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If you are a single person or a working couple, chances are that you often have unpleasant exchanges with courier companies. Couriers invariably tend to come sometime in the afternoon when you are at work and your house is probably locked. If the document to be delivered is an important one — say, a credit card or a cheque book — which requires you to show an identification and sign for it, the courier leaves a note, asking you to contact the company, and goes away.
So far, so good. The trouble begins when you call up the courier company’s customer service cell and request them to deliver the package either in the morning, say, around 10 ’clock or after seven or eight in the evening. That’s what Supriti Sen, a software professional, did when she missed an important shipment recently.
“I called up their customer service and explained that both me and my husband, who is a doctor, are away at work throughout the day — Monday to Saturday,” says Sen. “So I requested them to arrange the delivery of the shipment either around 10-10.30am or after eight in the evening. But the customer service lady flatly refused, saying that their delivery service began only after 11am and so the earliest they could get to the area was 12 noon. A late evening delivery was also not possible, she said. And when I suggested a Sunday delivery, she said rudely that it was ‘out of the question’.”
A heated exchange followed. The matter was resolved only when Sen contacted a senior manager of the courier company and brought it to his attention. The delivery finally took place a couple of days later at 10.30 in the morning.
It’s not just couriers. If your washing machine or microwave or air conditioner happens to pack up and you ask for a service call, you may be sure that the technician will want to pay a visit sometime in the afternoon. A request for a service call either in the morning or late evening will, more often than not, be met with stiff resistance and frank recalcitrance. Indeed, as singletons and working couples will tell you, most service staff seem utterly oblivious to the fact that not all their customers are housewives and hence may not be free to receive them between 12 and five in the afternoon — which, incidentally, appears to be the time period of choice for service engineers of every hue.
“We are simply not on their radar,” says Chitrita Sanyal, a chartered accountant and a singleton, who recently had to take one day’s casual leave so she could get her malfunctioning AC attended to.
So isn’t it high time that couriers and household appliance companies had a specific policy geared to working people — a policy that takes into account the fact that they may need to provide service to some customers after hours or on Sundays?
Put that poser to the senior management of these companies and they will insist that such a facility exists already. Says Harshal Bhoi, country manager operations, Aramex, a Mumbai-based courier company, “Our normal service hours are between 9am and 6pm. But if there is a genuine need to deliver before or after these hours, we are flexible. In fact, in the case of credit cards, we even deliver between 7am and 10am, on request. The golden rule is that you must deliver.”
Sure, but does the company have a system in place to ensure that its staff are following this dictum? Do they know if there is a disconnect between the company’s policy and the practice on the ground? “Efficiency of service depends on the local management,” admits Shekhar Mitra, operations head, east, of Aramex. “But yes, we definitely need to make sure that we attend to the needs of working people.”
Blue Dart, another courier company with which many working women in Calcutta claim to have had run-ins on precisely this issue, chose not to respond to The Telegraph’s questions in this regard.
Service centres of manufacturers of household appliances also exhibit a similar reluctance to cater to customers who may be out during the usual working hours. Here, too, though the provision for attending to “special requests” exists on paper, it’s usually an uphill task to get the service staff to agree to make a call after seven in the evening. “On special request we do make calls before or after our normal working hours, which is between 9am and 7pm,” says Randhir Chatterjee, branch manager, Samsung, West Bengal.
However, customers say that the reality is quite different. “When our microwave oven conked out sometime back, I had to embark on a huge battle of will with the service centre. It’s only after much persuasion that they agreed to send a technician around 8pm,” says Nirmalya Ghosh, a lawyer who works six days a week and has a wife who is often away on tours.
“We try to finish our calls by 6pm,” admits one customer service engineer of a reputed brand of household appliances. “We too get tired. We don’t have the energy to make late calls,” he says on condition of anonymity.
Fair enough. But one wonders why companies do not simply keep enough service staff on their rosters so that they can take turns to attend to requests for calls after hours or on Sundays.
Some are, in fact, trying to do just that. Sony, for instance, has plans to offer 24x7 service in the near future. “We are planning to launch it by next year. It’s in the pipeline,” reveals Soma Bose, regional customer care head, east zone, Sony.
One company which has taken some steps to cater to customers who are singles or working couples is Indian Oil. Apart from the facility of Sunday deliveries, it now also has a “Preferred Time Delivery” scheme where you can ask for your gas cylinder to be delivered at a time slot of your choice. It comes at an extra charge, of course. If you want a delivery before 8am or between 6pm and 8pm, for example, you will have to shell out Rs 50. “We launched this project last year keeping in mind the needs of working couples,” says Pallab Roy, corporate communications officer, Indian Oil, Calcutta.
However, even here, the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. An Indane distributor in Alipore, Calcutta, for example, stated that the scheme had “many problems” that were yet to be sorted out. And no, they were not offering the facility as yet.
“As far as we are concerned, all distributors have been brought under the scheme,” insists Roy. “It is not possible for us to check each one and see if they are implementing it or not. This is where consumers can help us by giving their feedback and registering their complaints. The feedback is always acted upon.”
As consumers, that’s all you can do right now. Put in your complaints, and hope for the day when all service sectors will become more sensitive to the needs and compulsions of working people.
