
Amazon Logistics didn't deliver important stuff with evening express several times, Amazon did nothing.
One time they tried to deliver an order at 10pm (!). And I had a 10-minute discussion with support who told me it was deliver 10am until they reread the entry and agreed it was 10:07pm - at an office address.
Support stuff lied to me and put lies in their support system.
I recently received an empty box from Amazon. No more than 5 minutes with their online support and they had created a new order to re-send the item with their fastest shipping option. Easiest customer support experience I've ever had honestly.
>I have. Amazon. Over 15 years now and flawless every time.
Wow, I have a completely different experience. I had been a Prime member up until about 2 years ago when my last 10 out of 10 deliveries arrived late. Since I noticed Amazon wasn't really competitive with other sellers on E-Bay, etc, I only used them when I actually needed something fast. So, moral of the story is I paid more for something to get it sooner, and it still didn't help.
Amazon is generally only competitive on big ticket items that you'd get free shipping on anyway. So I found Prime to be worthless.
I cancelled my prime account after a string of issues, the worst of which I’ll summarize.
I bought a $1300 camera, received a $500 camera. Easy error, easy fix. I wish.
I had to call twice to initiate the return, call twice more to find out why a moth later I had neither a camera nor my money. Turns out the return was silently rejected. Why? “Wrong item returned.” No kidding! Had to call a fifth time to finally get this resolved, but at the end of that call I realized I was paying amazing $100 annually to fix issues that they caused.
I’ve mostly had good experiences, but once I had a battery charger fail and destroy some batteries. I spent over an hour on the phone while the CSR tried (and failed) to look up how voltage worked so they could blame the failure on me instead of just sending me the $60 order again. Just gave up after ~90 minutes.
Amazon contract deliveries to organisations like Yodel, who you can't contact directly and have exactly the same problems with failing to deliver or chucking parcels over the fence etc.
Everytime I see my package is being delivered by Yodel I just sighs, they always find a way to fuck up an order.
But to be fair, it seems like Amazon, are no longer working with Yodel, I have not seen any item I have from bought from Amazon.co.uk to be delivered by Yodel for at least two years.
Yep. Other replies about bad selling experiences notwithstanding, as a buyer, Amazon's experiences are mechanically great. They might sacrifice a seller on an altar every week, and that would be sad, but it makes your statement no less true.
I have years of free Prime because my 2 day orders never come in 2 days. At least they give you something when they mess up, but they do mess up a lot.
customer service, sure. but delivery.... eh. A few weeks ago my brother ordered a tripod and got a toilet instead. Someone I follow on Twitter ordered an Xbox and got.... Capri Suns[1].
Waiting at home specifically for stuff to be delivered or picked up is insane. Let me pick it up and send it at the post office. Or at some other convenient nearby location (supermarkets are getting popular for this, although I recently had to pick something up at a paint store(?)).
Standard Dutch mail often leaves undeliverable packages with neighbours, which is great when you live in a good neighbourhood with good neighbours who are home a lot, and perhaps not so great when you don't.
But skipping work for this is stupid and unreasonable.
This is how it works in Sweden, where all post offices are now integrated with grocery stores. I’m not even sure the typical package above a certain size has the possibility to go to your doorstep, it basically just goes to the nearest supermarket.
The best seems to be to hand off the hard parts to smaller organisations and allow you to talk to those organisations (technically, the local delivery driver likely is a contractor, but you don't have a direct line or relationship with them).
E.g. when getting warranty repairs for my Thinkpad, dealing with the central Lenovo organisation wasn't great, but once they accepted "customer device has an issue" they pass it off to local service partner, and those (in my experience) deal with issues quite well. And if you don't have on-site support, some repair places take your device and handle the warranty communication for you (and have an established relationship with Lenovo making that easier). Probably not the cheapest possible setup for them though.
Much as I like Apple I'm not sure they handle the situation described better than any competitor:
> "A courier claims they called at your house and got no answer, even though you were in and they didn't. You call customer services, but they have no way at all to contact the courier and tell them to go back and try again. Even if they're only two minutes down the road. The system deliberately puts a firewall between the reps and the delivery infrastructure, because any kind of ad-hoc action to resolve customer issues interferes with the logistics planning for the day's deliveries."
If UPS claims they knocked and you didn't answer there's nothing more Apple can do than to tell you to wait for tomorrow.
Their customer service is genuinely great - but the firewall definitely exists between the shipper and the deliverer.
I think any large company works and coordinates with another large company if it's advantageous to them. Amazon works closely with USPS to drop items as close and convenient for USPS. Netflix famously worked with USPS on their DVD envelope design and I believe they even upgraded many USPS sorting machines because it was in their business interest.
I would believe Apple does the same (there's a sibling thread where UPS said they'd swing back by their house in 15m after missing a delivery of an Apple product--may be a coincidence, though).
It's funny, because I actually had this happen exactly once. I had ordered an iPhone 3G for delivery on the first day of its availiability. I was out of the house and rushing back to meet the UPS guy, but missed him. Very disappointed, I called UPS and they said "ok, he will swing back around in 15 minutes, does that work?" I remember being astonished, because as you point out, this never happens. I chalked it up to Apple putting pressure on UPS to deliver all the phones that day. Maybe even providing monetary rewards if over x% of the phones were delivered that day?
UPS has been good to me in that regard. I once had a package that needed signature that I wasn't home for. He left the slip on my door. About six hour or so later, towards the end of the driver's shift, he was driving by my house again while I was getting home. He saw a car pull into my driveway so he stopped and brought out the package and gave it to me while I was getting out of the car. Said "I tried to deliver this earlier and nobody was home." Very nice of him to 1) remember and 2) actually care.
I have an aquatintance who works at UPS and loves it. YMMV though.
This is not fully true. Amazon used DHL with me once - they didn't deliver because of a code/gate thing I used to live at. I called Amazon and they got the DHL DRIVER on the phone - me, Amazon customer support, DHL Driver on a single phone call. Amazon CS fucking rocks sometimes. So yes, there are companies that can go the extra mile and seriously dial up the heat on the delivery company.
I think the best CS will call and deal with shipping issues. Crappy companies will have none of that.
Amazon and Apple are the two biggest companies I can think of that does awesome CS, and that's because they do it in-house and they rely on consumer lock-in. If an Apple fanboy or an Amazon Prime member have a super-bad experience, they will leave and get locked in somewhere else.
Weirdly I have found Amazons support good right up until I tried to exchange a Kindle Paperwhite.
I’ve returned a fair amount of things to amazon. I had previously even received actual incorrect products in the packaging of the product I ordered (someone probably returned them to amazon as a scam) and I was able to return them without question. Easy peasy.
When I tried to return a Kindle Paperwhite that froze up every couple hours however that was a different story. I wasn’t allowed to just return it, I had to talk to support.
First call they had me powercycle it and told me to call back if it froze again. It did. I had done this myself to get it unfrozen many times.
Second call they had me factory reset it and call back if it froze again. It did. I had already done this myself.
Third call they ask “is it frozen right now?” It wasn’t. They tell me to call back when it is frozen.
Fourth call, I have it frozen, they ask me what I see and tell me to tap things to which I explain I cannot, it’s frozen! They then have me power cycle it and try to insist that that fixed the issue. I explain no, I have had this happen like 40 times now. I explain the process I’ve been through with support.
Finally they agree to give me a return authorization!
What is happening is that they are telling you to restart it and to call back later because that's there main goal, to get you off the phone asap in any way possible. Most of the time you get the "authorization" when the call center is not as busy and the rep is allowed to take time (with you on hold) to fill out the return info and follow through with what they should have done during the first call.
I wouldn't get angry at the rep, it's the managers that pressure this kind of behavior in full force, if it's busy and you are on the phone for more then 4 mins, a manger comes over and stands behind you and tells you what to say to end the call even if it doesn't make sense and guaranties the customer has to call back...
To get the best level of service you have to call when it's not so busy. Never call on a Monday or early in the morning, that's when it's the most busy. Slow times are Wed-Fri 1:30pm to about 6pm then anytime after 10pm. Sundays are a good bet if the place is open, although usually most of the reps that work on the weekend are new/less skilled hence prone to make more mistakes.
I've addressed nearly every gripe in this thread by getting a mailbox at a local UPS store. Sure, it's inconvenient and some extra money each month, but I never have packages stolen and there's always a signature available.
The most annoying part is when I deal with someone who makes it hard to deliver to a different address than my home (looking at you, Verizon) but it's always achievable.
Apple does it great. You get accurate (usually with any errors in favour of pessimism) estimates of lead times and delivery dates, and with AppleCare servicing or replacement of items has always gone super-smooth for me.
Mostly I'd agree with you, but milage varies. I for one have never had anything but stellar support from Apple, but I know people who've had nothing but struggles. GitHub has the best support I've ever encountered, both as a typical customer and as an enterprise customer – they put everyone else to shame in my book. But again, I hear stories from others who've experienced otherwise.
Courier services as you mention though seem to have terrible service across the board. It doesn't matter if they are big or small, this seems to be some sort of hard rule almost.
Honestly, a lot of the CS/delivery issues are somewhat dependent upon the consumer market that the company targets. Some communities are very word-of-mouth and reputation based. One of the ones I'm involved in is the firearm community, which is very much that way. Places that have bad CS or delivery issues get lambasted and are very affected by said issues, and those that go out of their way to help and assist their customers are hoisted far above.
I've been trying to buy a Herman Miller desk for the past few months. It's a quagmire and I'm still table-less. You'd think a two thousand dollar table would come with some customer service.
Overstock.com has excellent customer service. We order a lot from them and when something arrives damaged or with missing parts, they always have handled it quickly.
The thing is most couriers have orders to do it like this to go faster, even though it is not assumed publicly.
So if it happened one time with a company, it will probably go on.
After a lengthy lengthy process, I recently only got things moving forward with UPS, after emailing the CEO directly (found the email online, and briefly listed the situation). Soon after I got two calls, and it was fixed relatively fast (still had to follow up twice...).
> what that's potentially worth in terms of wasted effort, lost orders and customer hostility.
I agree with all of the above but wanted to underline this. Because it snowballs so much. First call they explain the problem. Second call they explain how they explained the problem to someone before, how instead they understood X and did Y. Third call... and so on. Add to that long waiting times and it compounds even more.
I did work in customer service and while I loved the people I talked to for the most part, it was really obvious that they were so nice to me because I was simply 100% frank, which was unexpected for them. And it was kinda heartbreaking how many thanked me just for listening, and not deflecting any blame, or just pointing to the EULA or whatever, but treating them like a normal person -- even though I really couldn't fix their problem, just agree that it sucks and wish them a nice day and mean it. I always tried but in many cases there was just nothing I could do except tell them all I know, and how sure I am about it. The bar was so incredibly low. When I offered people to call them back to follow up on a problem, they always were surprised when I actually did. Officially, I would have to ask permission for every outbound call, but I simply decided that that would just make it take even longer in total, so I did that once. I just made sure I was there to solve problems not chit chat, and then did what I considered necessary, not what people who didn't even talk with customers thought might be good. And when calling other departments, I also encountered people who said "you know, officially it would be X, but I think I can fix this", and they did. But it was a total crap shoot, sometimes they just made it worse or said they'd do something end then not do anything.
Once I told a coach that if the bread he eats were made as sloppily as he had suggested to me I should handle a specific problem (that is, hand it off in exactly the same way that happened 3 times before, knowing it would resolve nothing but make it someone else's problem), he would be dead in 3 months. He threw a fit and dragged me to my team leader, who had my back - a month later I hear I have a "solution rate" (some customers were asked after the call to rate friendliness etc. and if their problem was solved) of 66%, twice above the average. You might say I had ignored "orders" because I considered them bad, and my results had proven me correct. It didn't change anything about the process, but it did give me leg room if you will. At the end of the day I did the job the way I did it because I thought, if I'm going to be a drone for shitty pay, at least I want to be able to sleep at night, right? The job simply wasn't worth squirming and lying all day when I could try to make a little difference at least to that one person who had to ask me for assistance after some awfully long waiting period. But it ended up being fun and meaningful I wouldn't have imagined beforehand, and if I had just followed official suggestions and marketing materials, it would have turned out so differently, I would have learned nothing and it would have just been this shitty job I once had.
I don't believe it saves money. Maybe in the short term for the one company or a few execs in it or their shareholders, but in aggregate, it's just a waste. Call centers should simply fulfill some standards for the work and then get paid by the hour, not by call. That's all it would take, people who are in this job would mostly prefer being able to make a good job. During breaks we always used to share stories about customers on some freakish odyssey because of fucking $company. I'm sure there's also people who enjoy what little power they have over helpless callers, but if the incentives were aligned properly, they'd be gone before you can say "welcome to X, my name is Y, how can I help you?" :P
Most complaints I heard from customers, aside long waiting times, unfriendly treatment or outright incompetence, were that they didn't get feedback and had no single point of contact. Like, one person at the company who is assigned with following up on that problem until it's fixed. How would that not be flat out better? It takes 30 seconds to try to reach a customer. Just do that until you reach them, or you see something in their file indicating they called on their own and the issue is solved. Have a mechanism in place for sickness, quitting the job etc, done? Why is that hard? How is the current way better in any shape or form? If I've ever seen anything ripe for disruption, it's call centers. Talk about pain.
Yeah, call centres are especially disastrous. The whole thing is just set up to be bad because the employees are deskilled and disempowered but trying to fix cases where the automation has failed.
> some sites experience levels of failure demand, that is to say calls generated due to a prior failure to serve, over 50% of the total inbound calls.
Yeah, that sounds familiar. And the worst part is, as call centers get paid for call volume (and quality, but measuring quality except by the most shallow and misguided metrics would cost money to employ additional real people so it's avoided), it's kind of in their best interest to just have customers call over and over again. I always wondered about the kind of mutually parasitic relationship between call centers and companies that outsource to them, maybe that's really the whole problem, maybe it should be done in-house, period. If you have a big house and that makes it hard, boo-hoo. Make a smaller house, or learn to hack hard things.
> Our first anti-pattern is queueing. Call centres essentially all work on the basis of oversubscription and queueing. On the assumption that some percentage of calls will go away, they save on staff by queueing calls. This is not the only way to deal with peaks in demand, though – for example, rather than holding calls, there is no good technical reason why you couldn’t instead have a call-back architecture, scheduling a call back sometime in the future.
I used to fantasize about this. First off, you can't turn off caller ID for this, but that's fair I think. So you call the hotline, it tells you in what place in the queue you are, and that you can either hold the line or get called back when you are very close to being the next in line. You can call anytime to have an update on your queue position and wait, and if you miss the call (since it would be automatic and there would be no person waiting on the other end just yet, no harm in letting it ring for as long as possible), you're back to square one. Why isn't it already done this or a similar way? Surely such systems exist, even if not (yet) widely used?
Why not allow pressing numbers to change the music as you wait? And last, but not least: how hard is it to loop something properly? (I swear, some of that has to be on purpose, sadism is a better fitting explanation than incompetence.)
> Worse, companies are always tempted to impose on you while you wait – playing music on hold (does anybody actually like this?), or worse, nagging you about using the web site. We will see later on that this is especially pointless and stupid.
Well, they really really want you to use the website. For a lot of "they"'s. Not that they can manage to run that well, either, but it's still cheaper and "scales better". I agree it's stupid, I detested it not because of job security but because I hated the lame website and how pointless it was to try to make any suggestions "above my pay grade", but in their mind, there is a point, it's not just filler.
> But the big issue is management, and I think expectations. People expect the experience to be terrible. People expect the job to be status-reducing and generally horrible. People expect that because it’s a cost-centre, there’s no way to improve it other than flogging the slaves harder.
Yes. I was lucky in that I found a way to not reduce my status, but actually learn a lot about myself and people, but that's generally the pattern I saw.
Agreed with everything said here, I think the worst thing above all is that most call centers are outsourced and get paid by the amount of inbound calls taken per hour and hold time metrics. It like solved solutions are not even part of the equation at all, like it's not even in their game plan.
All the managers at these places are pretty uneducated and if you are working in the tech field, you are working with a bunch of people that know nothing about tech getting paid minimum wage, as anyone with the required skills is going to command a higher wage...
They belittle you by requiring you to ask permission to go to the washroom and to go on a 15 min break, which is bad enough, but what makes it worse is that usually the answer was "no, after your next call, ask me again". So it was normal to never get a break at some of these places. Although when they declined my requests to go to the washroom several times, I just said fuck it and went when I wanted.... and this is in Canada here....
The idea of assigning people to specific cases is one of the only ways to get something done right or at least know all the steps that were actually completed. Sadly most places didn't work that way as they "had" to squeeze in that extra call per hour. I'd regularly get in trouble for calling customers back, which to me is umm doing my job sufficiently.
I've found working for the company directly is much better then working for a 3rd party company. In those cases they care more about level of customer satisfaction. Out of all the major corps I've worked for Telus was adequate and Bell was the horrible.
having worked for many large companies in call centers I'll tell you why this happens,
In the call center, when you call in, our number one goal is to get you off the phone ASAP. Every major corp I've worked for never had a way to tell the status of the delivery via their in house software. In times like this we check the notes to see when the last time you called and just keep telling you to wait longer, say "it's sent" even though we have no way of knowing this, we are told flatout to lie.
The major reason is that delivery is outsourced to another company, who then themselves outsources it again to other drivers who will work for the least amount of money possible. So there is no direct way of contacting them or even knowing which sub company is doing the delivery.
All the managers are concerned about is you taking the next call. I have gotten in trouble multiple times for going out of my way to make sure the customer got everything completed properly. Soon as the customer hangs up your headset automatically takes another call, so you don't have time to fill out extra paper work to get what the customer actually needs completed cause you are told to do that "On your own time" and since you get paid minimum wage you don't give a shit if things get done or not due to the poisoned environment.
Now say a real incident happens where you must call the delivery driver, it CAN be done, just that they never tell the employees that because it takes "too long". Basically you call the 3rd party delivery company and tell them what's up and then it's their job to relay the message (if they even know who is doing the delivery!) So only under special circumstances can that be done.
No one cares about wasted effort or customer satisfaction, as long the hold times are low and they can employ the minimal amount of workers then they are doing there jobs...
Another thing, when you cancel your account and the company owes you money, you tell the customer 6-8 weeks to receive the refund. Now if the customer gets really angry and makes a big deal about it, then there is a little button we click on the screen that mails out the refund to the customer the next day! So why do they do that? because of all the interest they make with your money sitting longer in their bank account. This company had 3 internal accounts that had ~2 Million dollars in each of them, filled with customers money just waiting around to be sent out when the automated timer printed out a batch...
All the corporations I've worked for all operated like this, whether I was paid minimum wage or a decent 20$ an hour. I've only worked at one place where they genuinely cared about the customer, but it was small enough in that you had direct communication to everyone, but that place closed cause customer service costs too much money...
Why are you calling Company customer service for Courier problems? Yes, they'll try to help, but a CS rep at Nintendo (or any employee, for that matter) isn't going to be able to do anything to get FedEx back to your house when they've already left.
And can you imagine the logistics nightmare of multiple delivery attempts to the same address on the same day? For every courier that says they called when they didn't, there are people who will go shopping and come back at 3pm to see the slip, then call and complain.
I've had it happen to me where I'm sitting 4 feet away from my front door and I go out to find a slip on the door when they never knocked or rang the bell, but it's unreasonable to expect them to turn around and bring it back, just as it's unreasonable to think that maybe I just didn't hear it even though I was right there.
Some will point out (and some have!) that I could have quite easily saved myself a lot of time, hassle, and lost earnings at this point by just quietly holding on to the extra Switch and saying nothing to Nintendo about it. It certainly would have saved me a lot of stress, but it was morally not something I’d ever consider.
That's his mistake right there. He was under no moral obligation to fix Nintendo's mistake for them. Nintendo had made a string of mistakes up to this point, and one of their mistakes was in his favor.
If you truly have a guilty conscience, then just throw the extra package out, because it is abandoned property.
I've had this happen occasionally. Just know that you are not responsible for stuff like this. My Dad had a similar experience, where spent weeks trying to get a company to honor a warranty, and in the end they sent him two replacement hard drives instead of one. I actually interpret this as a kind of karma. Sometimes good things land in your lap, don't reject them.
> That's his mistake right there. He was under no moral obligation to fix Nintendo's mistake for them......If you truly have a guilty conscience, then just throw the extra package out, because it is abandoned property.
Do you really want to live in a world where everyone does this?
Imagine you are a small start-up where every penny counts and make the odd mistake here and there and people take advantage of that, destroying you.
Or imagine people are kind and help point out your mistake and give back your ~$500 device.
