Courier companies… Our business wouldn’t exist without them. But trying to find good, reliable couriers is as tough as trying to find Mr Right. They promise you the world, but are they really going to be there when you need them? Is what they are offering compatible with your needs? So right before Christmas we decided to try out a new courier. They were promising us all the right things, but were they going to deliver…
Christmas at the Basketcase is... well… a bit of a basketcase. Hundreds of orders being printed, allocated, made, dispatched, tracked and delivered, every day. (I’m exhausted just thinking about it) Not to mention the phones running off the hook. So the last thing you need is to spend half an hour on the phone with a courier company call centre trying to track down a gift, only to hang up with no more information than before you called. This is what we had been dealing with previously. So with this new courier we had not one, but two account managers taking care of us. If we came across a gift that hadn’t been delivered on time, we sent them both an email. One of them would get back to us very quickly, and you knew it was being looked into and would be resolved ASAP. Finally we had found someone that cared, something I believe you call customer service. Something that had definitely been lacking in other couriers.
Good news is that the new courier company did an amazing job. Sure, no one is perfect, but the improvement on the previous Christmas was massive. So when I headed to Sydney to visit my Sydney team in January, I had a meeting with our account managers and thanked them for the great job their team had done. Coincidently that very day we had a customer in Brisbane call who had ordered a number of gifts from us and only half of them had arrived. They were for a presentation that afternoon at 2pm and when she called the courier company to track down the remaining gifts, she was told they were still in Sydney! Argh! I called our account managers and begged them to move heaven and earth to get these gifts delivered before 2pm. They assured me they would do everything they could, and had them on the next flight to Brisbane. We tracked them like crazy all day, and sure enough they arrived with 15 minutes to spare.
And you would not believe what happened later that day. My Sydney team got a phone call from a sales rep for another courier company asking if he could forward us some pricing information and maybe we could use them to deliver our gifts. Well you can imagine his embarrassment when he found out that we already use them, and have used them for many, many years. So that my friends is why when you find yourself a good courier, you hang on to them for dear life, because they really are hard to find, just like Mr. Right.
