Impossible Commercial Customer

[upsmous]

Train Your Customers

 

[Griff]

Griff your point? Fedex has 50% of the business we have. Most likely without them it would have been UPS's. That's would be 50% more UPS jobs both for mgmt and hourly. That would have helped with the pension mess with CS. I think most of the fault is on mgmt with this, since in most cases drivers are doing as directed. However, like I mentioned, having a driver walk into store and intentionally "accidentally" hit items with his 2 wheeler etc is ridiculous. That's my point. It's amazing you think that intentionally pissing off our largest ground customer is OK, since they didn't come to the door immediately.

I never condoned that type behavior. I'm just tired of hearing the old "that's our business out there" crap from management. Yeah, I get that we have to swim or sink as a public company, but there comes a point in time where upper management needs to start game-planning better and pulling their bloated weight. Right now it seems all upper management has to offer is their stern backing of keywords and ignorant catchphrases in an effort to essentially blame everything on the driver. No driver should be damaging customer property on purpose, that's a joke. But I'm back in the truck and gone if nobody answers the door in the time it takes me to fill out the infonotice (properly) and put a service cross on the package. If you can't answer the door in that time period or call out "i'm coming, wait!", something is clearly wrong with that picture.

Also lets get real about the "more jobs" situation. It would gain more jobs on both fronts, but not NEARLY as much as that type of volume would call for. People think OT is bad now? If something like this happened, nearly everybody would be experiencing 11hr days 5 days a week. It's not UPS's m.o. to hire the appropriate amount of staff to handle volume, anyone who works in operations knows this.

 

[landrick]

I have a commercial customer that gets pkg nearly every day. This is a back door del. only. The problem is that when I get to the back door no one is ever there. They have a bell which apperently they cant here. I have had to sit and wait at this stop sometimes as much as 10 or 15 minutes. (...)

Somebody already hit one solution with the phone call idea. I used to have this problem with various customers at an outdoor shopping mall. Over a couple of weeks, I started collecting their phone numbers off of pkgs and storing them in my cell phone. (A couple of times, I even just got 'em from 411.) Drive up, ring the bell a couple of times while sheeting. If no response, call the number and say you're waiting. That usually did it, but sometimes I did the "see you tomorrow" routine. It would definitely be going above and beyond, but maybe for your difficult customer, you could even call them *beforehand* and say hey, I'll be there in 5 minutes. (Frustrating to do, but hey, if it works...) It's tempting to be a jerk with these guys (and sometimes I was) but I eventually learned that it paid off better to try building a rapport with the dock/store-room guy (along the lines of "we're both working stiffs with a job to do.") Face it, they're probably not real happy with their jobs and aren't very motivated to be accommodating to *you*. But, in many cases, I eventually got their respect to the point that they would answer the bell right away, and sometimes even start helping a lot more with loading and/or unloading their stuff. Each one is different...