Sprint Has Been Trumped

I started this blog many years ago with a complaint about Sprint's customer service. Today, I return to announce that the horribleness of that experience has finally been topped. Behold...the worst customer experience of my life!

Dear FedEx,

This past weekend, I had the single worst customer experience of my life, courtesy of you.

My uncle was overnighting his hockey tickets to me, which were supposed to arrive at my house by 10:30 Saturday morning, no signature required (an important detail). The game was Saturday night. When the tickets had not arrived by 1:30PM, I let him know, and he checked with his assistant Linda, who had sent the tickets.

Linda learned your courier had tried to deliver the tickets at 10:45, but found there was no one home. Now the tickets were at your FedEx location in Culver City, where I had to pick up the tickets by 5PM.

Let’s forget the minor quibble that the tickets were guaranteed to be delivered by 10:30, yet the delivery guy said he was there at 10:45. The first major display of incompetence is that the tickets were to be delivered NO SIGNATURE REQUIRED, and yet he left with the tickets because he could not obtain a signature.

Secondly, and much more egregious...I was home at 10:45. There was no knock at the door, no ring of the doorbell. I am curious as to how your delivery person expected to get the signature for the package when he did not actually attempt to deliver it. I have no plausible explanation for this other than that he lied about ever trying to complete the delivery.

Stunningly, this is all just the prologue for what would be the truly mind-bendingly awfulness of your customer service.

Now, having offered me no alternative other than having to abandon my playoff football watching and drive the half hour from my place to Culver City, I sucked it up and made the trek.

I walked into an empty FedEx store, with your employee standing behind the desk: a perfectly able-bodied young man. I told him a package was supposed to be delivered to me, but it wasn’t, and now it was here. He asked me for the tracking number. Reaching for my phone with Linda’s texts, I realized I had left it in the car. I told him I didn’t have it, but gave him my ID.

This was no good, he said. “It’s all about the tracking number,” he informed me.

Okay, fine. I ran back to my car, grabbed my phone, and hustled back. Except when I re-read Linda’s text, it said she was out of the office (since it was Saturday) and she didn’t have the tracking number, but did have my uncle’s account number, and that should suffice. I relayed this to the employee.

Nope, he said. He needed the tracking number. Otherwise, there was simply no way to locate the package. “Come on,” I said. “I don’t have the tracking number. There must be some sort of system here.”

He asked me my name again, confirmed the package was supposed to be delivered to my house that morning, and played around on his computer for a minute. Nothing, he said, explaining, “Without the tracking number, I don’t know if it’s a package, an envelope, or what.”

“Well, it’s an envelope,” I told him, getting frustrated. “You could have just asked me that.”

He told me to wait while he went and looked in the back. Then he disappeared for somewhere between 5-10 minutes. In that time, another customer came in. Eventually he came back empty handed. “I can’t find it,” he said.

“Alright fine, hang on. I’ll try and get the tracking number. Help her,” I said, motioning to the woman behind me. I texted Linda that the guy was telling me he needed the tracking number. After a couple texts back and forth, Linda called me, understandably annoyed.

“I can’t believe this is how I’m spending my Saturday,” she said. “I don’t have the tracking number. I called that location, I spoke to a supervisor, he assured me that if you come in and have your ID, they’ll give you the tickets. They are so stupid!”

“Agreed,” I said, as I turned and noticed there was suddenly now a line of about eight people building up behind the woman being “helped.” And she was turning away from the counter now, so I couldn’t let myself fall into line oblivion. “Linda I gotta go,” I said, stepping back up to the desk.

“Look man,” I said, very frustrated now. “She said she called and spoke to a supervisor, he told her all I needed was my ID. There is an envelope for me here somewhere, and I need to get it!”

He looked at me, surprised. “Oh, that was you?” He turned around, picked up an envelope sitting on a counter, and handed it to me.

I was stunned. “What...what was the magic word?” I asked.

“You didn’t tell me you spoke to someone on the phone.”

I was even more stunned. “What difference does that make? I gave you my ID! Why didn’t you just look to see if that was my package?!”

“You had to tell me you spoke to a supervisor.”

Aware there were witnesses present, I chose not to pursue this line of madness any further. “I don’t understand what’s happening,” I said. Then I left.

Hopefully, I don’t have to explain too much why this experience drove me to document it for you. You get it, right? You see how this man you employ was going to let me just walk out of there without the package I drove a half hour to retrieve, after a different person you employ screwed up by not delivering it in the first place?

You understand the lunacy of putting a package aside to give to a customer, then not so much as checking the ID of someone coming in requesting that exact package to see if it’s a match? The utter insanity of explaining matter-of-factly, without apology, as if he is making any sort of sense whatsoever, that in order to complete this transaction, all I had to do was tell him I had spoken to someone on the phone? As if that’s some sort of universally understood rule of shipping?

I hope you can appreciate how truly unhelpful this man was, working at your Culver City, CA location at 3:30PM on Saturday, January 14, 2017. If I had volunteered to do his job for him – having exactly zero experience as a FedEx employee – and look for the package myself...I would have gone behind the desk, glanced at the first thing I saw, and found the envelope addressed to me in within five seconds.

Trump’s not even president yet, but I imagine this is the type of experience we’re in store for. It goes without saying I’ll be using UPS in the future.