You get to decide which world you live in, because you are creating it.
I think this kind of thing really does depend on whether you're dealing with a small startup or even an individual human that you're screwing over, or a giant implacable machine like a multinational corporation.
There's no obligation to be nice to the machine, it can't recognise it, and it won't be grateful to you.
+1. The machine analogy is excellent. You have moral obligation to humans. You may decide to have moral obligation to society if you like the one your in and want it to grow. But you have zero obligation toward a souless entity. It's a robot. Optimized for profiting from a service it failed to perform adequatly.
Agree on the moral obligation to humans, but think it's best to keep the focus on not having a moral obligation to corporations (beyond T&Cs or contracts you willingly consent to). Not that you're wrong with the "souless robot" concept, but with the advances in AI, I wouldn't the first one to play out like Chappie.
"Why you humans do this? Why you all lie?" - Chappie
Have you seen "the good place" ? There is a hilarious part where "janet", their omnipotent and omniscient anthropomorphic IA - with basically no concept of suffering - triggers a defense mechanism where she pretends she is scared to die.
You are not taking into account that Nintendo is not a small startup, or an individual. I always go out of my way to help people who need it. I've always found people who've lost cell phones, and I have returned incorrectly shipped items that I have gotten on Ebay and Etsy.
There is a world of difference between a startup or a person, and Nintendo. Nintendo can afford this loss, and maybe they will improve their delivery system because of it.
But if an international mega-corporation accidentally screws themselves instead of me for once, no, I am not going to help them. They would never do the same for me, and it doesn't matter because they are not a person they are just a system, and will not appreciate it anyway.
And also, again, they are abandoning property with me. Are you seriously saying that some corporation can send you something, and expect you to keep it in good condition and then send it back to them? Think about this in terms of responsibility.
Treat others as they would want to be treated. Humans should be treated with kindness, respect, and forgiveness. Hypercapitalisitc international conglomerates should be treated with apathy, taking any advantage of any loophole that you can possibly get away with legally. Given how "they" treat others, its only fitting.
You should also consider the time it would take the company to correct the mistake and whether it's actually worth their time to do so. I'm reminded of this [1] answer on Stack Exchange that sometimes going through customer support costs a company more than they get back from the resolution.
You could do everything right and make no mistakes, and still fail. That's life.
You have a point though, that an economy -- at its core -- is an indirect representation of its host society's morals and values, and throwing around moral indignation does seem appropriate, but it's hard not to side with the defeatists here. Doing the right thing (ie: being morally responsible) carries a risk that only the most steadfast can endure.
I've personally been inconvenienced by this abandoned property issue too.
I agree 100% with the "it is their problem let them discover and fix it" resolution.
Received 4+1 devices, contacted seller, shipped back, somehow I ended up paying for their shipping fee. Could have re-contacted them, did not, retained grudge instead.
Destroying you is harsh. Startups make mistakes all of the time if this is a constant issue it is probably better the issue is visible and can he fixed before scaling.
> He was under no moral obligation to fix Nintendo's mistake for them.
I'm not convinced this is true (well it may be true morally but I don't think it's true legally). IIRC duplicate shipments are not considered Unsolicited Goods and in the UK you are legally required to inform the sender and return them if the sender requests.
Edit: This article[0] seems to suggest the same, but the Citizen's Advice link is broken.
Edit 2: This article[1] is better and includes a proper source[2].
Quite often the reason for receiving two items is that the first got stuck somewhere in transit, the customer complained so the company sent out a second item, and eventually both turn up. It seems reasonable under those circumstances for the company to ask for the second one back (politely of course, threatening the customer is never right).
I disagree. The company is now imposing on you for something that is absolutely not your responsibility. They have money set aside for losses like this.
It sounds like Nintendo should ask the courier company to fix things, not you. In a way, he is also a victim of the courier company's bad service, except that the mistake was in his favor.
And also, think about what that implies. How far are you supposed to go if they screw up? What if they do it again, with something more valuable?
You can't apply human morality to large corporations. If someone on Etsy or Ebay made a mistake like that, then yes of course you should ship it back. But corporations of that size are just systems. They will not be hurt or offended if you don't return it, and they won't be gracious if you do.
In consumer law in the EU (which the laws of the UK are supposed to reflect), I believe entities that enter into a consumer contract are in principle, treated equally. That means you have to minimise their losses in the event of a dispute, in the same way that they have to minimise your losses. I would imagine that principle would apply here, though I don't happen to know the specifics of the law in this case.
Just checked UK law. If you receive an extra item as part of a replacement for a broken item or similar and use it the sender has the right to demand payment for the extra item. The correct course of action is to contact the sender who can then choose to collect at their own expense.
I was surprised by this - I thought it would constitute unsolicited goods but it does not due to the extra item having been sent as remedy for a broken item. If someone sends you something out of the blue and then demands payment it is unsolicited goods and you have the right to keep it.
In that scenario, I think it would be you would need to make reasonable effort to collect the item, otherwise you abandon it. If the customer refuses you to collect it, then you can demand payment.
But as the above comment says, you would have had to send the item as part of an existing engagement, such as a purchase or replacement.
No, but you might be required to make reasonable accommodations to allow them to fix it, or minimise the cost of repairing it for them (at their expense). As I understand it, you couldn't just pick the most expensive solution and charge it to them, or obstruct every attempt they made to rectify the problem, simply because you were annoyed/inconvenienced. You may also be required to do other things to minimise the losses they have to compensate you for.
Sorry, I think I misunderstood your example. I read 10 TV as 10 Teravolts, i.e. they blew up your IT infrastructure with a massive electrical surge. Obviously I also mixed up who was sending the 10 TV and who was receiving. You can safely ignore my nonsensical reply. Yes, fortunately for you, if your IT system messes up and sends 10 TV (whatever that is), they cannot just keep the 10 TV. They are required to compensate you for them/it if they want to keep them/it.
If they were sent out of the blue you have no obligation to return them. If they were sent by mistake as part of a remedy of for example a faulty TV, and you decide to use them, the sender is entitled to ask you to pay for them. The correct course of action is to inform the sender, who then has 14 days (according to what I read) to collect them at their own expense.
As long as you don't use them the sender has no right to redress, only to ask for them back.
> I disagree. The company is now imposing on you for something that is absolutely not your responsibility
Ok. What if my payment processor has an issue, through no fault of the seller, and I end up getting charged twice? Do your rules still apply? It seems unreasonable to just assume a 'screw you' attitude from the get go.
At this point I'd sell the extra Nintendo Switch and pay back its price to Nintendo. Seems like it's less trouble than going through Nintendo themselves.
What do you mean by "pay back its price to Nintendo"? Sending them the money? It'd probably cost more in billable accountant time to process it than the amount being received.
I had a similar situation with a development system. It was fairly expensive and was popular. When I ordered it from the vendor, in the middle of the order their server crashed. It came up about an hour later and I found my transaction sitting there in my shopping cart incomplete, so I went ahead and paid for it. Then two weeks later it showed up at my door and I was happy. Then the next day another one showed up with the exact same transaction id.
I called the company and informed them, they offered a refund if I returned it. But I had only the one charge on my CC. Clearly they didn't have a path through their ordering systems that understood 'data corruption' as their root cause. The rep said just to keep it and if the CC got charged we could process a refund then.
Nothing for 3 months and then a collection notice from a debt collector saying I hadn't paid for the development system. I sent back all my documentation, the receipt, the cc statement etc. And explained to them what had happened, but they said they didn't care. I had proved to them that I had satisfied the debt and they marked it 'retired'.
How embarrassing (for Nintendo). As soon as someone threatens legal you just have to tell them you'll only be engaging via lawyers and you'll be seeking to recover your legal expenses from them once the situation is resolved.
Thanks, I appreciate your comments today as I've been getting a little worried here that the traction this article is getting this morning is going to come back to bite me in the backside.
Whether it's Nintendo or a UK-local entity they sub-contract (it's a bit unclear - either way the address is store.nintendo.co.uk and Nintendo-branded), the policies could use some work.
In 2013, the absolutely terrible defamation laws in the UK were improved somewhat. Before then, you basically couldn't have said anything at all, publicly, about this absolutely shocking incident! IANAL, but now I understand they would have to show actual or probable loss of business because of your published statements. Given how much space you devote to saying how much you love their products and how great they are, I think this would be pretty difficult for them. To me, the tone of your article is overwhelmingly one of wanting to pressure them to fix their bad customer service, not one of wanting to harm their business in any way. Customers should have the right to shame agents of large international companies into reforming bad business practices, without fear of legal ramifications. Having lived in the UK, I feel like companies there regularly get away with murder, figuratively speaking, because of the poor consumer protections in that country.
From what I can see, you've stuck to the facts and been completely honest about the process - it's completely unfair that you should suffer any hardship as a result of it.
It's infuriating to see big corporations act like bullies behind their lawyers, and equally satisfying to see good people stand up to them.
The best thing Nintendo could do - and their senior managers have a window of opportunity here now - would be to deliver a huge apology to yourself personally, along with a promise to review their entire delivery system processes.
Don't be ridiculous, truth is a defence against Libel (written down is libel, not slander).
The onus is on the person who said the thing to prove it is true ("guilty until proven innocent," since it's a civil rather than criminal offence), but as long as he has documentation/emails it's all good.
Indeed, I would be astonished if they sued him for this, it would not end well for them.
I don't recommend engaging council for this because it will cost you a fortune. And in the not unlikely event that you lose, you have to pay their costs as well. You have to ask yourself, "is this something worth spending my house on?"
It's a bluff. Nintendo wouldn't involve lawyers over a Switch, it makes zero financial sense. What happened likely is some tech support drone made a threat, which the corporate never approved.
This itself is an interesting question. The foundations of the justice system talk about testing everyone equal in the eyes of law but somehow equal access to legal resources is never talked about. I think we need to think over this as a society. There are some countries like Germany where for people with low income the state pays money to hire a lawyer rather than providing a lawyer.
But that is also problematic. What if you have an average income, are part of middle class and have normal job. Now according to this system you are not poor so state won't provide lawyer to you. But hiring a lawyer to represent you against some ridiculous lawsuit by company with huge bankroll and lawyer company on retainer will ruin a person like this. You might have to sell your house just to afford it or something similar and this would financially ruin you and your middle class family.
> Now according to this system you are not poor so state won't provide lawyer to you.
I never said that is system is perfect. You can create mechanisms where you look at incomes and look at percentage of fees to be paid to a lawyer. Similar to how fines are calculated in some countries.
The larger point being made was the current system of representation of giving a public counsel definitely doesn't work. We need to move towards better systems.
I agree. Also law firms used by companies have massive resources (thousands of employees) so a regular person can't fight against a machine like that even if he/she can afford to hire a single lawyer. The system needs to be changed from ground up to give people better options to defend themselves.
> A pity that multinational companies can usually afford much better lawyers than the average Joe.
I'm always amazed at how afraid customers are of companies in the US/UK. Like this article, where they threaten legal action and make the customer responsible for being available to hand off the third Switch. As a customer in a western European country, I'd laugh straight in their face and wouldn't lose a second of sleep over threats like that. I may live in a country that has a weird and at times annoying obsession with rules and regulations, but when it comes to being a consumer, it's great.
Force both parties to pool resources, and hire legal help from that pool and no others. So if a large company sues an individual or small one, it pays a large percentage of the latter's legal costs.
Simply to ban private legal representation and have everyone represent themselves in court?
I'm sure large companies would act a bit more nicely if any court case meant the CEO had to personally leave the office and fight it out in court.
It is my understanding that if you win a case, you can request that the other party pay for some legal fees, within reasonable degrees, of course.
Banning private legal representation would be more likely to hurt everyday citizens, rather than CEOs. Large companies would just start to hire lawyers or equivalent as their CEOs. The law system is incredibly complex because our society is equally complex. This is why we train professionals for so many years, and expect them to take regular classes every year so their knowledge is kept up date.
I think it would be interesting to review outcomes of cases where a regular person or small company challenged a large company, as well as the inverse. Just how much power do large multinational companies have? I'd also expect more leniency to be shown to individuals and smaller companies acting in good faith. As I understand it, intent is a large factor in many cases.
Yea but a case like this doesn't need high-powered lawyers. Usually a high-street solicitor will write a letter outlining what's happened, objecting to the legal threat and asking for information on how to return the merchandise. All in all, it should cost ~£60.
£60 is a hell of a lot of money to buy nothing. He doesn't need to do any of that, just arrange to return the item and if Nintendo (or The Hut Group, which is sounds like) screw up the collection, it's their problem. Just keep records of all correspondence.
My understanding (IANAL) is, that's not the best strategy. If you have a complaint against a company, it is often the case that the company has an internal complaints procedure (usually a simple 9 step affair that only takes a year or two of constant, vigilant effort). If you don't follow it, you might actually find it very difficult to recover expenses for hastily employed legal services. You always have to ask yourself, who will most enjoy/benefit from/be able to afford engaging lawyers, you or the company's legal department?
Very much so, in all the call centers I've worked in there was no "complaints department" we are just told to listen to the customer, relate with their concerns and tell them it will be "reviewed" by another department. In reality, it goes absolutely no where. Even if I 100% agreed with your complaint, I have no place to record it or know who it's supposed to go to to get further up the ladder. Some managers will accept your complaint, put it on their desk, then throw it out. If you been employed long enough the managers wont even accept it, cause honestly I don't think they have anyone to pass it up the chain to that would actually accept it.
Best way to go is social media, companies have "Social Media Experts" that are employed solely for online damage control.
Another way to get something done is by sending a plain snail mail letter addressed to someone high-up at the company in question. You have to figure that out yourself as if you call the call center, the reps are never allowed to give out that information or they are told to tell you a fake address/fake person or the general C/O Complaints Department. Those go to no one at all and directly to the garbage.
Now if you successfully send a written complaint letter to someone high up, everyone knows about it, cause the internal police come to investigate if anyone at the call center gave out that information (It's a huge deal and grounds to be fired).
Another thing, youtube clips, if you are recording and posting on youtube your conversation with a rep, the company has a team to watch for that stuff. Once they find you doing that, you then become a "Flagged Customer" and we prepare while we leave you on hold, get one of the better reps available and have 2-3 other managers listening in on the line guiding the rep through the call step by step.
That's very interesting, thanks for sharing your experience.
Re: youtube clips. I don't do that, but when I call a customer service to complain and ask for a change that I know will not be well received (e.g. cancel cable) I always start the conversation by saying that I am recording the conversation on my side. And to "confirm" what you wrote, it's not unusual that after exposing my problem/demand I'm put on hold for 5/10 minutes while the employee is fetching the "domain expert to help with my problem".
Specialised press would probably work well. Send the story to a few gaming news sites, post it on some Nintendo subreddits and the guy's situation may improve at least a bit.
I dont "have a lawyer", and am not sure what people mean with "my" in phrases such as "talk to my lawyer".
In the situation you describe, how would I go about finding a lawyer to receive communication and how much would it cost me out of pocket to simply be allowed to use their name and address when telling nintendo "talk with these guys, their my lawyers"
I'm no lawyer, but at least in the US I was under the impression that once something has been mailed to you, it's yours. A company cannot send you something then require payment or for you to return it.
My understanding in the UK is that if someone sends you unsolicited goods and then tries to bill you, it's yours to keep.
But this doesn't apply to things sent to you by mistake, which certainly seems to be the case here. You are expected to return the good to the sender at their expense. Although you are expected to facilitate returning it, I doubt any court would look favourably on a company taking you to court for failing to jump through their hoops.
Obviously I'd have preferred to keep it if they'd let me, but if they hadn't freaked me out with talk of legal action and been happy to say something to the effect of get it back to us within (e.g.) 30 days, I could've organised to post it at a weekend I wasn't working.
I couldn't include everything in the whole exchange in the article, but they did suggest collecting it from a place of work - but I don't have one, just my client's site, which isn't an option for that, which was explained.
In any case the courier has now collected the Switch, so at least I should be able to put it behind me.
Have you kept a record of the courier delivery? Like a collection receipt?
If not, write them a letter, send by recorded delivery, and state that the item was collected and that this is the end of the matter.
They're almost certainly incompetent rather than malicious, so if there's another screw up you can refer them to the letter and then ignore any further correspondence.
Yeah, it's all about good faith though. I've this happen to me with Corsair - their really expensive keyboard had a problem so they shipped out a replacement for me, and then 3 days later....another one arrived. I let them know and A) they were extremely apologetic for the inconvenience B) they arranged a courier to pick up the second keyboard when it suited me. Totally different approach to what Nintendo is doing.
It took ten seconds to Google the UK equivalent, and it seems to be the same rule. Unsolicited goods, which are defined the same as the FTC' s definition, seem to be treated the same:
But that means that they cannot force you to stay home waiting for a courier. He could've asked them for a return label to send it back. Refusing to stay at home for a day because of that is valid as it should constitute a personal expense (no lawyer).
Yep. He could have said "I'm only available to hand over the parcel to a courier on Saturdays 9am-5pm or during week days between the hours of 6pm and 9pm" and they have to figure out how to collect it in those hours - it's their problem essentially. And if they did take him to court they wouldn't have a leg to stand on, since he has shown willingness to return the item.
Bear in mind that customer service in the UK is often terrible especially compared to the US (I've been fortunate enough to live in both places) and I've found that some inexperienced or bad customer service people threaten legal action without even being serious about it as a sort of a threat. I was threatened legal action by a car rental company for something related to a flat tire that was nothing to do with me and I had even dealt with the situation at the physical rental place just fine. Nevertheless some representative contacted me several weeks later to threaten me, I told them to stop it and then they never contact me again, several years later I've never heard from them. It's bad customer service. If you call their bluff and say ok, sue me, they'll be surprised. This case (as was mine) sounds so clear cut that why should you feel intimidated. They would lose.
I didn't even know you could order from Nintendo directly in the UK, I think they'd be wise to shut this down entirely and work through their retail partners. Just imagine how little resources Nintendo puts into the retail aspect of their operations in the UK. Clearly they can't even train people to do customer service properly without threatening legal action. I understand the sentiment to want to support Nintendo but I am not entirely surprised this happened, it takes hard work to run a well functioning shop/store online or otherwise.
Having looked into it further it looks like at least part of their operation is being managed by The Hut Group - from some contact info - and I found this surprisingly similar link from four years ago.
Hard to say really to what extent there is overlap here.
Honestly I'm now starting to wonder if I should pull the article - getting it read is good, but this is more attention than I expected and I'm getting a little nervous of what'll happen next now. :-S
Don't be daft. Leave it up. As long as the article is truthful, what's the problem? Their appalling treatment of an honest customer should be exposed.
I do think you're totally overthinking this. They made the initial mistake, they need to correct it and at their expense.
They can't do anything to you. Make a "best effort" to return the item and no more. Keep a log of all your correspondence. Don't waste any more than a minimal amount of time on this, certainly don't take days off work etc to wait for couriers.
I already have taken the day off work, and the courier has now collected the Switch - so the hope at least is that I'm now done with it, albeit out-of-pocket.
I'd agree with the other comment above - if what you've said is true, leave it up.
Years ago I had a situation (with a music technology hardware supplier) which just wasn't getting resolved; as soon as I made a website publicising the issue, they were bending over backwards to get it taken down; I said that I'd take it down as soon as the issues were sorted.
They never were (the product died) - but I'll never forget the threatening phone call I had one Saturday morning. I knew I had nothing to fear as I'd just documented what had actually happened and nothing more. It may not be the same in the US (and I know you're in the UK), but in the UK I think that there's still the ability to complain loudly about something as long as you're being truthful. Looks to me like they screwed up three times, and it's all on them.
Yep. And it's a bad decision too, it's just against your best interest as a customer. With Amazon, I know that if there's absolutely ANY issue with my order they will issue a full refund and/or send a replacement within 5 minutes of talking to them over the phone or using the live chat. It will be bumped up to free allocated time delivery or even delivered with Prime Now if available.
I work at a games studio so we have few people ordering from Nintendo UK website all the time - and boy, there's loads of horror stories about deliveries and their customer service, I don't know why you'd order anything directly from them instead of Amazon or Argos or even(gasp!) Game.
Also, the terms of deals for retail placement may be very sweet to Nintendo, because they know it sells like hotcakes. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if stores were getting 0 margin on the switch itself
I wouldn't even be surprised if Nintendo is just outsourcing its "direct retail" operation to a third party retailer who takes a larger commission than the resellers. I mean, Nintendo (clearly) isn't in the retail business so it would make sense to outsource it rather than build that infrastructure from scratch.
There's not much of a reason to believe buying from the Nintendo store has higher margins for Nintendo than buying from a retailer.
