XPO customer

[calimac]

Kevin Standlee often writes in his blog about XPO, the company he works for doing shipping logistics. Well, I have become an XPO customer. They delivered a package to me today, and I'm here to tell you about it.

For six months now, since we bought our new Samsung oven, Samsung has been promising to deliver the air-fry basket that goes with it that I ordered separately. They kept giving me delivery dates and then delaying them, a few days or two months. April 1 was like the sixth date I was given. But this time it wasn't delayed. On Wednesday I got an e-mail from Samsung saying it had actually shipped and they were handing me over to their delivery service, XPO.

On Thursday, I got a phone call from XPO. It started out as an automated phone call, but as soon as I pressed the first button on instruction, the automated voice said there was a technical problem and it would hand me off to a human. It did. First we went through some confirmation blither, then the human seemed to tell me that the basket wouldn't be delivered on Friday after all; then she said it would. (Possibly she was the idol that neither always tells the truth nor always lies but gives a random answer.) But after we got that straightened out, she said no delivery time window had yet been set, and they'd call me back when it was. Furthermore, the delivery guy would phone 30 minutes out. But an adult needed to be home to accept the package; they wouldn't leave it on the porch.

I was just telling B. about this, so she'd know about the expected calls and the delivery, when the phone rang again. Same deal: automated voice, technical problem, human, confirmation blither. This is my phone number, this is my name & address, with zip code, yes you may call me by my first name. (You'd think that the first time they'd have a checkmark they could click: "Yes This Customer Will Permit You To Call Them By Their First Name. Christ, Give It A Rest Already, Will You?") But this guy didn't have the delivery time window either. Instead, he seemed to think he was the first call. Same info. I listened patiently; clearly his computer hadn't told him that I'd already heard this stuff.

Despite these assurances, I never got a call with the delivery time window. Instead, I got it by e-mail. 12:30-4:30, Friday afternoon. Fine.

The phone rang at 11:30 AM. Good thing I was already back from my morning errands by then. He'd be there in 20 minutes. Took closer to 30, but he was there. Handed over the package, took a photo of me with it with his phone. No signature or any other fuss.

And that's my experience with XPO. Much more conscientious about their service than a lot of companies one deals with in this manner, but still subject to weird glitches, from the technical problem with the automated phone call, to some unclear statements by the first person, to a needless repeat of the first phone call, to being told I'd get another phone call but getting an e-mail instead, to a delivery before the time window, which is OK except that I might have missed it; and generally an immense amount of fuss over a package, the kind that Amazon would just drop off and that would be an end to it.

Comments

[kevin_standlee]

As it happens, I no longer work for XPO (the company that purchased CNF, the parent company of Menlo Logistics, which is the company for whom I've been working since 1994), because XPO spun off the logistics-management (i.e. non-asset-based) parts of the business into a new company called GXO, while the trucking companies (asset-based) remained XPO. While I still work for the same legal entity (under the fifth name that I can remember since I was first hired), the spin-off technically discontinued my employment with the company that owned the pension plan (which was frozen years ago), so while I still do the same job for the same company by a different name, I also am collecting about $575/month in pension money, which is helpful in paying down debts so that with luck, I'll be debt free by retirement.

[calimac]

Sorry for not having kept up with the turns of your employment, but do you have any thoughts from your experience on my mixed encounter with the trucking firm?

[kevin_standlee]

There's not much that I can add because I've never worked for the "retail" side of the companies for which I work. (That is, the parts that do the physical delivery to individual customers, like you.) Unfortunately, it doesn't surprise me that lots of transportation companies have problems like this. Even the ones like UPS and FedEx that specialize in deliveries to individual private homes can botch stuff up.

Even when the customer is an industrial address, the drivers can get lost. On more than one occasion, including once when it was an XPO driver back when my employer was still part of XPO, I've had to go out and tell the truck parked across the street from my house that they are at the wrong end of the street, mainly because the business in question refuses to give its address as 100 East Front Street, and thus Google Maps and most GPS maps send drivers to 100 West Front Street, which is the railroad yard across from my house. I've even had drivers insist that their GPN must be right, and I've tried to point at the multi-story industrial plant down the street and tell them, "That's Imerys/Celite right there!"

[calimac]

Well, they didn't get lost. Not unless that accounts for it taking 30 minutes to get here instead of 20 minutes, and even then they found it. My house has an address out on the main street but it's located inside a townhouse complex, at the back end of the access driveway, yet I've never had a delivery or service vehicle be unable to find it. However, when I was still using airport transport pickup, they could never find it, and would wait out on the street where the address would be if it were out there.

The problems I had with XPO were just glitches, and they were with the logistics process of informing me of the status. A sequence of unnecessary and inaccurate (about what was going to happen next) phone calls is merely slightly amusing if it happens once; it would be highly annoying if I had to deal with it all the time. And unlike Amazon, which never phones and only sends me a series of update emails which I ignore unless something goes wrong, which doesn't often happen.

[andrewducker]

Sounds like they have some glitches to work out. Hopefully they'll have done so before you use them again!