UPS has just left me feeling bemused.
We all know how Americans like to call some things by different names, like:
- “soccer” vs “football”
- “sneakers” vs “trainers”
- “trunk” vs “boot”
- “shipping” vs “delivery” etc
But when it comes to operating an international document and parcel shipping service, you’d think it would be in UPS’s interests to ensure maximum consistency.
I’d received some paperwork that needed to be signed and returned to a company in the States. They sent it to me by UPS, along with a UPS envelope and pre-completed label for returning it.
When ready, I was told that I needed to call UPS and ask for an “On Call Air Pick Up”. I duly called UK customer services, who responded, ”a what?”.
I repeated the phrase, but the young lady evidently had no idea what it meant. When I explained that the recipient was paying for the return delivery she said, “oh, you mean Freight Collect”.
“Would it not be a good idea”, I asked, “for your US and UK operations to call the same service by the same name?” But it obviously wasn’t her responsibility to have a substantive reply.
I then asked how I should handle the labelling of the envelope in readiness for the collection. She wasn’t familiar with the type of UPS-branded envelope I had, but said that the van driver would be able to help me with that.
And so it was, later that day, that I came to ask the delivery man how many parts of the label needed to go where, including sharing my observation that the transparent plastic window designed to hold the delivery label would get sealed at the same time as the envelope itself was sealed. Yet he immediately sealed the envelope without putting a label in. Only when I reiterated my point did he realise where the relevant part of the label was supposed to go. So we had to unstick the seal in order to get it in place.
“Would it not be a good idea”, I asked (with an uncanny sense of deja vu), “for UPS to use the same kinds of envelopes for both its UK and US customers?” Again, an unfair question, for which he rightly had no reply.
Such inconsistencies in the naming of processes and design of packaging materials clearly cause day-to-day confusion for UPS customers and staff, which was pretty surprising to me, considering how hard UPS seems to have worked to standardise its brand.
It would seem that even “one of the leading global providers of specialised transportation and logistics services” still has room for improvement!