>It didn’t take long to arrive — but when it did, I noticed some damage to the outside of the packaging
Author signed off on a visibly destroyed package. This is where support stops in my country(also EU). Standard procedure is to either refuse damaged package, or open with courier as a witness and make damage protocol, documented with pictures. The fact Nintendo agreed to replace it on faith alone is quite good, pestering them with phone calls all week combined with fact they somehow send two units probably flagged him as a potential fraud.
This doesn't always work. Mail at my apartment gets delivered to a mail room. I have never been given a package directly. I had a purchase show up damaged once and I had no option to refuse delivery (the company replaced it though)
Q. Am I obligated to return or pay for merchandise I never ordered?
A. No. If you receive merchandise that you didn’t order, you have a legal right to keep it as a free gift.
Interesting! I didn't know this. Unfortunately in this case the buyer is in the UK, so FTC rules don't apply to him. I hope they have a similar consumer protection rule.
You don't have to send unsolicited goods back or even notify the sender.
But duplicate orders don't count as "unsolicited" and should be returned - however "there should be no cost or inconvenience to you" which is where Nintendo fail badly here.
> Some will point out (and some have!) that I could have quite easily saved myself a lot of time, hassle, and lost earnings at this point by just quietly holding on to the extra Switch and saying nothing to Nintendo about it. It certainly would have saved me a lot of stress, but it was morally not something I’d ever consider.
There is no room for morals/ethics when dealing with faceless mega-companies.
You are not dealing with an individual here. Which individual would demand you to be home all day waiting for the courier for a mistake they made?
What I would do is store the parcel away unopened for a few months to a year. If in the mean time somebody asks it back, they can have it, otherwise it would go to the trash.
I wouldn’t feel comfortable with opening and keeping it.
Maybe I would try to deliver it myself if the original recipient was reasonably close.
I know it’s not the most right thing to do, what I suggested, but I really cannot waste my time with customer support. We are talking about the same companies that put you through the pain of bot-agents when you call them.
One, as far as we know, isolated logistics problem with some ill-trained phone operators not solving it gracefully is the claim. What am I missing that makes this story more interesting than that? Is it just because Nintendo? Or is it exactly this interesting if it were the same story but the product plumbing supplies?
I think it raises some interesting questions about fulfilment, customer support, and what companies should be responsible for in these days of increasing home-delivery. I've also had problems with terrible couriers (haven't we all?) and, at least here in the UK, there are plenty of potential improvements to make.
Should Nintendo be selling this direct at all? Is it really still worth the cost of whatever systems need to be in place to achieve it?
Anecdotally, I received my Switch in the post in perfect condition, via Amazon.
I am super happy for the courier services available in Shanghai. What I experienced in the last 12 months is just shockingly good.
1. I can order whatever I want from any restaurant I like using some apps, someone is going to show up in front of my door within one hour to have it delivered. The cost is close to 2 metro tickets.
2. I don't need to go grocery shopping, courier guys do that for me, e.g. want to buy 2L of milk from your favourite 24 hours convenience store at 11pm? it is just a few clicks away, 1-2 hours delivery.
3. I can send 1kg stuff to Beijing (1000km away) in 12-18 hours for $4-5, door to door service, everything included.
courier guy may not show up? that is news here. You can track where is your assigned courier guys in apps, it is GPS based. One bad review is going to cause big trouble for the guy. Companies like jd.com also has pretty cool features in their apps to tip the courier guy you like, you can offer cash/free drinks to those who provide good services to you.
not impressive enough? jd.com requests all their courier guys to dump your rubbish after delivering your stuff, just be nice and ask (in Chinese of course) "could you please take those two bags of rubbish to the bins downstairs for me?"
Since there seems to be a lot of confusion about the legalities involved, with some people suggesting he should have just kept it and said nothing, I did some research.
In the UK, you have a legal duty to return it. http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/30294748/can-you-keep-... The only exception is completely unsolicited goods, which you can keep. Double shipments must be returned. This doesn’t change the fact that Nintendo was rather rude if the author’s characterization is accurate.
>Items that firms send to you, but you didn't actually order are called "unsolicited goods". You're well within your rights to keep them.
You have no obligation to send them back to the company or to pay for them. If a company demands payment, that's a criminal offence.
But this doesn't apply to items sent to you by mistake (as happened to Robert); if the order was sent to you twice; or if there's extra stuff on top of what you ordered.
If a firm has left goods with you that weren't unsolicited goods, they still belong to the trader and you should try to give them back.
Firms can take you to court to recover their goods.
The situation is different in the US, you are allowed to keep all "unordered merchandise" and have no obligation whatsoever to pay or return. No distinction is made between completely unsolicited and double shipments. A legal argument could be made that a double shipment is not "unordered merchandise." I didn't find anything on the legal databases or Google, other than newspaper columnists opining that double shipments are "unordered".
Back in 2014, https://store.nintendo.co.uk/ was managed by The Hut Group. Not sure whether they also manage shipping, customer support, etc, or just rent out the web site, could be either way. Looking at URLs and everything else, that still seems to be the case. So not sure which company is to be blamed here.
No, you are not taking the moral high ground by calling Nintendo customer service and initiating a back-and-forth on what to do with the mistakenly-delivered extra product. In fact, you are probably costing Nintendo more money than the second Switch is worth by doing so.
There is no reason, ever, unless the cost of the item is extremely high, to initiate a conversation with customer service when you are mistakenly delivered extra goods. The company will take inventory and notice that that it was mistakenly sent. If they don't contact you about it, it's because they want you to keep it because a cost-benefit analysis on their part does not warrant getting in contact with you over it.
A switch costs 330,- Dollar; The support person is getting paid anyway. Shipping costs 8 Dollar. Yes it matters.
Yes it matters in one case, yes it matters in 10 cases.
Yes you have a ethical/moral responsibility to tell them. Why? Because if you expect any company or someone else to tell you when you fucked up, you have to do this as well.
I go back to a store to tell them, that they forgot to give me 1$. I go back to a store and give them 1$ when i realise that they gave me 1$ more than expected.
No, they didn't "[cost] Nintendo more money than the second Switch is worth". Nintendo could just have said, "Keep it" and only been out the cost of a support call, which is necessarily less than the cost of a Switch.
Nintendo is the one in the wrong here.
The customer wouldn't have been wrong to do nothing and keep it, but calling them and admitting the mistake is definitely the moral high-road here. It may not be the smartest thing, but that's different.
I disagree, there's no code about this that everyone knows about. I think he did the right thing by contacting them. They did the wrong thing, obviously they should just let him keep it but some cheapskate customer service rep decided 'no we must have this thing back' and ridiculously decided threatening legal action was a good idea.
But I've heard of people contacting support for a vendor to hear "thanks for letting us know, you can keep the item" which should have probably been Nintendo's stance in this issue
I'm in the "if they want it back, they will contact you and ask" mindset --- it's entirely their mistake, to correct at their expense, and you shouldn't have to do anything about it.
I really had no idea how much the actual "unit cost" of a call to customer service was until I worked on a consumer-facing app for a company that also had a large call center. One of our metrics of how well our app worked was how many call center interactions were avoided because customers could use self-service options in the app. Anytime someone called, the average effective cost to us was on the order of tens of dollars.
This is doubly true when it comes to this threat of suing you for mistakenly receiving the second device, notwithstanding the customer support costs leading up to this.
A Switch is definitely worth less than the cost of having an attorney prepare even the initial legal complaint against you, let alone setting foot into court.
> A Switch is definitely worth less than the cost of having an attorney prepare even the initial legal complaint against you, let alone setting foot into court.
Small claims will be submitted to a collection agency, which will handle the legal posturing in a fully automated manner, i.e. Nintendo sells the claim for, say, 20 per cent of expected return and has nothing to do with it any more, ever (since the collection agency basically gives up if the debtor contests the claim, so they take a calculated risk that at least one fifth of claims will be paid uncontested).
>There is no reason, ever, unless the cost of the item is extremely high, to initiate a conversation with customer service when you are mistakenly delivered extra goods.
Why does it suddenly matter if the cost was arbitrarily high?
He received something he hadn't paid for in error. Seems like the decent thing to do is at least make an attempt to correct the issue. Maybe the error-sent package was meant for someone else. Maybe they say don't worry about it.
But to make an attempt is dumb, and you deserve the thing sent in error? Good grief.
What if someone erroneously deposits $1000 into your bank account? Is that yours to keep? Is it dumb to try to rectify the situation?
So you need to keep the package around for months until eventually they notice it missing and track it down, just to make sure if you will need to send it back or not? Doesn't sound very practical to me... and if you don't let them know they could even take a legal action against you, as it can be characterized as you attempt to conceal the fact and keep their property.
Don't know how it is in UK but in the USA no one is allowed to send you stuff unsolicited that pushes some obligation onto you. Even an obligation to return a shipping error to them.
You probably got a free Switch. And with their subsequent behaviour, a well deserved one.
US seems to just have a more broad term for goods delivered that you didn't order and refers to it as "unordered merchandise"[1]. You're pretty much free to keep it, it seems.
The UK is more specific for what is classified as "unsolicited" and what is considered goods delivered to someone else by mistake[2]. Companies have a right to get their product back if it's the latter. Since the author did order a switch, a duplicate delivery would very likely be considered a mistake. If the author never ordered a Switch (and never paid for it) in the first place, they'd definitely be able to keep it.
Regardless, if this is the way Nintendo asked for the second Switch back, they were completely out of line.
In France, you don't get the free stuff.
You have to give it back if the owner comes home to get it. You are not required to do anything else. You also have to notify the sender if it is a honest mistake.
If it is accompanied by a request for payment, this is a penal offense.
If the law is similar in the UK, Nintendo is mostly in the right. However, I don't think they have the right to ask the guy to be at home at a time of their choice.
Most countries have laws regarding that practice, but the details can be very different.
In the UK that only applies to unsolicited goods, not to genuine errors. So, if Nintendo were to send you a switch and then ask you to pay for it, sure, you can ignore the demand. If you buy a switch from Nintendo and they send you two you have no right to keep the second (or third, in this case).
That said, if the seller makes a mistake then they need to rectify it entirely, they can't demand you wait around for a courier at an inconvenient time or get you to pay for postage.
Taleb describes how antifragile systems need to provide enough leeway for people on the ground to actually make decisions. Otherwise you can't react to unforeseen events and things go sideways. Delivery companies and support departments of large companies seem to have built a incredibly fragile system that can't even deal with frequently occurring anomalies. Reading some of the comments here those anomalies even seem to include things like red lights and bad weather. It seems to be a consistent pattern that reaching out via social media or directly to leadership is what yields the best results for the same reason the system is so fragile.
In the US and if through USPS, if a package is shipped and delivered, the person receiving the package now owns it and is under no obligation whatsoever to return it. It's literally 'finders keepers':
"By law, unsolicited merchandise is yours to keep."
You solicited one, they delivered more than one. Not your problem. Note that this is for USPS. I'm not sure it holds up for private carriers.
I don't know about the UK but in the US it is illegal for a company to sue or threaten you to return a package that they shipped to you if you didn't request it.
This is to prevent mail fraud along the lines of - I send you a widget you never ordered and a bill for $20. You now either have to pay the bill, or spend time/money shipping the package back.
Customer service is an expense, so they want to train us to not even think of trying it. They will also give you a Hobson's choice over arbitration to dissuade you from trying small-claims court (though that may not hold up, at least for now, in some jurisdictions.)
I had a bad experience with Nintendo Germany, when they fucked up my New Nintendo 3DS Ambassador package address, and it took over 2 weeks to find out what is happening with the item I paid for... Never again buying directly from Nintendo again, learned my lesson.
If the writer has records of his interactions with Nintendo, in particular his goodwill in returning the extra Switch, there isn't a judge on Earth who would take Nintendo's lawyers seriously on this.
Sounds like they're really not used to people actually ordering from their site directly. I can imagine the prices are the suggested retail prices, which no retailer will actually end up charging.
> can imagine the prices are the suggested retail prices,
> which no retailer will actually end up charging.
I bought my Switch directly from Nintendo (well, sounds like it's actually via the Hut Group), and paid the RRP with free delivery. I didn't see any mainstream retailer (Amazon, Toys'r'Us, Tesco, etc) charging differently though.
I can't imagine mainstream retailers either price-gouging or discounting, unless a product's reaching its end of life or about to be superceded.
When in a contract like this, where you paid for one unit but was sent two units, always be honest about it. Look at it the other way around, what if you paid double by accident ?
Is this huge corporation going to look you in the eye, tell you that you've over/double paid, and then return the overpayment with a handshake? Or are they even going to notice? I'm not saying be dishonest about it, but let's not pretend this enormous business is going to take the initiative to make things right. They'll keep your money unless you make the call.
Nintendo customer support in Europe is known to be quite bad. I am a day one customer for the Switch, the controller has a defective antenna (it is a well known hardware bug) but sending it back would mean to lose a lot of time with the italian customer support and in the end have all my system data wiped out. I'll just wait for them to enable cloud savegames, buy a second Switch and sell back my current one to a retailer like Gamestop.
Does the UK not have consumer protections for delivery mistakes like this?
Should have had every right to tell them to get fucked and keep the switch the second they threatened him. They sent it to him, they can eat the loss. if they don't want to then they can politely offer to get you a return shipping label and apologize for the trouble.
This type of thing sounds about right for Nintendo.
The op is clearly writing a paid article. No one in their right mind would ever believe the bunk spewed from a support person in this circumstance. So say you call company X’s customer support line and the result is the staffer saying we company X will take legal action against you the customer for company X’s mistake ? Never in a thousand years would I believe that statement from some random staffer nor would the staffer try to make such a claim due to the potential for their supervisors taking retribution against them for over stepping the bounds of their position.
So al if that being said ; what’s the point of the article if you toss out the bullshit of my first toy was damaged and the vendor accidentally sent me two replacements? The point is look how cool this toy is . You know you want one; you should get one early like i did before everyone runs out to get one .
It’s just a ploy to sell more crap and improve earnings.
Let the products sell themselves. Fuck advertising, commercial psychology. Psychological methods to sell should be destroyed.
Like @bufferoverflow say it's totally bluff. We had all to deal with this kind of small little problem. Why are you crying like a SJW for a Switch? seriously? grow a little. You just waste your time.
edit:
1) I don't think the priority of life is getting a switch for these Kid at Christmas.
2)I don't think he had to call and waste his time for then complaining.
3)We have all at once the same problem but did had written an article about it, because it's useless. When I had the problem, the same day I had my package, because I directly go to the DHL post office get my package. Done. Strict to the point. Same with UPS.
Looks like you got yourself a free Switch. Enjoy it, and if your other Switch is in good condition, offer it to your son or a friend. If Nintendo threatens further legal action, take your lawyer out to dinner and spend the evening laughing over it.
You're not a mug, you've an honest person treated badly by an incompetent company.
You would be a mug if you dealt with them again ;-)
Don't be surprised if you haven't heard the end of it. They might well lose the item and then attack you again. If that happens, do not waste any more time or money on them.
I would have notified them, too, and have done similar in the past. Amazon botched initial delivery of a $500 item, then sent a new one, but both eventually arrived. I called back and they thanked me and emailed me a shipping label and instructions that gave me weeks to get it done.
No. They sent the package and then immediately threatened legal action for their mistake. That is a much different situation. If I were OP I would be personally insulted at this point and would make life as difficult as possible for the parties involved. Nintendo should have a better grip on their customer service. They've had over a century to figure it out.
Be careful what you wish for. I have one. Go for dinner with them, they would charge you for the time spent eating the delicious dinner, and afterwards they would write you a letter stating the dinner was delicious. Together with a bill for the letter. Plus a surcharge for providing the "laugh at events of the day" service.
Lol good luck with that. You would just waste more money and time doing this. What I recommend if you are a freelancer / contractor is to just let them know that you cannot take a day off to wait for their courier as you don't have vacation and are not paid unless you work (so that would incur financial loss to you).
So inform them to arrange a courier to come pick up the item at a specific time convenient to you (Saturday from 10am to 5pm or Mon-Thu 7pm-10pm) and it's their headache now. They have to work around your schedule without inconveniencing you.
I have never, ever dealt with any above mid-sized company that handles customer service and delivery well. There seems to be a set of standardised industry practices that are completely and utterly customer hostile.
The moment regular company employees stop dealing with customer issues, delivery, etc., and hands it over to "specialists", it's basically a crap shoot whether you can get any issue resolved at all, because the systems they put in place make it nearly impossible.
For example: A courier claims they called at your house and got no answer, even though you were in and they didn't. You call customer services, but they have no way at all to contact the courier and tell them to go back and try again. Even if they're only two minutes down the road. The system deliberately puts a firewall between the reps and the delivery infrastructure, because any kind of ad-hoc action to resolve customer issues interferes with the logistics planning for the day's deliveries.
All the rep can do is rearrange delivery for the subsequent day, whereupon the problem often repeats itself, but this time with a different courier, and a different rep. I had this process repeat several times, over a period of weeks, until simply cancelled an order completely (one worth hundreds of pounds to the vendor).
I do wonder if higher level managers realise that delivery departments are optimising purely to make things easy for themselves, and what that's potentially worth in terms of wasted effort, lost orders and customer hostility. I guess they probably don't care, because it still saves them money on aggregate.
This is SOO true.
I ordered some circuit boards from Seeedstudio (good and cheap board fab, btw). I paid extra for DHL to get them quicker.
I submitted my boards to Seeed (Shenzhen) October 10. On Oct 16, said they were shipped to DHL. Awesome. Told DHL via their webapp and text messaging that "I do not need signature. Drop at doorstep". 10 boards were a whopping $5. Guaranteed delivery by 19'th, cause thats what I paid extra for.
So what does the fucknut idiot delivery driver do? "Did not deliver because no signature". I was fucking furious. I called their support line, and "we'll try to deliver tomorrow" ~~~ for WHAT? The idiot to say AGAIN that no signature, did not deliver? Uh huh, tell them to get their ass back right now and drop it off. Their claim was "They can only ask". BTW, their systems noted both my previous "I dont need signature" authorization, along with the text message responses saying the same.
Well, it turns out that Twitter is good for other things, like complaining loudly. So I reached out to the 4 contacts linked to DHL, and included my package#. I got one of their US VP's on there. Wouldn'tya know, they had the authority to tell the idiot driver to get back and deliver.
Who knows when I would have gotten my boards. But I certainly know how to bypass 'consumer firewalls'. I brought Seeed into it as well, by mentioning them with DHL. Evidently, squeezing the B2B may have worked, I really don't know.
I have had a similar experience once with UPS. To cut a long story short they really messed up, relabelling someone else's package with my address and this package was payment on delivery, which I paid. Trying to get them to come and pick up the package they relabelled in error and refund me for the payment was an absolute nightmare.
Many calls to the call centre and 2 days later I had enough. No amount of asking to speak to a manager or anyone I spoke to managed to resolve the situation. I found the email address of the CEO of UPS on https://www.ceoemail.com/ and proceeded to write him an email explaining the issue, the effort I have made to try to resolve it as well as the incompetence and inability of the staff to resolve the problem. Note this email was very professional and stuck to the facts, the only emotional bit maybe being me highlighting that I honestly expected better from a company such as UPS.
I did not expect anything to happen honestly. However 15 minutes later I received a reply from him saying it will get taken care of. 20 minutes later the manager of the distribution centre that caused the problem gave me a phone call apologising. 2 hours later a driver came to pick up the parcel and refund me the money I paid in error. I received 2 more calls from the distribution manager and that person provided their personal contact number in case I ever have any issues again.
I personally do not like going the social media route by default. I would only consider it if I have exhausted all other options and am honestly left with no other choice which seems to be the situation you were in and that is completely understandable. Maybe give the CEO email option a try next time as I believe your success was due to someone high up being forced to recognise your issue. If that then fails I would hit the social media option for sure.
I live in France and in the working hours of the delivery guys I'm at work in a different city. I ordered a number of things to my personal address, and the story is typically like: "package delivered" with some strange message from the delivery guy where to find it, or no message at all. Out of the last 3 things I ordered, 2 didn't get to me (I made a claim on Amazon and they reimbursed me, no questions asked - at least), and 1 other was delivered to a shop three streets from my place, and after 2 weeks when no one came to get the thing, a good guy from the shop noticed my phone number on the box and called me.
I try to avoid buying physical stuff in the internet now, way too much stress.
Believe me, even if you are home 100% of the time, packages will still not get delivered because "nobody was home".
IIRC DHL is especially prone to this. I think the drivers try to catch up time or whatever.
