Easier to cut and paste the text of my complaint as sent TO UPS. Initial complaint first, my response to their response second. They never responded again.
Used u last Dec. 19, guaranteed it would arrive on 23rd, showed up around Jan. 5, weasled your way out of a GSR with one of your usual million lame excuses (I was a CSR with you, know them all), u passed the buck to UPS store I dropped shipment off at, who, after at least 5 attempts at calling, was told 'only owner can deal with this and she's not in, we'll have her call you', never received ANY call. It'll be a cold day in hell when I use your 'service' again.
Your only explanation was that 'the scheduled connection was missed.' And it was missed at your main hub in Louisville, not in some backwater in Ethiopia or some other 3rd world dump by some disinclined 3rd party service agent whose pack mule died en route to the delivery point. THAT I might have been a little more inclined to appreciate. Regardless, NOT a valid reason, IMO, to deny me a refund. "The scheduled connection was missed." Talk about stating the obvious. Duh. Not even an explanation, simply an obvious statement, in point of fact. Your company guaranteed 3-day delivery, specifically December 23rd, 2010, echoed by the UPS store (Elmwood Drive in Moncton, NB, FYI) to which I took the package, which is why I chose you. And of course, it was Christmas presents, a compact disc and a paperback book in one of your rush envelopes of some sort. It was, in fact, the only Christmas present that delivery post-Christmas was useless, as the cd was a song I wrote and recorded specifically for the recipient AS a Christmas present to be played upon receipt, as the receiver left the destination city of Plasencia, Spain on the 24th not to return until early January, in effect spoiling MY Christmas AND hers.
Additionally, to add insult to injury, when I called and applied for a GSR, the CSR ASSURED me it would be processed, and I come to find out it was voided only hours after I submitted it. Your defense (and I don't care whether it was Christmas or not, 'The scheduled connection was missed' does not suggest that Christmas volume had anything to do with 1. Your failure to execute the single most obvious connection point, Louisville itself, 2. Deliver the package on time OR 3. Honor your guarantee) is an excuse, not an explanation. You are, I believe, the largest courier company in the world. Therefore, your logistics should take into account 'Christmas volume' and plan accordingly. I paid you 78 dollars for ON-TIME delivery on December 23rd. YOU did not satisfy your end of the agreement and yet you clearly state in your advertising that you back up your reputation with guaranteed refunds in the event of late delivery. But I paid 78 plus dollars to send something time-sensitive that I might as well have sent by whatever 'slow boat to china' option Canada Post offers for much less.
What exactly WOULD qualify for a GSR, I wonder? Do they even actually exist? I don't even recall the outcome of any I might have processed in my 20 months as a CSR. Or perhaps they're reserved for large volume customers you can't afford to lose or risk suffering negative repercussions in the form of bad publicity?
As I stated earlier, I worked as a UPS CSR in all departments, pickups, billing, brokerage and tracking and tracing, consistently given excellent performance reviews by both management and customers, for approximately 20 months, and one of the 'tricks' that I recall was specifically being instructed that if a customer requested escalation to a supervisor, to just transfer to another CSR of equal status who would then claim to be higher up on the chain before escalating it even to help desk (which wasn't much more effective than CSR level, I might add, as I also served there on a few occasions and really had not much more latitude than as a CSR.) I always thought it was a scummy trick, and perhaps I should have realized that a company that would hoodwink their customers in such a fashion was to be avoided. Lesson learned - the hard way.
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