Our rabbit arrived this week from ThingGeek via DHL courier.
It actually arrived at our house at around 1:30 p.m. on Thursday afternoon, but [[Catherine]] was out, and she found the DSL “door knocker” on our front door when she returned.
I followed the instructions on the door knocker and went to the DHL website, entered the “door knocker number” and requested delivery on Friday to my office.
When nothing had arrived by Friday at lunch, I called the DHL toll-free number to confirm that my request had “taken.” After a transfer to the Canadian operation, an agent confirmed that there was no record at all of my web request; he submitted it manually, and said it could be Monday before my rabbit arrived at the office.
With no rabbit at the end of business on Friday, on a lark I called DHL back and spoke to a much more helpful agent who gave me the address of the local DHL station here in [[Charlottetown]] and told me I could simply try going there to see if my package was there.
It turned out that the station is located at 7 Mount Edward Road (although you won’t find any record of this in Google) in behind K&M Home Heating and next door to the old Wizard store. It’s only open two hours a day, one in the early morning and one in the afternoon, and it’s not really set up at all for customers to just “drop by” as it’s only a warehouse.
That said, I found two very helpful drivers unloading packages from a cube van, and they quickly located my rabbit. I paid the COD with a credit card, and I was off.
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I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
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ThingGeek? :)
ThingGeek? :)
Postscript: I got a call on
Postscript: I got a call on my cell phone on Monday morning in Halifax from the DHL office in Montreal wanting to arrange for me to get my parcel delivered. They had no record of the fact that I’d already picked it up — 48 hours before they called. Obviously DHL has some distance to go before they have FedEx-class IT systems (not that FedEx is infallible, but they’re right more than they’re wrong).
1. Email notifications are
1. Email notifications are confusing: Notification for shipment event group “Out for delivery”. Event Category: Shipment held – Available upon receipt of payment.
2. Website contact form allows for 100 char entry, oppose to 1000 characters as stated on the screen. This is less then a twitter, and provides no option for leaving a message other then short statement. You know what comes to mind…
3. 1-800 customer service has no way to contact local facility other then email.
4. Emails from customer service are ignored by local facility for days.
5. Couriers at a local facility apply status scans incorrectly. “Delivery attempted; recipient not home” showed up twice on trace history, when in fact not a single delivery attempt was made (no door tag left).
6. The item above can be attributed to fraud. Transferring fault to the customer instead of sort/delivery mistakes is a fraud. It allows DHL to avoid money-back payments to shipper when commitment times are not met.
7. Local facility open for customers only two hours per day. It has no phone number where anyone, including their head office in Montreal, could contact them.
8. Both Customer Service (Toronto/India) and Corp Office (Montreal) have no control of package movement once it is at the destination sort.
9. DHL system shows incorrect Ship To address on notifications, by using a city for local sort facility, instead of destination city. Though the postal code is shown correctly, this probably a root cause for misrouting my parcel.
10. The package sent from Alaska to PEI via DHL took 1 day to reach Hamilton (ON), one day to reach Moncton (NB), one day to reach Charlottetown (PE) and 18 days to cover 15 min driving distance from local sort facility to destination!!!
11. I had to call DHL customer service 7 times, was transferred to Montreal Head Office twice, and after all promises, and traces, they still failed to deliver.
12. I am going to show up at local facility and clear their heads in person…
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