DHL is mostly subcontracted to local companies. Yes, drivers do that when they have a residential address, because they cannot pull the same trick with companies at factory/office hours, they hope it goes unnoticed with individuals.
But I also have a DHL driver doing the opposite: you stay at home all day and nobody rings; then you notice that the parcel is marked as delivered on the website. What? You get outside and you see the parcel was thrown in your yard over the wall/fence/portal. You go back to DHL website and you download the receipt, to discover a beautiful fake signature of yours forged by the driver.
So he just didn't bother to ring the doorbell to save 20 seconds. He saves 20 seconds and you lose several hours waiting for him...
Also, in this subcontracting company, the drivers have very bad equipment, they do not have winter tyres (and we are talking about a mountain area...), they do not have enough large enough vans, so the drivers try to ditch as many parcels as possible in any 'possible' way because otherwise they have no room for pickups...
The driver even showed up one day with a regular compact car... He had to come back.
> But I also have a DHL driver doing the opposite: you stay at home all day and nobody rings; then you notice that the parcel is marked as delivered on the website. What? You get outside and you see the parcel was thrown in your yard over the wall/fence/portal. You go back to DHL website and you download the receipt, to discover a beautiful fake signature of yours forged by the driver.
IN cases like that, I would have a very hard ethical time in pushing that issue of fraud onto the driver. To be honest, I haven't done that... but the thought would definitely cross my mind.
I wouldn't think twice. I would absolutely do that. Why? While in school I was working as a delivery driver and never resorted to shit like that.
And we were not only pressed for time. We were paid by delivered parcel. Nothing else counted.
And we had to deliver the packets that were not successfully delivered to the central logistics station by 6pm.
So if we didn't perform we were f..ed.
> While in school I was working as a delivery driver and never resorted to shit like that.
How long ago was that? Maybe the service has gotten worse because the pay/reward system has gotten worse.
> You go back to DHL website and you download the receipt, to discover a beautiful fake signature of yours forged by the driver.
Depending on carrier, this has hellish consequences for customers who end up having to file loss/damage claims against the carrier. Your signature attests that you received it and it's intact, so when the signature is forged attesting to such, any claims filed are summarily denied.
(Consumers usually get their money back from the shipper as a matter of customer service, but the shipper still eats the loss.)
It also happens in germany. I once talked to a deliery guy from DHL. He told me, he has 3 minutes for a delivery. That's insane. Just one red traffic light and the 3 minute windows is fucked up.
When you call dhl you only get lame exuses. "Maybe you doorbell isn't working?" Sure, DHL, sure.
The person you call almost certainly has no actual insight into the problem or way to contact the driver
Wonder if we have it all wrong. If we paid for shipping on receipt there would be motivation to deliver.
In the UK we can get our money back if the goods don't make it into your hands. It's up to the seller / courier to prove otherwise although it's usually a battle arguing with them.
Royal Mail delivered a £560 multimeter to the wrong address and to a signature which wasn't mine. Never saw it again. That took a nightmare battle from hell to get sorted.
This is the same in every single country. However, if the mail say it was delivered then what do you do? You lose.
I actually found that in the UK at least, you get on twitter and call them thieving bastards repetitively until they are fed up with you and just give you the money to shut up :)
Royal Mail is just terrible at doing anything it seems.
Some of the vendors allow you to select the delivery company. I like this.
It's pretty hard to get back to a seller and try to explain him the delivery company he is using is potentially scamming, especially as it only affects me (the receiver), not the shipper.
Yeah I imagine the drivers do this to save time when they're behind schedule.
Which makes me feel bad for the drivers, really. I'm gonna guess that they have some very tough schedules.
You don’t need to guess, it’s been documented. Most have impossible schedules. Ugly industry, and it would be costly to make it less ugly. So we all look away.
As I understand it (no personal experience, just hearsay), the quotas given to drivers are unrealistically aggressive, encouraging this behavior.
This happens every single time with PostNord, the postal service in Sweden and Denmark. Every, single, time.
Second that.
Amazon lockers are the best thing since sliced bread. They put the ball back in your court to pick it up, when you have time. Removes the stress completely and makes ordering pleasant again.
Keep an eye out for them, if you can.
This kinda thing is extremely good and I'm surprised it hasn't caught on in a bigger way. Many (most?) purchases are made online these days, but when you do so you have to make one of a couple of awkward choices:
1. request a delivery at work, let the receptionists at your office sign for the package and very politely thank them each time (and don't do this too often)
2. place the order to be delivered at your home address, knowing that you won't be there and that you'll have to pick up the "you were out..." slip, and duck out of work and cross town later in the week to the post-office sometime during opening hours and suffer the queues there.
The reason I use the word "awkward" is that I feel like I'm misusing some facilities no matter what I do (expecting a receptionist to handle my packages, or making a postman bring a package all the way to my flat and then all the way back home and fill out forms etc).
These temp lockers are such a great idea.
> request a delivery at work, let the receptionists at your office sign for the package and very politely thank them each time (and don't do this too often)
Everyone in my office does this, although we don't have a dedicated receptionist and the job normally falls to the office manager instead. It doesn't even cross my mind as a misuse of company resources. Is this something that would be considered inappropriate in other places?
It depends, I think in a larger office it can get a bit out of hand. My previous workplace was a few hundred people and the pile of packages was a little shocking, especially around christmas time. My current workplace the downstairs reception is shared between a number of companies, so they're not even our employees which makes it a bit worse.
It could be that this is all fine and I'm overthinking it - so maybe take what I"m saying with a pinch of salt :-)
As a counter-example: we have a receptionist and a dedicated mailroom which is staffed for full business hours. I do imagine it gets nuts around christmas, but it's essentially an office perk / honestly I'd consider it something that should be expected by default - the alternative is, as mentioned, home delivery when you're not home, which is ridiculously ineffective and has problems with theft.
Fully agree. Unfortunately the lockers are not very popular yet in France. But I've seen a few added in the last months in my area, hope it catches the steam, because it's way better.
The problem though is that most of the time I can not choose the delivery company, and I've only seen La Poste having the lockers.
With the all the home deliveries that people have these days I think it should be mandatory for all new constructed condos etc to have delivery lockers. The item gets delivered to the locker the code is messaged to you retrieve when you get back home. The current place I am living in has the security gate intercom dial my handphone. So for any package delivery I tell the guy I will open the door for him but I am not at home so to leave the item outside my apartment door.
We have a few Amazon Lockers in Paris and the suburbs. It's awesome. A lot better than the usual "Relais Colis".
Just flash the barcode from the email, and it opens the appropriate locker. It even lets you open multiple ones with a single barcode if you received multiple packages the same day.
I'm curious, is it uncommon to have packages delivered to the mailroom at your place of work? That's what I've done for the last 4 years and I've never had a problem.
It is not uncommon, but at a mid-sized company it is a bit problematic: when the receptionist has to handle private parcels for a couple of individuals, that is OK; but when there are 100-200 employees and they regularly order non-work related stuff at their company address, it becomes a burden on the receptionist, burden that is not part of what the company pays him for.
So :
* small company where everyone takes care of (his own) deliveries: OK.
* smallish company company where there is a receptionist: OK because it does not happen too often.
* middle-sized company: not OK.
* large company with a dedicated mail/parcel/delivery service: I guess it depends on formal work agreements.
-We solved this in a simple manner at a former employer - we just had everybody who wanted something sent to work have it addressed to such-and-such, room 40.
Room 40 was a bench behind the warehouse reception.
Of course, there are potential pitfalls here - say, assuming your colleagues to be honest, for instance - but to the best of my knowledge, we never lost a parcel in years. (Which is more than could be said for anything entering the murky depths of our ERP system...)
At AOL in late 2001 they insisted that employees cease receiving non-work packages at work. The legit concern was the anthrax being mailed to DC area offices. That was also just past "peak AOL" so I was soon freed from this problem, with a decent sverance to boot.
I have found ordering from B&M's via their websites and picking the thing up at the store bypasses this whole problem.
I experienced the receptionist losing track of my stuff once and it was a really uncomfortable situation because, obviously, you're still colleagues and you don't want to get too pushy, but at the same time, where the hell is the stuff I paid for? After that I stopped having stuff delivered to my office.
And anyway you may not want everyone to know what you are buying.
I've rented a mailbox at a private post office for years to do this. It's basically a subcontracted receiving department, and they can deal with parcels from any vendor or courier for me.
Maybe... I've used them three times, I think. Once everything was good, the next time I couldn't retrieve the package because the touchscreen and barcode reader were malfunctioning, and then the third time I got someone else's package and mine vanished into thin air. (I was able to dox the other person and leave their package where they could get it though.) The company where I work has essentially the same thing, and seemingly more reliable, if I'm willing to wait an extra day for it to get through their system.
I almost never have to return anything but the one time I had a defective item I decided to use a locker for the return exchange and it never worked, they were always all full (London, UK) so then I had to end up going to a post office anyway.
Every time I've looked for one in NYC, there are none around within 5 miles.
I mean, most things I don't need to sign for and I can just pick them up on my doorstep when I get home, which is way more convenient than that.
It has been my experience that if you order with a credit card and the item is not delivered you will not be charged. I usually let the credit card company handle it to avoid the hassle.
Also being in France, I find that the most reliable and practical way to get something shipped is to use a "point relai" (when delivery at work is out of the picture because of company policies). Delivery services generally know better how to find them and deal with them, since other people use them too.
When your package is damaged, some will even offer to add a note to your delivery, without you asking, in case there's a problem later.
I order very regularly from Amazon, and I think I have never had a single problem receiving packages this way, and it's pretty easy to find one on your way from work or somewhere that suits you. Some of them are even open on Sunday, depending on what their main business is, very convenient ...
Yes I'm trying to use point relais right now whenever possible. However oftentimes Amazon says to me that the items I want to buy can't be delivered to point relais (probably there are restrictions on size and type of products).
This kinda stuff makes me appreciate being in Japan (for now). Cannot beat Japanese customer service. Gonna miss that the most.
It seems to me that being an expat in Japan is a win win with no downside, as one can enjoy everything that works within their society while avoiding all the social pressures the Japanese suffer.
We are planning a trip soon to investigate our insight.
Haven't been there, but anecdata from my friend who spent 2 years there says yes, but you have to probably work remotely, because Japanese companies are very rigid, hierarchical and conservative - culture clash might be hard and you might be suffocating.
Agreed. But working remotely from Japan can be a great lifestyle if you can pull it off. Almost all of Japan's downsides come from working for traditional Japanese companies.
The wages are also very low for computer programming compared to the US, despite a cost of living that is not much lower.
Bienvenue à Colis Privé.
This shitty company is the worst delivery one I know but for some reason Amazon France uses it to deliver to me (west of Paris).
I either get a "we were there" note when I was home, or nothing.
I complained to Amazon but it is maybe time to get it to social keyword with a #DropThatShittyCompany or something.
Is it not possible to have stuff shipped to our workplace address. I've been doing that for years.
Use a PaketShop, much better. Not sure how they're called in proper english.
> "I do not need signature. Drop at doorstep"
Isn't the point of the signature to protect them? You can't just say "I don't need a signature, I promise not to sue you." and expect them to just be ok with that, or have I got the wrong end of the stick here?
Why not? You say that with some authority, as if it's well known that this option doesn't exist. Why, then, do all the delivery companies give you the mechanism to waive the signature?
Sure you can. Many offer this option officially. For example, when I've ordered iPhones from Apple, they let me "pre-sign" online before delivery, which means the delivery person will drop it off if I'm not home.
Of course, the tradeoff is that if your package gets stolen, they're no longer responsible for it, which is why I've never actually done this.
Absolutely. If I were ordering bigger ticket items, you can be sure I'd tell them "I want to pick it up at the shipping office".
But in my case/story, it was $5 set of PCBs I had fabricated. Shipping was $20 for what amounted to an ePacket. I took the chance of having someone steal them (unlikely) to tell them to just drop it off at my dorrstep (in reality, a screened in porch).
Yeah, it can be totally reasonable to waive the signature in exchange for assuming liability. Depends on where you live, what you ordered, how you feel that day....
I've done it a lot but I'd be given pause for something worth a thousand bucks. But like, I'm not taking time off of work to sign for a PlayStation game.
Some carriers offer that option but it usually seems to waive the (limited) liability they would have had for stolen packages.
I live in a 130,000 person city. UPS will not drop packages off to your neighbor period, even though that is an option on the "Sorry we missed you slip." UPS will not drop package without signature. UPS took 2 weeks to deliver my replacement part for my vacuum. When I see the UPS driver I tell him UPS policy sucks and is anti-city and his response was maybe there were too many packages taken. "I've lived here for 10 years and never had a package taken and this part is $10."
United States Postal Service allows drop offs without signatures and dropping off at neighbors. I constantly request that my packages are not mailed by UPS.
Unfortunately package theft is common. Our neighborhood suffered several thefts and eventually the police put fake packages with GPS trackers into the delivery boxes then waited to see where they went. They ended up in the house of the person who delivered the newspaper..
Happens here in London, UK. Amazon like to leave packages on my doorstep. Stolen every single time. To fix this they appear to have left instructions to "sling it over the back fence" or "jam it in the letterbox and destroy it".
Best note through the letterbox so far: "Package is in the recycling bin".
I'm taking it that the friendly postal person knew it wasn't one of the 'every other Wednesdays'.
That seems rather risky. I see lots of people rummaging through recycling cans on the street for the recycling value of the cans and bottles. Or someone could just throw a big gross thing on top of it.
I was amazed to learn that the USPS leaves packages on the door step, always. I mean this was a surprise to me because I grew up in the UK where said package would be stolen in short order, and then for the past 20 years living in the US I was in either apartments where there is no doorstep, or out in the wilds where the postman doesn't come within a few miles of your doorstep. I'd never been in a situation where the post office were able to leave a package on my stoop. But now we have an office location in town with a bone fide door step, right on a busy street and they leave packages in plain sight. When I expressed surprise I was told this is standard procedure for the USPS everywhere. I have a security camera pointed at the door step and so far no thief has stepped forward to have their picture taken...
This reminds me of a segment on Top Gear (the BBC TV show for those unaware) in which Jeremy Clarkson is lamenting that having a pickup truck in the UK would result in your belongings in the bed being stolen when stopped.
For what it's worth, I have ordered many online items (100+) over the last several years, and every one has been left on my doorstep by USPS or UPS. The only time I have had a package stolen was during a summer I spent in a notably dangerous area. The rest of the orders were safely delivered, in my case to a college-town apartment or a suburban family home.
Fair enough, but counterpoint: I live in a vintage building on a busy street, and the USPS carriers never leave packages on our doorstep. Each apartment has put up a little sign on their front door indicating how they'd prefer packages left (on the stairs, out back, whatever), which the postal workers all adhere to.
I see them walking past my window, from the front of the building to the back, all the time.
So they must have some flexibility...
I got dire warnings from my neighbor when I bought my house that package thieves were on the loose (along with warnings about coyotes and heroin addicts). So far the packages have been fine and I haven't seen any coyotes or heroin addicts either, so hopefully my run of good luck continues.
We have package theft and coyotes. So two of out three ain't bad..
I mean I'm sure all that stuff is going on somewhere, but, irrational as it may be, as long as I personally haven't encountered it I don't feel compelled to take any particular countermeasures.
I would never allow them to leave my package at neighbors house and if they do I would write a note to the support. This is my package and I want it delivered to me. I can't understand what is the problem of rescheduling the delivery for the time that suits me the best. Or scheduling the best time in the first place. Why Japan can do this? Even Japanese Post (not only a courier) allows you to define when you'd like to get your delivery and they deliver even at 21:00. Why other countries can't follow is beyond me.
For most people, it's more convenient to go to their neighbour and collect the package right away than it is to try and reschedule a delivery for some other time.
Most people don't have hostile neighbours.
The bigger and more dense the city, the more hostile and private the neighbors.
I take packages for all my 10 neighbors, they are happy with it, but we live in a civilised city and all our delivery drivers are extremely competent and nice
I have never noticed this in my life. Center City is where neighbors know each other and actually help each other out. The suburbs have always been hostile and anonymous.
I went to college in Minneapolis and I knew all my neighbors and most of the homeless people. When I visit my friends in the suburbs they have no idea who their neighbors are unless there is open hostility. Look at Senator Paul.
I just notice that their is a HUGE bias to bash cities all the time. When you live in a city you actually get to know and live with a wide diversity of people, hence the normal more liberal bias. My father inlaw almost dies inside anytime he visits us and can't ever say anything positive about the city (They live in the country in West Virginia and he is a successful contractor). He thinks everyone is on drugs and lives off of $45,000 for the Government. No one knows how much the working poor works these days and West Virginia's drug problem is 10x that of my city. It's just a anti-city bias.
Wow, yea, some of these responses are crazy! If I had those neighbors I'd GTFO and move to a sane neighborhood. Next time someone accuses me of being a NIMBY because I don't want low cost crack housing built next door to me I'm going to remember this thread.
Sounds great, I'm not being sarcastic, it really does, I'm somewhat sick of the 'big city' bs.
You ever hear Merle Haggard's "Big City"? It's a classic and the story behind its composition is almost too good to be true. The story goes, he was on tour and his bus driver just lost it at some point and said "I'm tired of this dirty old city! As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather be somewhere in the middle of Montana!" and Merle Haggard was struck with inspiration and wrote the whole song (of which the thing about the dirty old city and Montana is a motif) almost on the spot. Then he supposedly shared the songwriting royalties with the bus driver.
"The song was inspired by a remark by Dean Holloway, Haggard's lifelong friend and tour bus driver. At the end of a packed two-day recording session at Britannia Studios in Los Angeles, Haggard went to the bus to check on Holloway, who had been minding the bus, and asked him how he was doing. Holloway responded, "I hate this place. I'm tired of this dirty old city." Haggard immediately saw inspiration, and began writing the song, based on Holloway's remark, on a nearby pad of paper. "I'm tired of this dirty old city" became the song's first line. Haggard decided that the chorus should include the narrator talking about moving elsewhere, and asked Holloway where he would rather be, to which Holloway responded, "If it were up to me, it'd be somewhere in the middle of damn Montana." "Somewhere in the middle of Montana" became part of the chorus. Haggard rushed back into the studio, where the band was packing up, and told them to unpack their instruments in order to record one last song; the band recorded the song in one take, with no rehearsal.
Haggard credited Holloway as a co-writer, entitling him to half the royalties for the song, which amounted to around half a million dollars for Holloway."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_City_(Merle_Haggard_song)
I did pretty well for reciting it from memory.
Agreed!
When I was a student I lived in a large student apartment building. Packages were regularly delivered to whoever was walking into the door at that moment or the first doorbell to answer, if the intended recipient was not home.
Then the person who got the package posted on an internal facebook page: "I've got a package for 304 in 605" and they would be collected.
The system worked perfectly and there were a lot of packages, I guess many potentially worth a lot.
Most neighbours round me are also out during the day.
The only 24/7 occupied house is across the road, and it's the local drug-dealing hangout, so that's a nope as they'll either fence the package or try to snort or inject it.
Most of the transient 'residents' wouldn't remember the day of the week, let alone whether they had been gifted a package.
No you have to Opt In. You write a note to leave the package at my neighbor. That is the best option for people living in cities without an Amazon Locker. My grocery store has a UPS locker system for pickup but they don't allow you to send your Amazon packages there.
I suspect this is a combination of delivery services being simultaneously an oligopoly and heavily unionized. The combination of little competition and high wages makes it difficult to justify going the extra mile.
For what it's worth I know at least UPS has a premium service where you can schedule your delivery to a specific time during the day.
The thing is, in Japan it's nothing special. Even post office would do it. More, if you wish they would lleave the package in nearest combini so you can collect on the way back from work. Combini is a convenient store available almost on every corner. It's just their customer service is on a different level. Keeping good reputation is important for them, event if sometimes cost a little bit more.
My biggest beef is that I can't seem to get UPS/Fedex/USPS to just open my front porch door and leave my packages inside anymore. My philosophy is to generally never lock anything if I can help it; if somebody wants to get in and steal my (largely worthless) stuff, all a lock is going to do is mean they kick down my door and then I have to replace the stuff AND the door.
So instead I end up with packages left out in the rain, or slung in the snowbank during a blizzard that I don't find until spring comes...
I can’t remember the last time I’ve signed for a UPS package. When we had a regular driver, back when I was racing bikes, he once said “you’re supposed to sign for this ($10 package), but I’ve dropped thousands of dollars worth of bike parts on your doorstep and you haven’t complained yet.” True, in seventeen years we’ve never had a package stolen from our doorstep here in Redmond, WA.
