What do you do when UPS can't find your lost packages after ten months of haggling and tying to find them through traditional UPS customer service channels? You tweet about it that is what you do. In the case of my friend Gayle the lost boxes were filled with her shoes, indeed a woman's worst nightmare! Ten months ago she entrusted UPS with twenty one boxes as part of her move to San Francisco. A UPS driver arrived and picked up the shipment along with her check for payment. Unfortunately during the course of processing the shipment the driver did not apply labels to all the boxes and she noticed that before he left. However, he assured her that he would apply all the labels to the boxes in the shipment before they left his truck.
Upon arrival in San Francisco last Halloween the shipment was missing three of the boxes. This is where my friend's journey into the horror of UPS's siloed customer service begins. For months she is given a run around by the Seattle field office that processed the shipment. Customer service representative George in Seattle is totally ineffective after months of discussions and can't find the boxes (according to the UPS twitter representative John, if she had tweeted about this earlier there was a chance the boxes could be located.) Because the boxes had no labels they can't find them in their system and nobody knows where they are. I would bet top dollar that a UPS employee or contractor stole the boxes. I will explain my thinking later.
Last month I decided to help my friend and started tweeting about UPS and their bad customer service and easily found two UPS representatives on Twitter. Both Evan and John from UPS on Twitter have been extremely helpful in bringing this adventure this customer service nightmare to an end. Within twenty four hours they were on it and a week later had completed their investigation, the sad part is that if my friend had tweeted this last year she may have found her shoes. During the course of their investigation they asked her for proof of payment so she had to produce the check that the financial department processed from Chase. This is an alarm signal right away and tells you that their customer service department is not integrated with financial services and that customer service reps don't even know if the customer has paid. This is a big disconnect and reflects that UPS customer service does not have a 360 degree view of their customers. In the meantime, John at UPS agrees to make things right by providing free shipment of more boxes from New Jersey that she had personally packed. We think this is great until one of the most important of all boxes arrived ripped open. You can clearly see that someone thought that there was a big screen TV inside this box and was about to steal it. What was in here was more expensive than the TV valued at $1-2 thousand dollars and was insured for seven thousand dollars. Unfortunately, because the box was ripped open, the glass inside the picture frame broke and damaged the art. NICE. Now what they are saying is that if it wasn't packed according to UPS standards then it won't be covered by the insurance, because she used recycled packaging. This box was in mint condition and there were packed boxes inside the TV box. So the saga continues and I have nicknamed them Unpredictable Parcel Service.
The customer service issues at UPS appear to be abundant on the Internet and after performing a couple of simple searches on UPS and customer service I see that they have a rather large issue. Not to mention the FEDEX Facebook attack on them named the Brown Bailout campaign which now has attracted 128,000 fans. UPS is ranked #136 out of the 302 companies that have a CustomerServiceScoreboard.com rating with an overall score of 40.38 out of a possible 200. This score rates UPS customer service and customer support as Disappointing, they have 198 negative comments to 29 positive as of today.
Net/Net
UPS had an operating profit of $1.4 billion according to their most recent financial statement and my advice to them is to take some of this profit and invest in an information technology platform and system that can do more than track boxes. Their core business has always been shipping and to their credit they have significantly innovated their business model with acquisitions that created the UPS store. However, they are now in the wake of the social media tsunami and can't hide the glaring issues with their brand that revolve around poor customer service and customer satisfaction.
For more insights into how companies like UPS are leveraging social media to control brand experience and customer service please download Improving The Bottom Line With Customer Engagement on this site. I have done my own analysis on the data and have listed my key findings in the bullet list below.
Abstract of High-level Key Findings from Improving the Bottom Line with Customer Engagement: The Social Customer / Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals Survey
By Brent Leary
Key strategies for improving your company's ability to successfully combine social engagement with traditional customer support processes are:
• Management buy-in is the key to successful social customer engagement programs.
• Integrating social channels with traditional service processes leads is paramount.
• Identify the social channels that your customers engage in.
• Engage with social customers in multiple channels if necessary.
• Customer support staff should take time to engage with customers on social channels.
• More interactions generate a higher positive impact with social customers.
• Companies that have a longer history of engaging customers on social channels from a service perspective experience more positive impact on their service goals.
• Facebook and Twitter ranked neck and neck for effective engagement overall.
In summary, I have never experienced any issues with UPS and in my mind they appear to be trying to improve their customer experience, but it would appear that they need to rethink some of their antiquated and siloed business processes. Until next time I wish you great selling and marketing in the millennium.