Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Why UPS [commercial] Customer Service Sucks.

Almost a year ago, a company in Jacksonville, Florida started giving our UPS Account number to its customers to ship return items, collect, next day air to their location.  We noticed random charges popping up on our company's UPS invoices.  We would constantly call UPS to dispute charges, and we also called the company [four times.]  Finally, the accountant from the company basically said, "oops" and that it "would never happen again."  Unfortunately, it continued to happen.

Now our company has been using UPS for decades.  We have been a valued "tier 1" customer for as long as well.  We had to call UPS to see about changing our account number.  Unfortunately, to do so we had to open a new account with them.  That was one of the biggest mistakes we ever made.  You see, what our sales representative (and UPS) never told us was that when you open a new account, you lose all of your former account history.  None of that history gets brought over to your new account.  I'm not talking to whom you've shipped, I'm talking all of our discounts, etc.

While we asked for our UPS former account number to be closed in September 2010, our sales representative never actually closed our former account until December 2010.  Meanwhile we continued to receive invoices for shipments made by the company in Jacksonville. 

In January 2011, our UPS driver told us that UPS told him not to pick up at our location anymore because we had closed our account.  WHAT?! We had to call UPS, again, to straighten everything out.  Well we thought it was everything.

Our [new] sales representative came in ONCE.  He promised to come back the following week to bring our agreement, pricing, etc. That was three months ago.  Since then, we have attempted to e-mail him, call him, and call UPS to get some sort of assistance once we realized we had lost the majority of our discounts.  He never responded to e-mails.  He never responded to voicemails.  UPS just said, "I've sent a note to your representative.  He has until the end of business day tomorrow to respond."  Those went unanswered as well.

When e-mails were received, he would ask the same questions he had already asked us (did he think the answers would change such as "who is XYZ?" (our former company name.)) 

He finally responded today to a phone call made two days ago to customer service, and he asks, again, "who is XYZ?"  When we tell him it's the same company, he says, 'well based on your shipment history, I can't offer you those discounts.'  Bullshit. You're looking at our NEW account number history from January not our entire history (including our former account number, a number he also asked us about....again.)

Thus far the moral of the story is...if someone is fraudulently using your UPS account number, and you have to get a new account number, don't expect to get the same discounts or level of service, and sure as Hell don't plan on ever getting a response from your UPS Sales Rep.

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