That said, I work from home on iPhone delivery day. Were I a thief, that would be just way too easy, knowing the day of delivery and an approximation of what the package looks like.
Does no one sign up for UPS My Choice? Very handy. I have them leave packages at the UPS store down the street from me pretty frequently, pre-sign, etc. They do all of the things they don't for you.
I think home package drop off vaults are going to grow in popularity. Getting one at my office to handle late package deliveries was really useful.
Does this usually work with any Twitter account? Even a new one with no followers? Or do you need to have followers or fame or something for the tweet to carry any weight in practice?
There should be a service where you can rent the use of a Russian troll twitter account to make customer service request tweets, taking advantage of its millions of crazy alt-right wing nut job follower parrots who will mindlessly retweet your message and threaten to boycott the company and make death threats and show up with automatic weapons at the offices of the company that didn't give you good customer service. Just mention the customer service rep's name was "Hillary".
Wow, that's a whole new way to play the 6-degrees-of-vladimir-putin game.. kudos to you, kremlin troll account
Well, if you take out the Russia angle, you can definitely buy followers on Twitter.
I’ve only got a couple hundred followers and rarely tweet and it’s been massively effective a couple of times for me. It helps to work in a popular or trending hashtag for good measure.
Any account. I’ve had good experiences reaching out on Twitter to Comcast, TMO, and airlines. I complained about having a problem, but also was not rude.
I've found that the inverse is true. If you are polite, Royal Mail will ignore you. If you call them thieving bastards, you'll have your refund sorted by the end of the day.
Public shaming seems to get you the best customer service. We need to use that more often.
Hard disagree on the 2nd point. It seems that needing to reach out to social media to get normal business processes to work has become the default.
Now I need to actively be registered on N social media sites and harass the company in question until such time as they bother to respond, instead of having just had to connect with the company and directly resolve the issue.
"We need to use it more" doesn't mean we should have to use it more, just that's the most effective avenue we do have left.
I’ve had similar experiences with delivery companies (UPS seems to be the worst for me) over the years, and sort of just accept now that this happens from time to time. After all, the “fucknut idiot” delivery driver is just a person who can makes mistakes like the rest of us. If they don’t deliver on time, I reach out to customer service and ask for a refund (works well, if you can put up with the hassle of calling)
Making a mistake is getting the house next to yours. You know, making good-faith attempts that are a mistake. This wasn't a mistake. At all.
"Making mistakes" and malicious compliance of literally driving by and not stopping are 2 very different things. Shows up on their GPS they were "there".
I was at the house, sitting on my screened-in porch when DHL 'updated' to "Sorry you didnt sign". First, I said no sig needed. Then they didn't even bother to stop. I WATCHED THEM DRIVE BY. They didn't do their fucking job.
username checks out.
Apple and Amazon have been the exceptions for me.
My mom ordered something for me off Amazon, but typed in the wrong address. I walked to that address and they denied receiving any packages. From their support page, they'll call you and you'll be speaking to someone within 20seconds. They sent a replacement without question and without charging (the item was less than $50). Other times, with other issues, they'll ship you a replacement and ask you to keep the original.
I bought an Apple laptop recently. It shipped with Sierra, but I wanted to start with a clean install of High Sierra. After installing stuff I had a suspicion something wasn't compatible with High Sierra and wanted to downgrade. Frustratingly, they removed the download in the App Store. The first person I talked to on the phone walked me through an Internet Recovery--and knew the difference between installing from the Recovery Partition (which is the OS installed, High Sierra) and Internet Recovery (which installs the OS the hardware shipped with, Sierra). That, and the ability to talk me through a series of screens (including partitioning) over the phone is no easy task. The same person called me back 2 hours later to confirm everything finished installing.
I think for most other larger companies, support is a huge expense with little upside. It's cheaper to waste your time then their's. The most cost effective thing to do is hire a small number of very polite people and give them the power to do nothing.
I have never, ever dealt with any above mid-sized company that handles customer service and delivery well.
I have. Amazon. Over 15 years now and flawless every time.
That's because they fuck over their sellers.
I tried to sell a modem which I had previously purchased through Amazon. The modem came both as a bundle and by itself. I listed it correctly as purchasing the modem only, listed it "like new" (when really it was basically new, not removed from the box). It was actually the lowest price you could get it used.
Someone bought it, shipped it to them faster than necessary. About a week later I got a notice from him saying that he wanted a refund because he had thought that he was getting the bundle (not just the modem as it was listed). Why they thought they were getting the bundle like new for that price is beyond me, but whatever. I rejected the refund because it was their mistake and it would have been too much work to be worth it. Sensible, yeah?
They initiated a claim against my account and Amazon withdrew the money (it was actually great timing - overdraft). The claim said the the item condition was wrong (it was not). You are able to contest any claim like that so I took the time to explain what had happened and why the issue wasn't even about the item's condition. I don't know if they just didn't bother reading it or if all responses are handled with robots because I get a very superficial answer that didn't even acknowledge what had happened. I repeated the process in order to try to talk to another person, wrote up another account of what happened (including the new non response), and got the same kind of non-response (you must list items under the correct condition, blah, blah, blah) from a different rep. Basically, they just didn't bother answering me. I'd already wasted way more time than necessary on what I thought was gonna be a little extra cash, so now some dude in Minnesota got my modem for free, and I got an overdraft for my trouble. That's a cool trick.
Got no clue what's going on over there but I'll never sell anything there again if I can avoid it. Worst customer experience ever.
Worst seller experience ever. FTFY.
You are not the customer, just a seller. You don’t matter. The “Amazon smile” is for customers only.
Exact same thing happens on eBay, at least here in the UK.
In the US too, and probably everywhere else as well.
I 100% agree.
The day that I became a lifelong Amazon customer was when I mistakenly ordered a mattress to the wrong address via Prime. I noticed the mistake some 28 hours after placing the order. I nearly said that I called them to tell them about my mistake, but that isn't true. I typed in my number online AND THEY CALLED ME when an operator was available. The operator quickly calmed me down and told it was "nothing to worry about". She cancelled the shipment of the mattress going to the wrong side of the US and placed an order for a replacement within 2 minutes of learning about the problem. On top of that, without being asked, she upgraded my replacement to 1 day shipping FOR FREE so that my order would still arrive by the original delivery date.
Since I screwed up in such a ridiculous way, that I would have fully expected to have gotten slammed with a return shipping fee, a shipping fee for the replacement, and even some kind of BS replacement fee. But Amazon took the bullet and provided me the the best customer service I ever could have hoped for, which prevented me from having to sleep on the ground for even one extra night.
I agree, it's great for the consumer.
But amazon didn't take the bullet. The seller of the mattress took the bullet.
Amazon didn't lose a penny.
Sellers just have to assume a 10% loss of gross margin due to issues like this. It's not the end of the world, but that's where the cost is.
> Sellers just have to assume a 10% loss of gross margin due to issues like this. It's not the end of the world, but that's where the cost is.
This explains why individuals selling individual items, or a small number of items, can get so burned too. You need sufficient volume to cover all the inevitable bullets you have to swallow.
>Sellers just have to assume a 10% loss of gross margin due to issues like this. It's not the end of the world, but that's where the cost is.
Cost of doing business. Reminds me of the book "What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars" where Jim Paul describes how someone trading in lumber doesn't cry about 20% of the wood being useless, he knows 20% will be useless and he writes that up under cost of doing business. Just like refunds and customer support are a cost of doing business.
Amazon support is absolutely terrible. Amazon seller support is even worse.
I mean, the worst. Only matched by health insurance companies.
The huge problem with Amazon support is everyone I've ever interacted with (besides that one time I got forwarded to a supervisor) either have a fundamental lack an understanding of the English language or lack reading comprehension (or listening if phone support). They also won't or can't spend any significant time on any one customer inquiry, they need to move onto the next.
On the buyers side they understand how to refund an order which they do readily, ship items, say you can keep items that are errors, maybe some account stuff, and that's basically it. If you need them to do anything else that requires them to understand your inquiry it's an uphill battle.
Basically, you get terrible support if your inquiry can't be solved by quickly pressing the "refund" button or the "ship item" button. I guess most buyers usually only need those two buttons though.
I actually think that's part of why they have such a big problem with counterfeits (and other issues). If someone complains about a counterfeit some low paid employee who doesn't really understand the problem just presses "refund order," the customer stops complaining, and the systemic issues remain.
I have a nightmare Amazon seller support story, but I won't go into it for fear of spiking my blood pressure to dangerous levels. It was only resolved by me finally getting forwarded to a supervisor, who, finally, understood English.
Yeah, that's absolutely the problem they have. One time I ordered some road bike tires. Amazon sent mountain bike tires by the same manufacturer. I told Amazon. They sent me two more of the wrong tires. I told Amazon. They sent me two more of the wrong tires. I gave up. They don't read anything you write to them, they just either send you something or give you your money back.
I guess most people value money over anything else, but if I take the time to help them correct their inventory problem, it would at least be nice if they fixed it.
Very similar thing happened to me about 12 years ago.
I ordered some glassware, very fragile. It was packaged incorrectly, basically shoved in too big of a box with no padding or anything. Or if there was padding it was very, very minimal. It arrived broken, of course. It would have been nothing short of a miracle if glassware survived that packaging.
Told Amazon the item broken due to poor/incorrect packaging. They sent another packaged identically, broken.
Told Amazon, same thing, they sent another packaged identically, broken.
I tried one more time begging them to package it correctly and got another packaged identically, broken.
I just gave up and decided I didn't really need it, got a refund, and continued to drink out of dollar store plastic cups. There was absolutely no getting through to them what they problem was. I ended up feeling defeated with 4 sets of broken glasses.
Another "they don't read anything you write to them" story... Several years ago I sold a memory card via FBA. The buyer returned the card, they said they were returning it because of a defect, they said "card slows down significantly after it gets half full." Amazon's wearhouse receives the return, they mark it as sellable, and then sell it (as new) again!! Clearly its not new, the problem was evident only from using it! The new buyer didn't complain or ask for a refund, thankfully for me, but the card might have been commingled (I don't recall) so another seller might have been dinged if Amazon shipped out the used card to their buyer.
If the return reason is "defective," why would mark as sellable ever be possible?
> If the return reason is "defective," why would mark as sellable ever be possible?
Hope the next sucker doesn't catch it.
Something something, free market, YOLO.
>If the return reason is "defective," why would mark as sellable ever be possible?
Because customers don't always tell the truth, as in your perception of truth might be different from my perception of truth, meaning what's considered defective to you might be perfectly acceptable to me and to other customers.
That's my experience as well. As long as all you want is return faulty/not-needed-after-all articles then Amazon is great. Never ever had a hiccup in 10 years and I order a lot of stuff.
However if your request is a little more specific and doesn't fit neatly in whatever scripts they're using then it's a bit of a mess. I mainly use amazon.fr so I've interacted with the french support but like you they had a rather thick accent and seemed to have trouble understanding me at times even though I did my best to speak slowly and clearly. In the end I could see that they kept reverting to the script and where a bit lost when I tried to steer things away from it.
I just wanted to complain about a transporter who kept failing to deliver my parcels so it wasn't a big deal but I think it would've been pretty difficult to interact with this (nonetheless very kind) person if I had something a little trickier and more important to figure out with them.
> I've interacted with the french support but like you they had a rather thick accent and seemed to have trouble understanding me at times even though I did my best to speak slowly and clearly.
That's the one advantage of living in a tiny country (the Netherlands) that speaks a language hardly anyone else does. It's impossible to outsource customer support to low-wages countries because you simply can't find anyone there who speaks Dutch.
There are lots of low-wage Afrikaans speakers, and Wikipedia says there "is a large degree of mutual intelligibility between" Dutch and Afrikaans. So there must be some other explanation for why you get native Dutch speakers for customer support?
Afrikaans is not similar enough for customer support roles. If you hear Afrikaans as a Dutch person you can sort of get the meaning of what they are saying if they speak slow enough, but it's not like it's just a dialect.
It's a bit like the difference between English and Jamaican Creole.
Actually there are companies doing that type of outsourcing in Serbia. Wages there are still low and they have enough employees who can speak even the smaller European languages.
I suppose the wages in the Dutch Caribbean must be fairly good then.
I think the main industry there is tourism. If there are any Dutch speaking callcenters there they aren't very common, I've never encountered it in real life (you'd instantly notice by the accent).
I don't doubt you're right about the "anything but basic refund/reship is a nightmare", but I think the reason people are praising Amazon (and I would too) is that most other companies (big OR small) don't even do that, even though it resolves like 90+% of the customer support issues and leaves happy customers behind.
As for sellers, yes, it's obvious they're getting screwed.
>I actually think that's part of why they have such a big problem with counterfeits. If someone complains about a counterfeit some low paid employee who doesn't really understand the problem just presses "refund order," the customer stops complaining, and the systemic issues remain.
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-i...
GO through the subsection
>Pulling the andon cord
I really don't understand why individual people try to sell small items through Amazon or eBay anymore. The chance of getting cheated is just so high that unless you're a high-volume seller making a business out of it the risk/reward ratio just doesn't make sense. Better to sell for cash on Craigslist or Nextdoor (with the transaction done in the police station parking lot for safety).
I don't know where you get the idea I'm a small time seller from my post. I move about $20,000 in product a year.
Well I used to. I pretty much quit about six months ago.
> everyone I've ever interacted with either have a fundamental lack an understanding of the English language or lack reading comprehension (or listening if phone support)
The place is staffed by Indians, what did you expect? Have you ever spoken to someone in a NOC?
Probably my worst experience was with Amazon. Ordered a big sofa sized furniture. Got wrong color which was cheaper. Asked them to adjust the price since I didnt want to go through the hassle of shipping it back. No. The guy just said "we dont price match, you can sent it back and order again". Not even a sorry. I got so frustrated at his response, it ruined my day. Tried twice more with similar response. I sent it back, ordered again (at a lower price than my original order).
In Amazon's defence, this items price was dropping heavily during that period. But I wasnt asking them to give me new price.
Because of this incident plus Amazon taking 4-5 days to just start shipping and the news about fake goods, Amazon is no longer my first preference.
I ordered a small item 5 dollars item came was different tried to refund but wanted me to pay to ship back the product which costs more than the product. I gave up.
For me, Amazon by far has been the worst. Closing my account for buying too many things (and inevitably returning a tiny fraction of them because they were fake/shitty quality as most Amazon products) is the most insane thing I've ever experienced. This while I was paying for Prime. The only thing they didn't do is threaten to sue me, but stealing my membership fee is pretty on par with that.
Customer since before 1999.
Only if everything goes into the two categories: 1.) send again 2.) reimburse/take back
Everything else doesn't work at all.
I had a phone from Amazon, empty box delivered, they had no way to stop the contract, weeks of pain, my threat getting the police involved solved the problem.
Amazon Logistics didn't deliver important stuff with evening express several times, Amazon did nothing.
One time they tried to deliver an order at 10pm (!). And I had a 10-minute discussion with support who told me it was deliver 10am until they reread the entry and agreed it was 10:07pm - at an office address.
Support stuff lied to me and put lies in their support system.
I recently received an empty box from Amazon. No more than 5 minutes with their online support and they had created a new order to re-send the item with their fastest shipping option. Easiest customer support experience I've ever had honestly.
I'm suprised, a phone with an attached contract?
It's usually the other way around (at least in germany / europe).
You "buy" a telephone contract and get the smartphone on top (priced into the contract of course).
>I have. Amazon. Over 15 years now and flawless every time.
Wow, I have a completely different experience. I had been a Prime member up until about 2 years ago when my last 10 out of 10 deliveries arrived late. Since I noticed Amazon wasn't really competitive with other sellers on E-Bay, etc, I only used them when I actually needed something fast. So, moral of the story is I paid more for something to get it sooner, and it still didn't help.
Amazon is generally only competitive on big ticket items that you'd get free shipping on anyway. So I found Prime to be worthless.
I cancelled my prime account after a string of issues, the worst of which I’ll summarize.
I bought a $1300 camera, received a $500 camera. Easy error, easy fix. I wish.
I had to call twice to initiate the return, call twice more to find out why a moth later I had neither a camera nor my money. Turns out the return was silently rejected. Why? “Wrong item returned.” No kidding! Had to call a fifth time to finally get this resolved, but at the end of that call I realized I was paying amazing $100 annually to fix issues that they caused.
I’ve mostly had good experiences, but once I had a battery charger fail and destroy some batteries. I spent over an hour on the phone while the CSR tried (and failed) to look up how voltage worked so they could blame the failure on me instead of just sending me the $60 order again. Just gave up after ~90 minutes.
Amazon contract deliveries to organisations like Yodel, who you can't contact directly and have exactly the same problems with failing to deliver or chucking parcels over the fence etc.
Everytime I see my package is being delivered by Yodel I just sighs, they always find a way to fuck up an order.
But to be fair, it seems like Amazon, are no longer working with Yodel, I have not seen any item I have from bought from Amazon.co.uk to be delivered by Yodel for at least two years.
Amazon just use "Amazon Logistics" which I refuse to pay for any random guy with a van to deliver stuff randomly anytime up to 10pm
Yep. Other replies about bad selling experiences notwithstanding, as a buyer, Amazon's experiences are mechanically great. They might sacrifice a seller on an altar every week, and that would be sad, but it makes your statement no less true.
I have years of free Prime because my 2 day orders never come in 2 days. At least they give you something when they mess up, but they do mess up a lot.
customer service, sure. but delivery.... eh. A few weeks ago my brother ordered a tripod and got a toilet instead. Someone I follow on Twitter ordered an Xbox and got.... Capri Suns[1].
https://twitter.com/StefMichalak/status/928174251395469317
I would agree until they started using the USPS.
Waiting at home specifically for stuff to be delivered or picked up is insane. Let me pick it up and send it at the post office. Or at some other convenient nearby location (supermarkets are getting popular for this, although I recently had to pick something up at a paint store(?)).
Standard Dutch mail often leaves undeliverable packages with neighbours, which is great when you live in a good neighbourhood with good neighbours who are home a lot, and perhaps not so great when you don't.
But skipping work for this is stupid and unreasonable.
This is how it works in Sweden, where all post offices are now integrated with grocery stores. I’m not even sure the typical package above a certain size has the possibility to go to your doorstep, it basically just goes to the nearest supermarket.
The best seems to be to hand off the hard parts to smaller organisations and allow you to talk to those organisations (technically, the local delivery driver likely is a contractor, but you don't have a direct line or relationship with them).
E.g. when getting warranty repairs for my Thinkpad, dealing with the central Lenovo organisation wasn't great, but once they accepted "customer device has an issue" they pass it off to local service partner, and those (in my experience) deal with issues quite well. And if you don't have on-site support, some repair places take your device and handle the warranty communication for you (and have an established relationship with Lenovo making that easier). Probably not the cheapest possible setup for them though.
> I have never, ever dealt with any above mid-sized company that handles customer service and delivery well
Apple
Much as I like Apple I'm not sure they handle the situation described better than any competitor:
> "A courier claims they called at your house and got no answer, even though you were in and they didn't. You call customer services, but they have no way at all to contact the courier and tell them to go back and try again. Even if they're only two minutes down the road. The system deliberately puts a firewall between the reps and the delivery infrastructure, because any kind of ad-hoc action to resolve customer issues interferes with the logistics planning for the day's deliveries."
If UPS claims they knocked and you didn't answer there's nothing more Apple can do than to tell you to wait for tomorrow.
Their customer service is genuinely great - but the firewall definitely exists between the shipper and the deliverer.
I think any large company works and coordinates with another large company if it's advantageous to them. Amazon works closely with USPS to drop items as close and convenient for USPS. Netflix famously worked with USPS on their DVD envelope design and I believe they even upgraded many USPS sorting machines because it was in their business interest.
I would believe Apple does the same (there's a sibling thread where UPS said they'd swing back by their house in 15m after missing a delivery of an Apple product--may be a coincidence, though).
It's funny, because I actually had this happen exactly once. I had ordered an iPhone 3G for delivery on the first day of its availiability. I was out of the house and rushing back to meet the UPS guy, but missed him. Very disappointed, I called UPS and they said "ok, he will swing back around in 15 minutes, does that work?" I remember being astonished, because as you point out, this never happens. I chalked it up to Apple putting pressure on UPS to deliver all the phones that day. Maybe even providing monetary rewards if over x% of the phones were delivered that day?
UPS has been good to me in that regard. I once had a package that needed signature that I wasn't home for. He left the slip on my door. About six hour or so later, towards the end of the driver's shift, he was driving by my house again while I was getting home. He saw a car pull into my driveway so he stopped and brought out the package and gave it to me while I was getting out of the car. Said "I tried to deliver this earlier and nobody was home." Very nice of him to 1) remember and 2) actually care.
