Public Service Broadcast

The time has come for me to have a rant on one of my favourite rantable topics – customer service. I recently purchased an item online – a bean bag – for my new home. The website claimed it offered free delivery, so I duly entered my card details and parted with the requisite amount of money in return for the bag. During no part of these proceedings was any information given to inform me of the likely dispatch of my bean bag and what arrangements had been made for its delivery. For all I knew it would be a year before it arrived, whilst it was lovingly crafted from a billion individual beans. I had given the delivery address as my new house, but since I was not yet living there I would have to be present to receive the package.

A few days later I received a text message from a company called Yodel, informing me in an upbeat and excitable way that they would be delivering my bean bag that very day! Upbeat and excitable though I was to hear this news, I was also slightly put out as it was a day when I had already made plans, and would not be around to receive the bean bag upon arrival. Sure enough, I returned home to find the usual note saying they had called only to find that I was unexpectedly not at home. Though the card gave space for them to leave a contact number I could call to arrange a convenient time, no number was included. Nor were any other details about how I could locate my bean bag and arrange for its safe passage. Later on I received a second text message informing me again that they had tried to deliver my bean bag, and that it would automatically be delivered again the following day. This was excellent news, since the following day was a Sunday when I had planned to be home all day.

Sunday arrived and I waited eagerly for the bean bag to arrive. No time slot had been given, but the helpful card left the day before suggested that delivery could take place at any point between the hours of 07:30 and 21:00, a convenient 13.5 hour window during which I was expected to remain incarcerated in my own house. As the day wore on I began to feel deflated, then melancholy, then cynical and I finally checked their web site for further information. The web site informed me that they do not deliver on a Sunday. This seemed reasonable, except that I had been told by text that they would in fact do so. So I gave up.

On Monday I assumed that they would attempt the delivery again, but since I was at work all day there was little I could do about this. After work I found the same pointless and uninformative card left again with no further information. I went back onto the web site and rescheduled the delivery for Thursday, a day that I already had off work to take another delivery.

Thursday arrived and I yearned for my bean bag to arrive. The morning passed uneventfully, until the IKEA delivery came and went. By late afternoon my cynicism returned, and though they still had hours left to fulfil their promise of delivering before 9pm, I had to make a dash to get some food. Fearing that my absence would coincide perfectly with their arrival, I left a note saying that I was just minutes away and could they call me if they arrived. I returned 20 minutes later to find the note still in place, and then sat waiting for a further three hours, finally leaving at 9.30pm.

On the Friday morning I tried to trace my package on the Yodel website, only to be told that it had been delivered. This was news to me, since it certainly wasn’t at the delivery address. I decided the time had come to call the insane people at Yodel and find out more. The nice customer service lady apologised profusely and tried to locate my bean bag with no success. Since nobody seemed to know where it was, she said she would have to start an investigation, but that it might take days to trace the bean bag. I told her what I thought of that, and promptly returned to the website to tell them what I thought of it too. Having finally navigated to a page where I could leave a long-winded ranty complaint not dissimilar to this one, I hit send only to be told that my long-winded complaint was too long-winded for their comments box, which was limited to 1500 words. This was the final kick in the teeth of dissatisfaction. So I cut my complaint in half and submitted it twice, with a small ‘to be continued’ message at the end of the first one and an additional statement at the end of the second one about how unbelievably awful their complaints procedure was, similar to their outlook on customer service.

Having been told that the investigation could take days, I forgot about the bean bag delivery and carried on living my life. On the Sunday, I was popping into the house for five minutes to pick up recycling, only to be greeted by a Yodel delivery man complete with my bean bag. This was unexpected, since it was in fact a Sunday, the day of Yodel rest. It was also massively fortuitous since I was there for all of five minutes, and can only assume that a few minutes either side would have resulted in me missing the delivery yet again and going on a whopping rampage down the streets of ineptitude.

I have heard nothing back from Yodel. No confirmation that the parcel has been delivered, no apology, no pathetic attempt to quell my intense hatred for everything they stand for. Though I am delighted to have my bean bag safely ensconced in my new abode, there will always be a part of me that recalls the immense frustration of getting it here. Yodel took that from me.