2013 Customer Service Hall of Fame No. 4: UPS

[bluehdmc]

2013 Customer Service Hall of Fame - MSN Money
'Excellent' rating: 41.3%
UPS (UPS) routes 16.3 million packages a day. On its busiest day last year, Dec. 20, it delivered 28 million.
'Customer experience' isn't seen as a separate unit or department, says the company. It is the rubric under which all other decisions are made, and have been since the company's first deliveries by foot and bicycle in Seattle in 1907.
"In other companies, these groups are typically under separate senior management," said Larry Darrow, the president of UPS global business services. At UPS, all proposals funnel up to what it calls 'customer experience,' and if an idea is bad for customers, it can be killed point-blank.
UPS uses union workers and does not hire contract drivers. "We have to enable our employees to be successful, so they can deliver success to our customers," Darrow said. "We have to treat our employees like they're our customers."
UPS posted revenue of $54.13 billion in 2012.

Was that dude drinking when he made this statement.

Probably a LARGE glass of brown Kool-Aid.

 

[soberups]

I was on TAW a few years ago, with a 20 lb weight restriction. The office had me shuttling misloads around in a pkg car. I had a DIAD, but only for communication purposes; I was expressly forbidden from scanning a package or making a delivery with it, lest I show up on the WOR as a route and negatively affect the all-important Stops Per Car metric that we were obsessing over at the time.

I went and picked up a 2Day air misload from a driver, and then drove it to the business where it was supposed to be delivered to. My instructions were to wait in the parking lot for the driver who normally delivered that business, who had been paged to meet me there and deliver the package himself. It was late in the day, approaching the 6:00 closing time for this business, and the driver who was supposed to meet me called me on my cell phone to tell me that he was stuck in traffic miles away and had no hope of getting there before they closed. So...I messaged the office that the package only weighed 4 lbs which was well below my TAW restriction so I was going to go ahead and deliver it myself in order to avoid the service failure.

Nope. I was specifically told not to deliver it, but to bring the package back to the building. I argued with them that I was sitting in the freaking parking lot with the package and a DIAD, perfectly able to make service on it, but their answer remained the same. Bring it back. To deliver it would cause me to show on the report as a route, which would cause the center to miss its Stops Per Car quota for the day. Since it was a misload, the "blame" for the missed stop could simply be assigned to preload while allowing the center to hit its SPC plan.

It wasnt about service. It wasnt about meeting the needs of the customer. It wasnt about cost. It wasnt about safety, or common sense, or doing the right thing. It was about fear-based obsession with generating a number.

I actually blame myself for this one in a way. What I should have done...was to ignore the instructions and deliver the package anyway. What would they have done? Given me a warning letter for making service on a package? In hindsight, I should have forced them to do just that. It would have been worth it for the comedic value alone, not to mention being able to make them explain in an open forum what the hell they were thinking. To this day I regret not delivering that package.

Something tells me that the author of the article who spoke glowingly about "ideas that are bad for the customer experience being killed point blank" and "enabling our employees to be successful" has never himself been in a package car or been assigned to an operational center. I'm sure he is sincere in his beliefs, he is just ignorant of the reality of the day to day dealings of a package center. He reminds me a bit of the general during the Viet Nam War who, thousands of miles from the battlefront in his cubicle in the Pentagon, explained how "we had to destroy the village in order to save it."

 

[thessalonian13]

2013 Customer Service Hall of Fame - MSN Money
'Excellent' rating: 41.3%
UPS (UPS) routes 16.3 million packages a day. On its busiest day last year, Dec. 20, it delivered 28 million.
'Customer experience' isn't seen as a separate unit or department, says the company. It is the rubric under which all other decisions are made, and have been since the company's first deliveries by foot and bicycle in Seattle in 1907.
"In other companies, these groups are typically under separate senior management," said Larry Darrow, the president of UPS global business services. At UPS, all proposals funnel up to what it calls 'customer experience,' and if an idea is bad for customers, it can be killed point-blank.
UPS uses union workers and does not hire contract drivers. "We have to enable our employees to be successful, so they can deliver success to our customers," Darrow said. "We have to treat our employees like they're our customers."
UPS posted revenue of $54.13 billion in 2012.

What a crock of $%#t... I thought i smelled crap coming out of my computer. LOL