I have an aquatintance who works at UPS and loves it. YMMV though.
This is not fully true. Amazon used DHL with me once - they didn't deliver because of a code/gate thing I used to live at. I called Amazon and they got the DHL DRIVER on the phone - me, Amazon customer support, DHL Driver on a single phone call. Amazon CS fucking rocks sometimes. So yes, there are companies that can go the extra mile and seriously dial up the heat on the delivery company.
I think the best CS will call and deal with shipping issues. Crappy companies will have none of that.
Amazon and Apple are the two biggest companies I can think of that does awesome CS, and that's because they do it in-house and they rely on consumer lock-in. If an Apple fanboy or an Amazon Prime member have a super-bad experience, they will leave and get locked in somewhere else.
Weirdly I have found Amazons support good right up until I tried to exchange a Kindle Paperwhite.
I’ve returned a fair amount of things to amazon. I had previously even received actual incorrect products in the packaging of the product I ordered (someone probably returned them to amazon as a scam) and I was able to return them without question. Easy peasy.
When I tried to return a Kindle Paperwhite that froze up every couple hours however that was a different story. I wasn’t allowed to just return it, I had to talk to support.
First call they had me powercycle it and told me to call back if it froze again. It did. I had done this myself to get it unfrozen many times.
Second call they had me factory reset it and call back if it froze again. It did. I had already done this myself.
Third call they ask “is it frozen right now?” It wasn’t. They tell me to call back when it is frozen.
Fourth call, I have it frozen, they ask me what I see and tell me to tap things to which I explain I cannot, it’s frozen! They then have me power cycle it and try to insist that that fixed the issue. I explain no, I have had this happen like 40 times now. I explain the process I’ve been through with support.
Finally they agree to give me a return authorization!
What is happening is that they are telling you to restart it and to call back later because that's there main goal, to get you off the phone asap in any way possible. Most of the time you get the "authorization" when the call center is not as busy and the rep is allowed to take time (with you on hold) to fill out the return info and follow through with what they should have done during the first call.
I wouldn't get angry at the rep, it's the managers that pressure this kind of behavior in full force, if it's busy and you are on the phone for more then 4 mins, a manger comes over and stands behind you and tells you what to say to end the call even if it doesn't make sense and guaranties the customer has to call back...
To get the best level of service you have to call when it's not so busy. Never call on a Monday or early in the morning, that's when it's the most busy. Slow times are Wed-Fri 1:30pm to about 6pm then anytime after 10pm. Sundays are a good bet if the place is open, although usually most of the reps that work on the weekend are new/less skilled hence prone to make more mistakes.
I've addressed nearly every gripe in this thread by getting a mailbox at a local UPS store. Sure, it's inconvenient and some extra money each month, but I never have packages stolen and there's always a signature available.
The most annoying part is when I deal with someone who makes it hard to deliver to a different address than my home (looking at you, Verizon) but it's always achievable.
Amazon. I would rather order from there than from anywhere else if it's available on Amazon.
They win at ease/speed of delivery and fantastic customer service, and usually price too - which means they own online retail.
The only thing they don't have an edge on is food and used items (although they are trying) and certain things directly from China.
Apple does it great. You get accurate (usually with any errors in favour of pessimism) estimates of lead times and delivery dates, and with AppleCare servicing or replacement of items has always gone super-smooth for me.
Mostly I'd agree with you, but milage varies. I for one have never had anything but stellar support from Apple, but I know people who've had nothing but struggles. GitHub has the best support I've ever encountered, both as a typical customer and as an enterprise customer – they put everyone else to shame in my book. But again, I hear stories from others who've experienced otherwise.
Courier services as you mention though seem to have terrible service across the board. It doesn't matter if they are big or small, this seems to be some sort of hard rule almost.
Honestly, a lot of the CS/delivery issues are somewhat dependent upon the consumer market that the company targets. Some communities are very word-of-mouth and reputation based. One of the ones I'm involved in is the firearm community, which is very much that way. Places that have bad CS or delivery issues get lambasted and are very affected by said issues, and those that go out of their way to help and assist their customers are hoisted far above.
Actually, some of the biggest companies ever are known for their top notch customer service: Apple and Amazon.
I've been trying to buy a Herman Miller desk for the past few months. It's a quagmire and I'm still table-less. You'd think a two thousand dollar table would come with some customer service.
Overstock.com has excellent customer service. We order a lot from them and when something arrives damaged or with missing parts, they always have handled it quickly.
(I am not affiliated with Overstock)
The thing is most couriers have orders to do it like this to go faster, even though it is not assumed publicly. So if it happened one time with a company, it will probably go on.
After a lengthy lengthy process, I recently only got things moving forward with UPS, after emailing the CEO directly (found the email online, and briefly listed the situation). Soon after I got two calls, and it was fixed relatively fast (still had to follow up twice...).
> what that's potentially worth in terms of wasted effort, lost orders and customer hostility.
I agree with all of the above but wanted to underline this. Because it snowballs so much. First call they explain the problem. Second call they explain how they explained the problem to someone before, how instead they understood X and did Y. Third call... and so on. Add to that long waiting times and it compounds even more.
I did work in customer service and while I loved the people I talked to for the most part, it was really obvious that they were so nice to me because I was simply 100% frank, which was unexpected for them. And it was kinda heartbreaking how many thanked me just for listening, and not deflecting any blame, or just pointing to the EULA or whatever, but treating them like a normal person -- even though I really couldn't fix their problem, just agree that it sucks and wish them a nice day and mean it. I always tried but in many cases there was just nothing I could do except tell them all I know, and how sure I am about it. The bar was so incredibly low. When I offered people to call them back to follow up on a problem, they always were surprised when I actually did. Officially, I would have to ask permission for every outbound call, but I simply decided that that would just make it take even longer in total, so I did that once. I just made sure I was there to solve problems not chit chat, and then did what I considered necessary, not what people who didn't even talk with customers thought might be good. And when calling other departments, I also encountered people who said "you know, officially it would be X, but I think I can fix this", and they did. But it was a total crap shoot, sometimes they just made it worse or said they'd do something end then not do anything.
Once I told a coach that if the bread he eats were made as sloppily as he had suggested to me I should handle a specific problem (that is, hand it off in exactly the same way that happened 3 times before, knowing it would resolve nothing but make it someone else's problem), he would be dead in 3 months. He threw a fit and dragged me to my team leader, who had my back - a month later I hear I have a "solution rate" (some customers were asked after the call to rate friendliness etc. and if their problem was solved) of 66%, twice above the average. You might say I had ignored "orders" because I considered them bad, and my results had proven me correct. It didn't change anything about the process, but it did give me leg room if you will. At the end of the day I did the job the way I did it because I thought, if I'm going to be a drone for shitty pay, at least I want to be able to sleep at night, right? The job simply wasn't worth squirming and lying all day when I could try to make a little difference at least to that one person who had to ask me for assistance after some awfully long waiting period. But it ended up being fun and meaningful I wouldn't have imagined beforehand, and if I had just followed official suggestions and marketing materials, it would have turned out so differently, I would have learned nothing and it would have just been this shitty job I once had.
I don't believe it saves money. Maybe in the short term for the one company or a few execs in it or their shareholders, but in aggregate, it's just a waste. Call centers should simply fulfill some standards for the work and then get paid by the hour, not by call. That's all it would take, people who are in this job would mostly prefer being able to make a good job. During breaks we always used to share stories about customers on some freakish odyssey because of fucking $company. I'm sure there's also people who enjoy what little power they have over helpless callers, but if the incentives were aligned properly, they'd be gone before you can say "welcome to X, my name is Y, how can I help you?" :P
Most complaints I heard from customers, aside long waiting times, unfriendly treatment or outright incompetence, were that they didn't get feedback and had no single point of contact. Like, one person at the company who is assigned with following up on that problem until it's fixed. How would that not be flat out better? It takes 30 seconds to try to reach a customer. Just do that until you reach them, or you see something in their file indicating they called on their own and the issue is solved. Have a mechanism in place for sickness, quitting the job etc, done? Why is that hard? How is the current way better in any shape or form? If I've ever seen anything ripe for disruption, it's call centers. Talk about pain.
Yeah, call centres are especially disastrous. The whole thing is just set up to be bad because the employees are deskilled and disempowered but trying to fix cases where the automation has failed.
See http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/the-politics-of-... (three part series)
Thanks for that!
> some sites experience levels of failure demand, that is to say calls generated due to a prior failure to serve, over 50% of the total inbound calls.
Yeah, that sounds familiar. And the worst part is, as call centers get paid for call volume (and quality, but measuring quality except by the most shallow and misguided metrics would cost money to employ additional real people so it's avoided), it's kind of in their best interest to just have customers call over and over again. I always wondered about the kind of mutually parasitic relationship between call centers and companies that outsource to them, maybe that's really the whole problem, maybe it should be done in-house, period. If you have a big house and that makes it hard, boo-hoo. Make a smaller house, or learn to hack hard things.
> Our first anti-pattern is queueing. Call centres essentially all work on the basis of oversubscription and queueing. On the assumption that some percentage of calls will go away, they save on staff by queueing calls. This is not the only way to deal with peaks in demand, though – for example, rather than holding calls, there is no good technical reason why you couldn’t instead have a call-back architecture, scheduling a call back sometime in the future.
I used to fantasize about this. First off, you can't turn off caller ID for this, but that's fair I think. So you call the hotline, it tells you in what place in the queue you are, and that you can either hold the line or get called back when you are very close to being the next in line. You can call anytime to have an update on your queue position and wait, and if you miss the call (since it would be automatic and there would be no person waiting on the other end just yet, no harm in letting it ring for as long as possible), you're back to square one. Why isn't it already done this or a similar way? Surely such systems exist, even if not (yet) widely used?
Why not allow pressing numbers to change the music as you wait? And last, but not least: how hard is it to loop something properly? (I swear, some of that has to be on purpose, sadism is a better fitting explanation than incompetence.)
> Worse, companies are always tempted to impose on you while you wait – playing music on hold (does anybody actually like this?), or worse, nagging you about using the web site. We will see later on that this is especially pointless and stupid.
Well, they really really want you to use the website. For a lot of "they"'s. Not that they can manage to run that well, either, but it's still cheaper and "scales better". I agree it's stupid, I detested it not because of job security but because I hated the lame website and how pointless it was to try to make any suggestions "above my pay grade", but in their mind, there is a point, it's not just filler.
http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/politics-of-call...
> But the big issue is management, and I think expectations. People expect the experience to be terrible. People expect the job to be status-reducing and generally horrible. People expect that because it’s a cost-centre, there’s no way to improve it other than flogging the slaves harder.
Yes. I was lucky in that I found a way to not reduce my status, but actually learn a lot about myself and people, but that's generally the pattern I saw.
Agreed with everything said here, I think the worst thing above all is that most call centers are outsourced and get paid by the amount of inbound calls taken per hour and hold time metrics. It like solved solutions are not even part of the equation at all, like it's not even in their game plan.
All the managers at these places are pretty uneducated and if you are working in the tech field, you are working with a bunch of people that know nothing about tech getting paid minimum wage, as anyone with the required skills is going to command a higher wage...
They belittle you by requiring you to ask permission to go to the washroom and to go on a 15 min break, which is bad enough, but what makes it worse is that usually the answer was "no, after your next call, ask me again". So it was normal to never get a break at some of these places. Although when they declined my requests to go to the washroom several times, I just said fuck it and went when I wanted.... and this is in Canada here....
The idea of assigning people to specific cases is one of the only ways to get something done right or at least know all the steps that were actually completed. Sadly most places didn't work that way as they "had" to squeeze in that extra call per hour. I'd regularly get in trouble for calling customers back, which to me is umm doing my job sufficiently.
I've found working for the company directly is much better then working for a 3rd party company. In those cases they care more about level of customer satisfaction. Out of all the major corps I've worked for Telus was adequate and Bell was the horrible.
having worked for many large companies in call centers I'll tell you why this happens,
In the call center, when you call in, our number one goal is to get you off the phone ASAP. Every major corp I've worked for never had a way to tell the status of the delivery via their in house software. In times like this we check the notes to see when the last time you called and just keep telling you to wait longer, say "it's sent" even though we have no way of knowing this, we are told flatout to lie.
The major reason is that delivery is outsourced to another company, who then themselves outsources it again to other drivers who will work for the least amount of money possible. So there is no direct way of contacting them or even knowing which sub company is doing the delivery.
All the managers are concerned about is you taking the next call. I have gotten in trouble multiple times for going out of my way to make sure the customer got everything completed properly. Soon as the customer hangs up your headset automatically takes another call, so you don't have time to fill out extra paper work to get what the customer actually needs completed cause you are told to do that "On your own time" and since you get paid minimum wage you don't give a shit if things get done or not due to the poisoned environment.
Now say a real incident happens where you must call the delivery driver, it CAN be done, just that they never tell the employees that because it takes "too long". Basically you call the 3rd party delivery company and tell them what's up and then it's their job to relay the message (if they even know who is doing the delivery!) So only under special circumstances can that be done.
No one cares about wasted effort or customer satisfaction, as long the hold times are low and they can employ the minimal amount of workers then they are doing there jobs...
Another thing, when you cancel your account and the company owes you money, you tell the customer 6-8 weeks to receive the refund. Now if the customer gets really angry and makes a big deal about it, then there is a little button we click on the screen that mails out the refund to the customer the next day! So why do they do that? because of all the interest they make with your money sitting longer in their bank account. This company had 3 internal accounts that had ~2 Million dollars in each of them, filled with customers money just waiting around to be sent out when the automated timer printed out a batch...
All the corporations I've worked for all operated like this, whether I was paid minimum wage or a decent 20$ an hour. I've only worked at one place where they genuinely cared about the customer, but it was small enough in that you had direct communication to everyone, but that place closed cause customer service costs too much money...
Why are you calling Company customer service for Courier problems? Yes, they'll try to help, but a CS rep at Nintendo (or any employee, for that matter) isn't going to be able to do anything to get FedEx back to your house when they've already left.
And can you imagine the logistics nightmare of multiple delivery attempts to the same address on the same day? For every courier that says they called when they didn't, there are people who will go shopping and come back at 3pm to see the slip, then call and complain.
I've had it happen to me where I'm sitting 4 feet away from my front door and I go out to find a slip on the door when they never knocked or rang the bell, but it's unreasonable to expect them to turn around and bring it back, just as it's unreasonable to think that maybe I just didn't hear it even though I was right there.
Some will point out (and some have!) that I could have quite easily saved myself a lot of time, hassle, and lost earnings at this point by just quietly holding on to the extra Switch and saying nothing to Nintendo about it. It certainly would have saved me a lot of stress, but it was morally not something I’d ever consider.
That's his mistake right there. He was under no moral obligation to fix Nintendo's mistake for them. Nintendo had made a string of mistakes up to this point, and one of their mistakes was in his favor.
If you truly have a guilty conscience, then just throw the extra package out, because it is abandoned property.
I've had this happen occasionally. Just know that you are not responsible for stuff like this. My Dad had a similar experience, where spent weeks trying to get a company to honor a warranty, and in the end they sent him two replacement hard drives instead of one. I actually interpret this as a kind of karma. Sometimes good things land in your lap, don't reject them.
> That's his mistake right there. He was under no moral obligation to fix Nintendo's mistake for them......If you truly have a guilty conscience, then just throw the extra package out, because it is abandoned property.
Do you really want to live in a world where everyone does this?
Imagine you are a small start-up where every penny counts and make the odd mistake here and there and people take advantage of that, destroying you.
Or imagine people are kind and help point out your mistake and give back your ~$500 device.
You get to decide which world you live in, because you are creating it.
I think this kind of thing really does depend on whether you're dealing with a small startup or even an individual human that you're screwing over, or a giant implacable machine like a multinational corporation.
There's no obligation to be nice to the machine, it can't recognise it, and it won't be grateful to you.
+1. The machine analogy is excellent. You have moral obligation to humans. You may decide to have moral obligation to society if you like the one your in and want it to grow. But you have zero obligation toward a souless entity. It's a robot. Optimized for profiting from a service it failed to perform adequatly.
A human may harm a robot; or, through inaction, allow a robot to come to harm.
We should rename the constitution "the laws of biologic" and add this.
Agree on the moral obligation to humans, but think it's best to keep the focus on not having a moral obligation to corporations (beyond T&Cs or contracts you willingly consent to). Not that you're wrong with the "souless robot" concept, but with the advances in AI, I wouldn't the first one to play out like Chappie. "Why you humans do this? Why you all lie?" - Chappie
Have you seen "the good place" ? There is a hilarious part where "janet", their omnipotent and omniscient anthropomorphic IA - with basically no concept of suffering - triggers a defense mechanism where she pretends she is scared to die.
Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etJ6RmMPGko
Haha, I haven't seen that before, but that scene really piqued my interest.
[SPOILER]
"Attention, I have been murdered" - Janet
[/SPOILER]
The first season is complete, on netflix, and have a non disapointing ending. The season 2 is running. Nice "feel good" show overall.
You are not taking into account that Nintendo is not a small startup, or an individual. I always go out of my way to help people who need it. I've always found people who've lost cell phones, and I have returned incorrectly shipped items that I have gotten on Ebay and Etsy.
There is a world of difference between a startup or a person, and Nintendo. Nintendo can afford this loss, and maybe they will improve their delivery system because of it.
But if an international mega-corporation accidentally screws themselves instead of me for once, no, I am not going to help them. They would never do the same for me, and it doesn't matter because they are not a person they are just a system, and will not appreciate it anyway.
And also, again, they are abandoning property with me. Are you seriously saying that some corporation can send you something, and expect you to keep it in good condition and then send it back to them? Think about this in terms of responsibility.
Treat others as they would want to be treated. Humans should be treated with kindness, respect, and forgiveness. Hypercapitalisitc international conglomerates should be treated with apathy, taking any advantage of any loophole that you can possibly get away with legally. Given how "they" treat others, its only fitting.
Mistake is a variable that cannot be eliminated. It is something to be written in on everything you do.
If you make enough mistakes to create a destructive scenario. You're doing something wrong.
Here's an similar scenario:
Person A 'mistakenly' misplaces money on the city sidewalk. Who should Person B ethically return it to?
If person B knows that person A was the one to mistakenly misplacing it, as is the case here, I'd say they should try to get it to person A.
> Imagine you are a small start-up where every penny counts and make the odd mistake here and there and people take advantage of that, destroying you.
If sending out 1 widget for free destroys your start-up, then you likely have bigger things to worry about.
If you have a systematic problem of sending out widgets for free, then you likely have bigger things to worry about.
You should also consider the time it would take the company to correct the mistake and whether it's actually worth their time to do so. I'm reminded of this [1] answer on Stack Exchange that sometimes going through customer support costs a company more than they get back from the resolution.
[1] https://travel.stackexchange.com/a/104307
You could do everything right and make no mistakes, and still fail. That's life.
You have a point though, that an economy -- at its core -- is an indirect representation of its host society's morals and values, and throwing around moral indignation does seem appropriate, but it's hard not to side with the defeatists here. Doing the right thing (ie: being morally responsible) carries a risk that only the most steadfast can endure.
I've personally been inconvenienced by this abandoned property issue too.
I agree 100% with the "it is their problem let them discover and fix it" resolution.
Received 4+1 devices, contacted seller, shipped back, somehow I ended up paying for their shipping fee. Could have re-contacted them, did not, retained grudge instead.
Destroying you is harsh. Startups make mistakes all of the time if this is a constant issue it is probably better the issue is visible and can he fixed before scaling.
> He was under no moral obligation to fix Nintendo's mistake for them.
I'm not convinced this is true (well it may be true morally but I don't think it's true legally). IIRC duplicate shipments are not considered Unsolicited Goods and in the UK you are legally required to inform the sender and return them if the sender requests.
Edit: This article[0] seems to suggest the same, but the Citizen's Advice link is broken.
Edit 2: This article[1] is better and includes a proper source[2].
[0]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/30294748/can-you-keep-...
[1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25330615
[2] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2000/2334/pdfs/uksi_20002...
In Germany there is the concept of Unterschlagung: illegally taking hold of an object owned by someone else.
Translates to embezzlement, but that's not quite it, I'd say.
So here I am pretty certain you would have to contact Nintendo.
Who is responsible for the cost of returning the goods?
I believe it's the sender.
Quite often the reason for receiving two items is that the first got stuck somewhere in transit, the customer complained so the company sent out a second item, and eventually both turn up. It seems reasonable under those circumstances for the company to ask for the second one back (politely of course, threatening the customer is never right).
