The power of Social Media

In Italy we have a common way to say: Christmas with your relatives, Easter with whoever you want. And as we are nearly to the Christmas time, good habits will require me to go home for holiday. However, this year to avoid being robbed by RyanAir and their expensive extra luggage tariffs, I decided to send gifts using an express courier, which total at hands is cheaper.

I’ve been living in the UK for about a year now, and in the past I had a chance to use couriers on three seperate occasions using a parcel broker, two of them with InterParcel and one with Parcel2Go. The last experience with Parcel2Go has not been so bad, despite a little problem with the tracking code. However as their tariffs were a bit more convenient this time, I’ve decided to give them another go.

Parcel2Go and Twitter

With Parcel2Go I’ve had the worst experience in all my life

I placed an order on Saturday the 4th with the collection date of the 6th. Nobody came to collect the parcel, but at the time of the order they sent an email which informed me that “due to the weather” my parcel would not be collected, an automatic rebook would have been placed for the next day.

With such an email, I didn’t take any action, but guess what? Nobody came on the rescheduled day . So, after 35 long minutes of waiting with their chat service, I was told that it was my fault and that I should have rebooked the collection. So I did, for Wednesday the 8th, and guess what … nobody came again.

They are absolutely incompetent, they should have at least given me a ring or send me an email to say sorry.

This was not the case, and after 18 hours I sent an email complaining, asking for a refund, nobody has answered yet nor did I receive an automatic email.

So I decided to start using the social media to complain a bit more heavily.

And Parcel2Go is such an unprofessional company that never heard anything, because they are not taking any action against this.

Luckily for us, there are professional team, at least on my job sector, that monitoring their competitors and the market, got the chance and send a very interesting job help offer to Parcel2Go.

I’m not sure if they will be so intelligent to accept TNT offer, but this demonstrate once for all that Social Media are absolutely a powerful channel that companies need to monitor and interact with.

Ah, and just to tell all the story. Yesterday night I was so upset with Parcel2Go, that I placed an order with Interparcel again with today as a collection date.

At 14.32 they sent me an email telling the appointed courier was unable to come and they sent me the label for a new more expensive courier. This is what I call service!!!

Thanks Interparcel.

**Update 2011-01-15: **Further to my blog post, Parcel2Go got in touch with me to say sorry and offered to me to collect my parcel again. As my parcel already gone, I refused. So they proposed to me £20 of discount to be credited on my account, but I still waiting for that “gift”. Definitely it’s a no-no company.