Lousy customer service with UPS

I am a reasonable person (I think): when someone screws up, I will ask for and accept an apology and move on. But recently UPS screwed up and it created a lot of trouble... and the company refused to acknowledge any error or make apologies, and then cited legalities when I pushed for an apology and reimbursement for the value of the lost package. Given their refusal to deal with my complaint at all, I am boycotting UPS. I figure with using other shippers for my online purchases and sales, as well as overseas shipping, I will have cost UPS enough lost business within a year to cost them at least as much as it would have to apologized and dealt with the damages. But that's not enough: They need to know what I am doing, and maybe I can encourage enough others to make them rethink their approach to customer service. I just wanted an apology. I got legal mumbo jumbo. Hence this web page to inform people why I am boycotting them.

By way of contrast, I should add, I also recently had trouble with United Airlines. My wife and I travelled to Hawaii. On the voyage from San Francisco to Kona, a six-hour dinnertime flight that advertised that a meal was part of the flight service, exactly six dinners were packed for a plane with 158 passengers. We were not among the lucky six. I wrote United, they apologized promptly and gave us a coupon for $100 future service, good for one year. That's how customer service is supposed to work: you make a complaint and the business tries to resolve in a way that makes the customer happy and encourages the customer to use their service again. United will more than make up that $100 in "lost" service and I'll stick to flying with them when they are a reasonable choice. UPS could well learn from their example.

The story in full

I was going to travel to Russia in late October of 2007 to visit my in-laws. As I have done several times before, I sent my passport to the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Washington D.C. along with all the applications materials via express mail, with a returning express mail envelope addressed to me. In the past I have always used FedEx: they had a location across the street from my work. However some time in the past year, the location closed. So I used the convenient UPS store near my home instead. They even printed the label for the envelope for my returning package for me. Remember that point, because it will be important. It had my address on it, as my receipts show. I checked. These packages, with the envelope to mail it all back to me, went in the mail and arrived at the embassy quite promptly.

Alas, the trouble began a week later when the embassy sent my visa back to me (UPS tracking number J1875541673). The embassy recorded that the address was my home address, and handed it to UPS on October 18. A few hours later, the package was scanned arriving in Landover, Maryland and thence later the same night to Baltimore... and thence it disappeared. It should have arrived at my home on Friday, but I waited for Monday (as there is no weekend delivery to residential addresses). So it was Monday afternoon and no package before I realized something might be amiss and typed the tracking number into the computer system online to see where my visa and passport was... and discovered it had last been seen several days before. That report went in to UPS at 4:30 pm on October 22. Meaning to convey the urgency of the package, I pointed out that it had a passport with visa in it for overseas travel in the near future. Big mistake: if they didn't know what was in the package, they could not have been so creative as they would soon prove to be.

Within hours, the missing package was located in Laurel, Maryland (the logical sorting centre for my home address) and sent on its way. Happily expecting the package the next day, I was unconcerned... until my wife informed me the passport has not arrived at the house during the day. At 4 pm on October 23, I plugged in the tracing number J1875541673 to find out what had happened now... and discovered it HAD been delivered. Just not to me. Someone named "Harrison" had signed for it at an address on C St. in Northwest Washington D.C. A little research online (UPS provided only a street address and that someone had signed for the package) showed that it was the mailroom for the U.S. State Department.

WTF? That was not the address on the envelope when it left my hands! I called UPS to report the package mis-delivered. They said the driver was already back from his rounds, so they would not send him back out to retrieve the package, but would do so the next day. In the meantime I called the Russian Embassy visa division and confirmed that the address on the envelope when it left their hands was still my home address. Somehow while my package was misplaced, it got a new address label (or most likely, a sorting machine stripped the address label, which is how the package got lost. Then when I called to report it missing, instead of sending it to the address I gave when I reported it missing, they recorded that the package contained a lost passport and they put the lost passport office address on the envelope.)

Feeling a tad annoyed, but at least certain I knew where my package was and that it would be retrieved, or failing that, that I could go into the city and get it myself (not feeling very trusting of UPS after they had now lost and then mis-delivered the package), I called the next morning, to be informed that the driver, in fact, had no such instructions to retrieve my package and there no record with UPS whatsoever of my call the previous afternoon to report the mis-delivery (and also a statement of surprise that they had not sent the driver out immediately to retrieve the mis-delivered package the previous day).

A few more calls over the next few hours ascertained that the driver claimed that the mailroom claimed they had not received a mis-delivered package. That is to say, the driver said that the mailroom staff said that there was no package with the wrong address. I was able to neither confirm nor dispel the driver's version, so suggest that UPS applied a new address to the package. UPS was unconcerned that the address on the envelope was not the address it had had when it was given to them in the first place, nor that it did not match the address I gave them for the delivery when I reported the package missing. They have remained steadfast in their claim that they did absolutely nothing wrong and even if they did, the customer service agreement limits liability to the replacement cost of the package and absolutely no responsibility for any incidental costs caused by mis-delivery or lost packages. And they even found a way to wiggle out of that too.

As far as UPS was concerned, their business was done: the letter was delivered and the fact the address had nothing to do with its intended destination was really not their problem. And no, they were not interested in all in any proof I had that it was NOT the address on the envelope when this all started.