I disagree. The company is now imposing on you for something that is absolutely not your responsibility. They have money set aside for losses like this.
It sounds like Nintendo should ask the courier company to fix things, not you. In a way, he is also a victim of the courier company's bad service, except that the mistake was in his favor.
And also, think about what that implies. How far are you supposed to go if they screw up? What if they do it again, with something more valuable?
You can't apply human morality to large corporations. If someone on Etsy or Ebay made a mistake like that, then yes of course you should ship it back. But corporations of that size are just systems. They will not be hurt or offended if you don't return it, and they won't be gracious if you do.
In consumer law in the EU (which the laws of the UK are supposed to reflect), I believe entities that enter into a consumer contract are in principle, treated equally. That means you have to minimise their losses in the event of a dispute, in the same way that they have to minimise your losses. I would imagine that principle would apply here, though I don't happen to know the specifics of the law in this case.
Just checked UK law. If you receive an extra item as part of a replacement for a broken item or similar and use it the sender has the right to demand payment for the extra item. The correct course of action is to contact the sender who can then choose to collect at their own expense.
I was surprised by this - I thought it would constitute unsolicited goods but it does not due to the extra item having been sent as remedy for a broken item. If someone sends you something out of the blue and then demands payment it is unsolicited goods and you have the right to keep it.
So if my IT system messes up and sends you 10 TV, you have to pay for it or get out of your way to fix it ?
In that scenario, I think it would be you would need to make reasonable effort to collect the item, otherwise you abandon it. If the customer refuses you to collect it, then you can demand payment.
But as the above comment says, you would have had to send the item as part of an existing engagement, such as a purchase or replacement.
No, but you might be required to make reasonable accommodations to allow them to fix it, or minimise the cost of repairing it for them (at their expense). As I understand it, you couldn't just pick the most expensive solution and charge it to them, or obstruct every attempt they made to rectify the problem, simply because you were annoyed/inconvenienced. You may also be required to do other things to minimise the losses they have to compensate you for.
Sorry, I think I misunderstood your example. I read 10 TV as 10 Teravolts, i.e. they blew up your IT infrastructure with a massive electrical surge. Obviously I also mixed up who was sending the 10 TV and who was receiving. You can safely ignore my nonsensical reply. Yes, fortunately for you, if your IT system messes up and sends 10 TV (whatever that is), they cannot just keep the 10 TV. They are required to compensate you for them/it if they want to keep them/it.
If they were sent out of the blue you have no obligation to return them. If they were sent by mistake as part of a remedy of for example a faulty TV, and you decide to use them, the sender is entitled to ask you to pay for them. The correct course of action is to inform the sender, who then has 14 days (according to what I read) to collect them at their own expense.
As long as you don't use them the sender has no right to redress, only to ask for them back.
> I disagree. The company is now imposing on you for something that is absolutely not your responsibility
Ok. What if my payment processor has an issue, through no fault of the seller, and I end up getting charged twice? Do your rules still apply? It seems unreasonable to just assume a 'screw you' attitude from the get go.
At this point I'd sell the extra Nintendo Switch and pay back its price to Nintendo. Seems like it's less trouble than going through Nintendo themselves.
What do you mean by "pay back its price to Nintendo"? Sending them the money? It'd probably cost more in billable accountant time to process it than the amount being received.
What? That sounds absurd. I've had this happen many times to me over the years and I always let them know. I help send it back and everything is fine.
How wasteful that would be to throw it out. Personally I do feel like it's a moral obligation to make an attempt to send it back.
>He was under no moral obligation to fix Nintendo's mistake for them.
He was under no legal obligation. But it was the moral thing to do.
Morality only applies if it applies bidirectonally, and corporations couldn't give two shits about morality.
The story seems like it’s set in the UK; what you’re saying is true to in the USA, but is it true in the UK?
As far as I'm aware no, there was an issue with some Vitas a few years back where people had to send them back.
You are correct: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25330615
Throwing it away would make me feel even worse. I wouldn't want it to be wasted. I'd feel better about giving it to a friend.
What he really should have done was get it delivered or picked up at his workplace so he wouldn't have to stay home waiting for the courier.
I had a similar situation with a development system. It was fairly expensive and was popular. When I ordered it from the vendor, in the middle of the order their server crashed. It came up about an hour later and I found my transaction sitting there in my shopping cart incomplete, so I went ahead and paid for it. Then two weeks later it showed up at my door and I was happy. Then the next day another one showed up with the exact same transaction id.
I called the company and informed them, they offered a refund if I returned it. But I had only the one charge on my CC. Clearly they didn't have a path through their ordering systems that understood 'data corruption' as their root cause. The rep said just to keep it and if the CC got charged we could process a refund then.
Nothing for 3 months and then a collection notice from a debt collector saying I hadn't paid for the development system. I sent back all my documentation, the receipt, the cc statement etc. And explained to them what had happened, but they said they didn't care. I had proved to them that I had satisfied the debt and they marked it 'retired'.
I've still got it, in a box unopened. Sad really.
How embarrassing (for Nintendo). As soon as someone threatens legal you just have to tell them you'll only be engaging via lawyers and you'll be seeking to recover your legal expenses from them once the situation is resolved.
I'm hoping this blows up in Nintendo's faces; they forgot to treat and respect their customers as fellow human beings.
The writer ought to be compensated for his wasted time thanks to their incompetence.
Thanks, I appreciate your comments today as I've been getting a little worried here that the traction this article is getting this morning is going to come back to bite me in the backside.
Whether it's Nintendo or a UK-local entity they sub-contract (it's a bit unclear - either way the address is store.nintendo.co.uk and Nintendo-branded), the policies could use some work.
In 2013, the absolutely terrible defamation laws in the UK were improved somewhat. Before then, you basically couldn't have said anything at all, publicly, about this absolutely shocking incident! IANAL, but now I understand they would have to show actual or probable loss of business because of your published statements. Given how much space you devote to saying how much you love their products and how great they are, I think this would be pretty difficult for them. To me, the tone of your article is overwhelmingly one of wanting to pressure them to fix their bad customer service, not one of wanting to harm their business in any way. Customers should have the right to shame agents of large international companies into reforming bad business practices, without fear of legal ramifications. Having lived in the UK, I feel like companies there regularly get away with murder, figuratively speaking, because of the poor consumer protections in that country.
From what I can see, you've stuck to the facts and been completely honest about the process - it's completely unfair that you should suffer any hardship as a result of it.
It's infuriating to see big corporations act like bullies behind their lawyers, and equally satisfying to see good people stand up to them.
The best thing Nintendo could do - and their senior managers have a window of opportunity here now - would be to deliver a huge apology to yourself personally, along with a promise to review their entire delivery system processes.
It's a great post, and Nintendo does indeed owe you.
But, at this point, I do recommend engaging counsel. As I understand it, truth is not a defense against slander under UK law.
Edit: I meant "libel", not "slander". Also, I was wrong about truth not being a defense. It's just that you need to prove the claims.
Don't be ridiculous, truth is a defence against Libel (written down is libel, not slander).
The onus is on the person who said the thing to prove it is true ("guilty until proven innocent," since it's a civil rather than criminal offence), but as long as he has documentation/emails it's all good.
Indeed, I would be astonished if they sued him for this, it would not end well for them.
Disclaimer: not a lawyer, but an election agent.
I don't recommend engaging council for this because it will cost you a fortune. And in the not unlikely event that you lose, you have to pay their costs as well. You have to ask yourself, "is this something worth spending my house on?"
By "engaging counsel", I didn't mean suing them. I meant getting professional advice regarding the situation.
That tends to involve less than a house, but still costs more than the Switch itself.
(I just got a quote this morning for a what I thought would be simply "explain my property deeds", and it came out at £500...)
So is there a UK equivalent of Nolo?
I'm not sure. There is a small claims court system, but we were talking about slander/libel in which case https://www.justanswer.com/uk-law/7bj5d-sue-someone-libel-sm...
I really would not recommend getting involved with libel law on a pro-se basis.
> truth is not a defense against slander under UK law.
It most certainly is. Defence #1, in fact.
https://www.blakemorgan.co.uk/news-events/news/brief-guide-t...
It is a complete defence, but the burden of proof rests on the defendant.
Yes, that's what I meant.
Under US law, the burden of proof rests on the plaintiff.
Have you considered having the courier pick up the item at your workplace?
I hope he sends them an invoice in accordance with his standard hourly rate.
A pity that multinational companies can usually afford much better lawyers than the average Joe.
It's really not the same as threatening your neighbor with a "We'll see each other in court", for a parking lot dispute.
It's a bluff. Nintendo wouldn't involve lawyers over a Switch, it makes zero financial sense. What happened likely is some tech support drone made a threat, which the corporate never approved.
It make zero financial sense to send 3 switches. But here they are.
This itself is an interesting question. The foundations of the justice system talk about testing everyone equal in the eyes of law but somehow equal access to legal resources is never talked about. I think we need to think over this as a society. There are some countries like Germany where for people with low income the state pays money to hire a lawyer rather than providing a lawyer.
But that is also problematic. What if you have an average income, are part of middle class and have normal job. Now according to this system you are not poor so state won't provide lawyer to you. But hiring a lawyer to represent you against some ridiculous lawsuit by company with huge bankroll and lawyer company on retainer will ruin a person like this. You might have to sell your house just to afford it or something similar and this would financially ruin you and your middle class family.
> Now according to this system you are not poor so state won't provide lawyer to you.
I never said that is system is perfect. You can create mechanisms where you look at incomes and look at percentage of fees to be paid to a lawyer. Similar to how fines are calculated in some countries.
The larger point being made was the current system of representation of giving a public counsel definitely doesn't work. We need to move towards better systems.
I agree. Also law firms used by companies have massive resources (thousands of employees) so a regular person can't fight against a machine like that even if he/she can afford to hire a single lawyer. The system needs to be changed from ground up to give people better options to defend themselves.
http://web.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/h...
> A pity that multinational companies can usually afford much better lawyers than the average Joe.
I'm always amazed at how afraid customers are of companies in the US/UK. Like this article, where they threaten legal action and make the customer responsible for being available to hand off the third Switch. As a customer in a western European country, I'd laugh straight in their face and wouldn't lose a second of sleep over threats like that. I may live in a country that has a weird and at times annoying obsession with rules and regulations, but when it comes to being a consumer, it's great.
The UK is a western European country, and still part of the EU (and therefore bound to its regulations).
Wouldn't a solution be either to:
Force both parties to pool resources, and hire legal help from that pool and no others. So if a large company sues an individual or small one, it pays a large percentage of the latter's legal costs.
Simply to ban private legal representation and have everyone represent themselves in court?
I'm sure large companies would act a bit more nicely if any court case meant the CEO had to personally leave the office and fight it out in court.
It is my understanding that if you win a case, you can request that the other party pay for some legal fees, within reasonable degrees, of course.
Banning private legal representation would be more likely to hurt everyday citizens, rather than CEOs. Large companies would just start to hire lawyers or equivalent as their CEOs. The law system is incredibly complex because our society is equally complex. This is why we train professionals for so many years, and expect them to take regular classes every year so their knowledge is kept up date.
I think it would be interesting to review outcomes of cases where a regular person or small company challenged a large company, as well as the inverse. Just how much power do large multinational companies have? I'd also expect more leniency to be shown to individuals and smaller companies acting in good faith. As I understand it, intent is a large factor in many cases.
Yea but a case like this doesn't need high-powered lawyers. Usually a high-street solicitor will write a letter outlining what's happened, objecting to the legal threat and asking for information on how to return the merchandise. All in all, it should cost ~£60.
£60 is a hell of a lot of money to buy nothing. He doesn't need to do any of that, just arrange to return the item and if Nintendo (or The Hut Group, which is sounds like) screw up the collection, it's their problem. Just keep records of all correspondence.
>A pity that multinational companies can usually afford much better lawyers than the average Joe.
It's a $400 device, that is the extent of the damage; how much do you think they are willing to spend on their legal?
My understanding (IANAL) is, that's not the best strategy. If you have a complaint against a company, it is often the case that the company has an internal complaints procedure (usually a simple 9 step affair that only takes a year or two of constant, vigilant effort). If you don't follow it, you might actually find it very difficult to recover expenses for hastily employed legal services. You always have to ask yourself, who will most enjoy/benefit from/be able to afford engaging lawyers, you or the company's legal department?
Would it be a better alternative to threaten to take it to Twitter or to specialized press?
I've never done it, but I observed that contacting customer service on Twitter is usually very effective.
Very much so, in all the call centers I've worked in there was no "complaints department" we are just told to listen to the customer, relate with their concerns and tell them it will be "reviewed" by another department. In reality, it goes absolutely no where. Even if I 100% agreed with your complaint, I have no place to record it or know who it's supposed to go to to get further up the ladder. Some managers will accept your complaint, put it on their desk, then throw it out. If you been employed long enough the managers wont even accept it, cause honestly I don't think they have anyone to pass it up the chain to that would actually accept it.
Best way to go is social media, companies have "Social Media Experts" that are employed solely for online damage control.
Another way to get something done is by sending a plain snail mail letter addressed to someone high-up at the company in question. You have to figure that out yourself as if you call the call center, the reps are never allowed to give out that information or they are told to tell you a fake address/fake person or the general C/O Complaints Department. Those go to no one at all and directly to the garbage.
Now if you successfully send a written complaint letter to someone high up, everyone knows about it, cause the internal police come to investigate if anyone at the call center gave out that information (It's a huge deal and grounds to be fired).
Another thing, youtube clips, if you are recording and posting on youtube your conversation with a rep, the company has a team to watch for that stuff. Once they find you doing that, you then become a "Flagged Customer" and we prepare while we leave you on hold, get one of the better reps available and have 2-3 other managers listening in on the line guiding the rep through the call step by step.
That's very interesting, thanks for sharing your experience.
Re: youtube clips. I don't do that, but when I call a customer service to complain and ask for a change that I know will not be well received (e.g. cancel cable) I always start the conversation by saying that I am recording the conversation on my side. And to "confirm" what you wrote, it's not unusual that after exposing my problem/demand I'm put on hold for 5/10 minutes while the employee is fetching the "domain expert to help with my problem".
Companies don't like it when you air out their dirty laundry.
I'd say being able to speak openly about a company is one of the few ways regular people have a chance of standing up to multinational corporations.
Specialised press would probably work well. Send the story to a few gaming news sites, post it on some Nintendo subreddits and the guy's situation may improve at least a bit.
I dont "have a lawyer", and am not sure what people mean with "my" in phrases such as "talk to my lawyer".
In the situation you describe, how would I go about finding a lawyer to receive communication and how much would it cost me out of pocket to simply be allowed to use their name and address when telling nintendo "talk with these guys, their my lawyers"
Interesting suggestion.
Have you tried this? What were the results?
yeah, I'm sure Nintendo would be scared of losing some pocket change battling one guy and his budget lawyer.
I'm no lawyer, but at least in the US I was under the impression that once something has been mailed to you, it's yours. A company cannot send you something then require payment or for you to return it.
My understanding in the UK is that if someone sends you unsolicited goods and then tries to bill you, it's yours to keep.
But this doesn't apply to things sent to you by mistake, which certainly seems to be the case here. You are expected to return the good to the sender at their expense. Although you are expected to facilitate returning it, I doubt any court would look favourably on a company taking you to court for failing to jump through their hoops.
This is my understanding, too.
Obviously I'd have preferred to keep it if they'd let me, but if they hadn't freaked me out with talk of legal action and been happy to say something to the effect of get it back to us within (e.g.) 30 days, I could've organised to post it at a weekend I wasn't working.
I couldn't include everything in the whole exchange in the article, but they did suggest collecting it from a place of work - but I don't have one, just my client's site, which isn't an option for that, which was explained.
In any case the courier has now collected the Switch, so at least I should be able to put it behind me.
Have you kept a record of the courier delivery? Like a collection receipt?
If not, write them a letter, send by recorded delivery, and state that the item was collected and that this is the end of the matter.
They're almost certainly incompetent rather than malicious, so if there's another screw up you can refer them to the letter and then ignore any further correspondence.
Yeah, it's all about good faith though. I've this happen to me with Corsair - their really expensive keyboard had a problem so they shipped out a replacement for me, and then 3 days later....another one arrived. I let them know and A) they were extremely apologetic for the inconvenience B) they arranged a courier to pick up the second keyboard when it suited me. Totally different approach to what Nintendo is doing.
Why not? Mistakes are unsolicited.
Looks like you're right.
>Q. Am I obligated to return or pay for merchandise I never ordered?
>A. No. If you receive merchandise that you didn’t order, you have a legal right to keep it as a free gift.
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0181-unordered-merchan...
I don't think the FTC cover the UK.
It took ten seconds to Google the UK equivalent, and it seems to be the same rule. Unsolicited goods, which are defined the same as the FTC' s definition, seem to be treated the same:
https://www.saga.co.uk/magazine/money/spending/consumer-righ...
Read further and you'll see that if they're sent by accident you're obligated to arrange their return at no personal expense.
But that means that they cannot force you to stay home waiting for a courier. He could've asked them for a return label to send it back. Refusing to stay at home for a day because of that is valid as it should constitute a personal expense (no lawyer).
Yep. He could have said "I'm only available to hand over the parcel to a courier on Saturdays 9am-5pm or during week days between the hours of 6pm and 9pm" and they have to figure out how to collect it in those hours - it's their problem essentially. And if they did take him to court they wouldn't have a leg to stand on, since he has shown willingness to return the item.
Yeah, threatening him with legal action was absurd.
The comment I was replying to was talking about the US.
Guess you missed the important part:
"Federal laws prohibit mailing unordered merchandise to consumers and then demanding payment."
US federal laws don't apply to the UK. The same thing is true in the UK, but demanding the return of mis-mailed goods is allowed in UK law.
https://www.saga.co.uk/magazine/money/spending/consumer-righ...
Mistakenly delivered goods are not unsolicited.
I had to explain this to some friends.
They can sue you for unfair enrichment. This is to keep places from sending you things intentionally then trying to bill you.
Plus, have some friggin morals/values/ethics.
Bear in mind that customer service in the UK is often terrible especially compared to the US (I've been fortunate enough to live in both places) and I've found that some inexperienced or bad customer service people threaten legal action without even being serious about it as a sort of a threat. I was threatened legal action by a car rental company for something related to a flat tire that was nothing to do with me and I had even dealt with the situation at the physical rental place just fine. Nevertheless some representative contacted me several weeks later to threaten me, I told them to stop it and then they never contact me again, several years later I've never heard from them. It's bad customer service. If you call their bluff and say ok, sue me, they'll be surprised. This case (as was mine) sounds so clear cut that why should you feel intimidated. They would lose.
I didn't even know you could order from Nintendo directly in the UK, I think they'd be wise to shut this down entirely and work through their retail partners. Just imagine how little resources Nintendo puts into the retail aspect of their operations in the UK. Clearly they can't even train people to do customer service properly without threatening legal action. I understand the sentiment to want to support Nintendo but I am not entirely surprised this happened, it takes hard work to run a well functioning shop/store online or otherwise.
Having looked into it further it looks like at least part of their operation is being managed by The Hut Group - from some contact info - and I found this surprisingly similar link from four years ago.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25330615
Hard to say really to what extent there is overlap here.
Honestly I'm now starting to wonder if I should pull the article - getting it read is good, but this is more attention than I expected and I'm getting a little nervous of what'll happen next now. :-S
Don't be daft. Leave it up. As long as the article is truthful, what's the problem? Their appalling treatment of an honest customer should be exposed.
I do think you're totally overthinking this. They made the initial mistake, they need to correct it and at their expense.
They can't do anything to you. Make a "best effort" to return the item and no more. Keep a log of all your correspondence. Don't waste any more than a minimal amount of time on this, certainly don't take days off work etc to wait for couriers.
Thanks!
I already have taken the day off work, and the courier has now collected the Switch - so the hope at least is that I'm now done with it, albeit out-of-pocket.
I'd agree with the other comment above - if what you've said is true, leave it up.
Years ago I had a situation (with a music technology hardware supplier) which just wasn't getting resolved; as soon as I made a website publicising the issue, they were bending over backwards to get it taken down; I said that I'd take it down as soon as the issues were sorted.
They never were (the product died) - but I'll never forget the threatening phone call I had one Saturday morning. I knew I had nothing to fear as I'd just documented what had actually happened and nothing more. It may not be the same in the US (and I know you're in the UK), but in the UK I think that there's still the ability to complain loudly about something as long as you're being truthful. Looks to me like they screwed up three times, and it's all on them.