This also meant that while the person on the ‘phone with me might be personally sympathetic, UPS would not offer any assistance in retrieving the package, calling the mail room, getting things straightened out and certainly would not provide a letter of apology from them. When I then tried to file a claim, they denied ever hearing of the issue and creatively considered it more than fifteen days old and hence beyond their having any obligation EVEN THOUGH I HAD BEEN IN NEAR CONSTANT CONTACT ABOUT THE PROBLEM WITHIN DAYS OF THE PACKAGE BEING INITIALLY LOST AND REPEATEDLY FILING COMPLAINTS AND REQUESTS FOR REDRESS.

A couple of days of calling through the State Department mail room and their passport services offices never did locate the missing package. With my travel date looming, I had to replace the passport and get a new visa. Since UPS refused to provide a letter of apology, the Russian Embassy could not waive the application fee. Both the State Department passport services office and the Russian Embassy were kind, helpful, and worked very rapidly to replace my missing papers. I had to pay the standard passport and visa application fees, but in both instances, they waived all the expatiated service fees. I had a new passport in an hour, and a new visa in it within the same day. Wow!

The saga, alas, did not end there. When I called UPS to request reimbursement for the delivery fee (since it was not delivered), to complain that their unwillingness to provide a letter of apology cost me $100 in a new application fee that would have been waived if they had provided the letter, and that I got whacked with a $97 new passport application fee not to mention all the angst of dealing with all this right before travelling and having to take most of a day from work to deal with all this.... Well, their response was, and I quote


Unfortunately, a Guaranteed Service Refund must be requested within 15 calendar days from the scheduled delivery date. Since 15 calendar days have elapsed, I am unable to process a refund.


Per the UPS Terms and Conditions of Service, UPS is not liable for any incidental or consequential damages resulting from delayed delivery or attempted delivery. Additional information regarding our service guarantee can be downloaded at the following link


http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/service.html?WT.svl=Footer


Again, I apologize for any problems this late delivery may have caused.


Please contact us if you need any additional assistance.


[name removed for this blog]


UPS Customer Service

I did indeed contact them again to point out that they mangled the delivery, they caused the problem, and while their policies might give them legal reasons to protect them from liability, it was hardly good customer service. No response. And by now, also no surprise.

Here’s what I want UPS to do

• write a letter of apology to me


• write a letter of thanks to the State Department passport services and mailroom offices. Those guys worked pretty hard over a couple of days with frantic calls from me trying to find the passport, and waived all the expatiated processing fees they could have legitimately socked me with. People paying quite a lot of fast processing did not get the speed of service I did.


• write a similar letter of thanks to the Visa division of the Embassy of the Russian Federation.


• some kind of compensation for the ~$200 worth of expenses I incurred because of their incompetence.

If UPS can do at least some of the above, I'll take down this posting and consider the matter resolved. Let's just say I am not holding my breath, based on my experience with them so far, however.

So what to do? There are a lot of options. Shrug it off, accept that paying for two visas and a new passport was just part of the cost of traveling? Certainly that's what UPS seems to want and assumes I do. At some level, I pretty much figure the $200 in fees and lost work time is just lost and I have to write it off.

Complain again to customer service? That doesn't seem to be working. Einstein (or someone else) said that stupidity is trying something that doesn’t work, and then keep trying it expecting a different result.

File a complaint with the Better Business Bureau? I'll be doing that, but I'm not expecting much of it. I'd be pleased to be wrong, however.

File the complaint with something a bit more brutal like Rip Off Report? That might be emotionally satisfying, but I'm not sure it would have much useful in the way of results. The site is terribly disorganized. More important, it is pretty indiscriminate in its collection, which rather undermines its authority (not withstanding that when you Google many companies' names, one of the highest rated Google links will be the Rip Off Report page on them). My genuine complaint is going to be next to a patently false rant about the sexual proclivities of the CEO. What's more, there are pretty serious and reasonably supported allegations that the site operator is running something akin to extortion: for a fee (which is pretty hefty), he'll add an editorial comment to the effect that the information is considered false. A good many of the ranting complaints may originate with himself, and then he asks for a fee to editorialize it (which, if true, certainly seems like extortion). Finally, if the matter were ever to be resolved, the site never takes down material: the complaint would be permanent and I want it to be resolved, not forever outstanding.

So here’s my deal: this page is up on my blog until UPS makes some effort to resolve my complaint. I realize this is not exactly a high traffic web log, but we work with what we have. I am boycotting UPS in the meantime, and pointing anyone and everyone to this blog to explain why. All my online purchases will use another shipper, all my overseas shipments (and with family in Russia, that's no small matter!) will not use UPS, and all my online sales will be shipped with another company and I will prominently display links to this blog page in my online sales pages to explain why... until such a time as the matter is resolved or the internet is replaced with something even better and stranger and all the links die of excessive old age.

I strongly encourage others to consider alternatives to UPS. They deliver things just fine if nothing goes wrong, but God help you if something does go wrong. UPS certainly won’t help and they will deny culability for everything.

And that’s saying nothing about fighting with their automated answering computer to get customer service, dealing with calls getting dropped as they were forwarded, or getting disconnected when put on hold, all of which happened several times in the midst of this adventure. But that seems to just be a standard part of business these days.