>I ordered the Switch on October 16th from Nintendo’s UK online store. I wanted to buy direct primarily to support Nintendo
This seems like an odd impulse to me. It isn't like Nintendo is some small mom and pop business or even that they are struggling.
Yep. And it's a bad decision too, it's just against your best interest as a customer. With Amazon, I know that if there's absolutely ANY issue with my order they will issue a full refund and/or send a replacement within 5 minutes of talking to them over the phone or using the live chat. It will be bumped up to free allocated time delivery or even delivered with Prime Now if available. I work at a games studio so we have few people ordering from Nintendo UK website all the time - and boy, there's loads of horror stories about deliveries and their customer service, I don't know why you'd order anything directly from them instead of Amazon or Argos or even(gasp!) Game.
I'm glad to hear that my experience doesn't seem to be unique, and I'll know for future reference.
I genuinely do think they're a great company, it's just a really unfortunate turn of events that should probably have been avoidable.
Mom and pop business compared to Amazon, and less seedy than GameStop.
Also, the terms of deals for retail placement may be very sweet to Nintendo, because they know it sells like hotcakes. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if stores were getting 0 margin on the switch itself
I wouldn't even be surprised if Nintendo is just outsourcing its "direct retail" operation to a third party retailer who takes a larger commission than the resellers. I mean, Nintendo (clearly) isn't in the retail business so it would make sense to outsource it rather than build that infrastructure from scratch.
There's not much of a reason to believe buying from the Nintendo store has higher margins for Nintendo than buying from a retailer.
>It didn’t take long to arrive — but when it did, I noticed some damage to the outside of the packaging
Author signed off on a visibly destroyed package. This is where support stops in my country(also EU). Standard procedure is to either refuse damaged package, or open with courier as a witness and make damage protocol, documented with pictures. The fact Nintendo agreed to replace it on faith alone is quite good, pestering them with phone calls all week combined with fact they somehow send two units probably flagged him as a potential fraud.
The author doesn't say they signed off on it though. Where I live, I never sign off on anything. UPS just leaves it outside.
He did, you cant receive mailed packages without signature in UK. Dropping valuables on a porch is very alien concept to Europeans.
Damage isn't always apparent, and package drop offs don't always happen when you're home.
This doesn't always work. Mail at my apartment gets delivered to a mail room. I have never been given a package directly. I had a purchase show up damaged once and I had no option to refuse delivery (the company replaced it though)
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0181-unordered-merchan...
Q. Am I obligated to return or pay for merchandise I never ordered? A. No. If you receive merchandise that you didn’t order, you have a legal right to keep it as a free gift.
Interesting! I didn't know this. Unfortunately in this case the buyer is in the UK, so FTC rules don't apply to him. I hope they have a similar consumer protection rule.
http://www.thecomplainingcow.co.uk/all-you-need-to-know-abou...
You don't have to send unsolicited goods back or even notify the sender.
But duplicate orders don't count as "unsolicited" and should be returned - however "there should be no cost or inconvenience to you" which is where Nintendo fail badly here.
> "there should be no cost or inconvenience to you"
Cool, so OP could take Nintendo to court to recover lost wages!
Not all Americans agree, but your laws only apply to your country.
> Some will point out (and some have!) that I could have quite easily saved myself a lot of time, hassle, and lost earnings at this point by just quietly holding on to the extra Switch and saying nothing to Nintendo about it. It certainly would have saved me a lot of stress, but it was morally not something I’d ever consider.
There is no room for morals/ethics when dealing with faceless mega-companies.
You are not dealing with an individual here. Which individual would demand you to be home all day waiting for the courier for a mistake they made?
What I would do is store the parcel away unopened for a few months to a year. If in the mean time somebody asks it back, they can have it, otherwise it would go to the trash.
> otherwise it would go to the trash.
You wouldn't open it and keep it?
I wouldn’t feel comfortable with opening and keeping it.
Maybe I would try to deliver it myself if the original recipient was reasonably close.
I know it’s not the most right thing to do, what I suggested, but I really cannot waste my time with customer support. We are talking about the same companies that put you through the pain of bot-agents when you call them.
You would throw a Nintendo Switch into the trash?
That's so wasteful. Why not give it to a friend? Or to GoodWill?
It wouldn’t feel right to open the package.
One, as far as we know, isolated logistics problem with some ill-trained phone operators not solving it gracefully is the claim. What am I missing that makes this story more interesting than that? Is it just because Nintendo? Or is it exactly this interesting if it were the same story but the product plumbing supplies?
If it is The Hut Group behind this, then they have a track record of this kind of cock up (re the Zavvi article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25330615).
I think it raises some interesting questions about fulfilment, customer support, and what companies should be responsible for in these days of increasing home-delivery. I've also had problems with terrible couriers (haven't we all?) and, at least here in the UK, there are plenty of potential improvements to make.
Should Nintendo be selling this direct at all? Is it really still worth the cost of whatever systems need to be in place to achieve it?
Anecdotally, I received my Switch in the post in perfect condition, via Amazon.
I am super happy for the courier services available in Shanghai. What I experienced in the last 12 months is just shockingly good.
1. I can order whatever I want from any restaurant I like using some apps, someone is going to show up in front of my door within one hour to have it delivered. The cost is close to 2 metro tickets.
2. I don't need to go grocery shopping, courier guys do that for me, e.g. want to buy 2L of milk from your favourite 24 hours convenience store at 11pm? it is just a few clicks away, 1-2 hours delivery.
3. I can send 1kg stuff to Beijing (1000km away) in 12-18 hours for $4-5, door to door service, everything included.
courier guy may not show up? that is news here. You can track where is your assigned courier guys in apps, it is GPS based. One bad review is going to cause big trouble for the guy. Companies like jd.com also has pretty cool features in their apps to tip the courier guy you like, you can offer cash/free drinks to those who provide good services to you.
not impressive enough? jd.com requests all their courier guys to dump your rubbish after delivering your stuff, just be nice and ask (in Chinese of course) "could you please take those two bags of rubbish to the bins downstairs for me?"
Since there seems to be a lot of confusion about the legalities involved, with some people suggesting he should have just kept it and said nothing, I did some research.
In the UK, you have a legal duty to return it. http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/30294748/can-you-keep-... The only exception is completely unsolicited goods, which you can keep. Double shipments must be returned. This doesn’t change the fact that Nintendo was rather rude if the author’s characterization is accurate.
>Items that firms send to you, but you didn't actually order are called "unsolicited goods". You're well within your rights to keep them. You have no obligation to send them back to the company or to pay for them. If a company demands payment, that's a criminal offence. But this doesn't apply to items sent to you by mistake (as happened to Robert); if the order was sent to you twice; or if there's extra stuff on top of what you ordered. If a firm has left goods with you that weren't unsolicited goods, they still belong to the trader and you should try to give them back. Firms can take you to court to recover their goods.
The situation is different in the US, you are allowed to keep all "unordered merchandise" and have no obligation whatsoever to pay or return. No distinction is made between completely unsolicited and double shipments. A legal argument could be made that a double shipment is not "unordered merchandise." I didn't find anything on the legal databases or Google, other than newspaper columnists opining that double shipments are "unordered".
US statute in question: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/39/3009
FTC commentary: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0181-unordered-merchan...
Back in 2014, https://store.nintendo.co.uk/ was managed by The Hut Group. Not sure whether they also manage shipping, customer support, etc, or just rent out the web site, could be either way. Looking at URLs and everything else, that still seems to be the case. So not sure which company is to be blamed here.
Source: used to work for The Hut Group.
This is dumb on the part of everyone involved.
No, you are not taking the moral high ground by calling Nintendo customer service and initiating a back-and-forth on what to do with the mistakenly-delivered extra product. In fact, you are probably costing Nintendo more money than the second Switch is worth by doing so.
There is no reason, ever, unless the cost of the item is extremely high, to initiate a conversation with customer service when you are mistakenly delivered extra goods. The company will take inventory and notice that that it was mistakenly sent. If they don't contact you about it, it's because they want you to keep it because a cost-benefit analysis on their part does not warrant getting in contact with you over it.
A switch costs 330,- Dollar; The support person is getting paid anyway. Shipping costs 8 Dollar. Yes it matters.
Yes it matters in one case, yes it matters in 10 cases.
Yes you have a ethical/moral responsibility to tell them. Why? Because if you expect any company or someone else to tell you when you fucked up, you have to do this as well.
I go back to a store to tell them, that they forgot to give me 1$. I go back to a store and give them 1$ when i realise that they gave me 1$ more than expected.
No, they didn't "[cost] Nintendo more money than the second Switch is worth". Nintendo could just have said, "Keep it" and only been out the cost of a support call, which is necessarily less than the cost of a Switch.
Nintendo is the one in the wrong here.
The customer wouldn't have been wrong to do nothing and keep it, but calling them and admitting the mistake is definitely the moral high-road here. It may not be the smartest thing, but that's different.
I disagree, there's no code about this that everyone knows about. I think he did the right thing by contacting them. They did the wrong thing, obviously they should just let him keep it but some cheapskate customer service rep decided 'no we must have this thing back' and ridiculously decided threatening legal action was a good idea.
> There is no reason, ever
There are Ethical reasons
But I've heard of people contacting support for a vendor to hear "thanks for letting us know, you can keep the item" which should have probably been Nintendo's stance in this issue
You’re completely wrong here. See my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15661878
> This is dumb on the part of everyone involved.
It may be a cultural difference. For some people it's dumb, for others it's a fundamental question of ethics.
I'm in the "if they want it back, they will contact you and ask" mindset --- it's entirely their mistake, to correct at their expense, and you shouldn't have to do anything about it.
I really had no idea how much the actual "unit cost" of a call to customer service was until I worked on a consumer-facing app for a company that also had a large call center. One of our metrics of how well our app worked was how many call center interactions were avoided because customers could use self-service options in the app. Anytime someone called, the average effective cost to us was on the order of tens of dollars.
This is doubly true when it comes to this threat of suing you for mistakenly receiving the second device, notwithstanding the customer support costs leading up to this.
A Switch is definitely worth less than the cost of having an attorney prepare even the initial legal complaint against you, let alone setting foot into court.
> A Switch is definitely worth less than the cost of having an attorney prepare even the initial legal complaint against you, let alone setting foot into court.
Small claims will be submitted to a collection agency, which will handle the legal posturing in a fully automated manner, i.e. Nintendo sells the claim for, say, 20 per cent of expected return and has nothing to do with it any more, ever (since the collection agency basically gives up if the debtor contests the claim, so they take a calculated risk that at least one fifth of claims will be paid uncontested).
>There is no reason, ever, unless the cost of the item is extremely high, to initiate a conversation with customer service when you are mistakenly delivered extra goods.
Why does it suddenly matter if the cost was arbitrarily high?
He received something he hadn't paid for in error. Seems like the decent thing to do is at least make an attempt to correct the issue. Maybe the error-sent package was meant for someone else. Maybe they say don't worry about it.
But to make an attempt is dumb, and you deserve the thing sent in error? Good grief.
What if someone erroneously deposits $1000 into your bank account? Is that yours to keep? Is it dumb to try to rectify the situation?
So you need to keep the package around for months until eventually they notice it missing and track it down, just to make sure if you will need to send it back or not? Doesn't sound very practical to me... and if you don't let them know they could even take a legal action against you, as it can be characterized as you attempt to conceal the fact and keep their property.
Don't know how it is in UK but in the USA no one is allowed to send you stuff unsolicited that pushes some obligation onto you. Even an obligation to return a shipping error to them.
You probably got a free Switch. And with their subsequent behaviour, a well deserved one.
Prefacing this with IANAL.
US seems to just have a more broad term for goods delivered that you didn't order and refers to it as "unordered merchandise"[1]. You're pretty much free to keep it, it seems.
The UK is more specific for what is classified as "unsolicited" and what is considered goods delivered to someone else by mistake[2]. Companies have a right to get their product back if it's the latter. Since the author did order a switch, a duplicate delivery would very likely be considered a mistake. If the author never ordered a Switch (and never paid for it) in the first place, they'd definitely be able to keep it.
Regardless, if this is the way Nintendo asked for the second Switch back, they were completely out of line.
[1] https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0181-unordered-merchan...
[2] https://www.saga.co.uk/magazine/money/spending/consumer-righ...
In France, you don't get the free stuff. You have to give it back if the owner comes home to get it. You are not required to do anything else. You also have to notify the sender if it is a honest mistake. If it is accompanied by a request for payment, this is a penal offense.
If the law is similar in the UK, Nintendo is mostly in the right. However, I don't think they have the right to ask the guy to be at home at a time of their choice.
Most countries have laws regarding that practice, but the details can be very different.
In the UK that only applies to unsolicited goods, not to genuine errors. So, if Nintendo were to send you a switch and then ask you to pay for it, sure, you can ignore the demand. If you buy a switch from Nintendo and they send you two you have no right to keep the second (or third, in this case).
That said, if the seller makes a mistake then they need to rectify it entirely, they can't demand you wait around for a courier at an inconvenient time or get you to pay for postage.
Taleb describes how antifragile systems need to provide enough leeway for people on the ground to actually make decisions. Otherwise you can't react to unforeseen events and things go sideways. Delivery companies and support departments of large companies seem to have built a incredibly fragile system that can't even deal with frequently occurring anomalies. Reading some of the comments here those anomalies even seem to include things like red lights and bad weather. It seems to be a consistent pattern that reaching out via social media or directly to leadership is what yields the best results for the same reason the system is so fragile.
In the US and if through USPS, if a package is shipped and delivered, the person receiving the package now owns it and is under no obligation whatsoever to return it. It's literally 'finders keepers':
"By law, unsolicited merchandise is yours to keep."
You solicited one, they delivered more than one. Not your problem. Note that this is for USPS. I'm not sure it holds up for private carriers.
http://about.usps.com/publications/pub300a/pub300a_tech_021....
I don't know about the UK but in the US it is illegal for a company to sue or threaten you to return a package that they shipped to you if you didn't request it.
This is to prevent mail fraud along the lines of - I send you a widget you never ordered and a bill for $20. You now either have to pay the bill, or spend time/money shipping the package back.
Customer service is an expense, so they want to train us to not even think of trying it. They will also give you a Hobson's choice over arbitration to dissuade you from trying small-claims court (though that may not hold up, at least for now, in some jurisdictions.)
I had a bad experience with Nintendo Germany, when they fucked up my New Nintendo 3DS Ambassador package address, and it took over 2 weeks to find out what is happening with the item I paid for... Never again buying directly from Nintendo again, learned my lesson.
Looks like the author deleted it.
Google cached version here: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gq60it...
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20171108150109/https://headmelte...
Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20171108150109/https://headmelte...
Would any court rule in their favor? Is there any reason to worry in such a case?
If the writer has records of his interactions with Nintendo, in particular his goodwill in returning the extra Switch, there isn't a judge on Earth who would take Nintendo's lawyers seriously on this.
In my personal experience it can be quite futile in general to deal with customer support.
My goto solution is to contact the public relations people instead with the same issue and it usually gets resolved very quickly...
Sounds like they're really not used to people actually ordering from their site directly. I can imagine the prices are the suggested retail prices, which no retailer will actually end up charging.
I can't imagine mainstream retailers either price-gouging or discounting, unless a product's reaching its end of life or about to be superceded.
To be fair, their prices were quite good - and they offered a two year warranty - which surprised me.
Although yes, in retrospect I'll default back to Amazon in future.
When in a contract like this, where you paid for one unit but was sent two units, always be honest about it. Look at it the other way around, what if you paid double by accident ?
Is this huge corporation going to look you in the eye, tell you that you've over/double paid, and then return the overpayment with a handshake? Or are they even going to notice? I'm not saying be dishonest about it, but let's not pretend this enormous business is going to take the initiative to make things right. They'll keep your money unless you make the call.
This is why I buy these sort of things from Amazon.
google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...
Nintendo customer support in Europe is known to be quite bad. I am a day one customer for the Switch, the controller has a defective antenna (it is a well known hardware bug) but sending it back would mean to lose a lot of time with the italian customer support and in the end have all my system data wiped out. I'll just wait for them to enable cloud savegames, buy a second Switch and sell back my current one to a retailer like Gamestop.
@headmelted deleted the story form Medium. I wonder what happened? Anyone have a mirror?
Does the UK not have consumer protections for delivery mistakes like this?
Should have had every right to tell them to get fucked and keep the switch the second they threatened him. They sent it to him, they can eat the loss. if they don't want to then they can politely offer to get you a return shipping label and apologize for the trouble.
This type of thing sounds about right for Nintendo.
The op is clearly writing a paid article. No one in their right mind would ever believe the bunk spewed from a support person in this circumstance. So say you call company X’s customer support line and the result is the staffer saying we company X will take legal action against you the customer for company X’s mistake ? Never in a thousand years would I believe that statement from some random staffer nor would the staffer try to make such a claim due to the potential for their supervisors taking retribution against them for over stepping the bounds of their position.
So al if that being said ; what’s the point of the article if you toss out the bullshit of my first toy was damaged and the vendor accidentally sent me two replacements? The point is look how cool this toy is . You know you want one; you should get one early like i did before everyone runs out to get one .
It’s just a ploy to sell more crap and improve earnings.
Let the products sell themselves. Fuck advertising, commercial psychology. Psychological methods to sell should be destroyed.
Like @bufferoverflow say it's totally bluff. We had all to deal with this kind of small little problem. Why are you crying like a SJW for a Switch? seriously? grow a little. You just waste your time.
What eloquent commentary /s Can someone ban this bozo?
ban for what? telling the true? Nice.
edit: 1) I don't think the priority of life is getting a switch for these Kid at Christmas. 2)I don't think he had to call and waste his time for then complaining. 3)We have all at once the same problem but did had written an article about it, because it's useless. When I had the problem, the same day I had my package, because I directly go to the DHL post office get my package. Done. Strict to the point. Same with UPS.
Looks like you got yourself a free Switch. Enjoy it, and if your other Switch is in good condition, offer it to your son or a friend. If Nintendo threatens further legal action, take your lawyer out to dinner and spend the evening laughing over it.
I perhaps should have done, instead I took the threat seriously and took the day off work to await the courier (who collected the Switch).
So I'm down another day's income, and honestly starting to feel like a bit of a mug given the responses here.
You're not a mug, you've an honest person treated badly by an incompetent company.
You would be a mug if you dealt with them again ;-)
Don't be surprised if you haven't heard the end of it. They might well lose the item and then attack you again. If that happens, do not waste any more time or money on them.
I would have notified them, too, and have done similar in the past. Amazon botched initial delivery of a $500 item, then sent a new one, but both eventually arrived. I called back and they thanked me and emailed me a shipping label and instructions that gave me weeks to get it done.
Don’t be silly, you are honest and ethical and that counts for a lot more!
In worst case, you are not doing it for nintendo but for yourself.
Anyway i would have told them that i will send the switch back but it is not possible to stay at home.
They send you something by accident? And you are allowed to keep it? Nope thats not how it works.
It doesn't. He is probably even by law obligated to tell.
And yeah there is still something called moral/ethics.
No. They sent the package and then immediately threatened legal action for their mistake. That is a much different situation. If I were OP I would be personally insulted at this point and would make life as difficult as possible for the parties involved. Nintendo should have a better grip on their customer service. They've had over a century to figure it out.
"Nintendo" there are still just people on the other side.
You don't need to become a dick only because someone else is one.
take your lawyer out to dinner
Do normal people actually have lawyers? That they know well enough to hang out socially with?
Honestly I'm now wishing I did have a lawyer, if only to enjoy delicious evening meals with while we laugh at the events of the day.
Don't get me wrong, I like my friends, but none of them are lawyers, nor do they work for me - which I imagine would be swell.
Be careful what you wish for. I have one. Go for dinner with them, they would charge you for the time spent eating the delicious dinner, and afterwards they would write you a letter stating the dinner was delicious. Together with a bill for the letter. Plus a surcharge for providing the "laugh at events of the day" service.
Oh no, it's clear which one of us has actual experience with this. :(
As you are a freelancer, you could easily send them an invoice for the lost time at your normal rate. They will probably pay it without querying.
Lol good luck with that. You would just waste more money and time doing this. What I recommend if you are a freelancer / contractor is to just let them know that you cannot take a day off to wait for their courier as you don't have vacation and are not paid unless you work (so that would incur financial loss to you).
So inform them to arrange a courier to come pick up the item at a specific time convenient to you (Saturday from 10am to 5pm or Mon-Thu 7pm-10pm) and it's their headache now. They have to work around your schedule without inconveniencing you.
On what fantasy planet does this work?