I recently had a particularly silly experience with the US Postal Service.*

I mailed an envelope (containing nothing more than a copy of my very thin, light book) from Denver across the country to a client.  The estimated arrival time on the east coast was to be two days.  In fact, I sent two identical packages from the same place at the same time to two equidistant (from me) places on the east coast.  One arrived exactly as promised.  The other?  A week and a half later (I spent that time bemusedly watching via the tracking on the USPS website as it made its way up and down the coast), it finally arrived.

So I called the Customer Service number and asked for what any other Customer in his or her right mind would request:  A refund for their complete failure to do what they’d promised.

Their response?

“Sorry, sir, it’s just an estimate.”

Well, yes, I know it’s an estimate.  You never know what may happen, after all.  For what it’s worth, there was no force majeure during this time, but from time to time things will happen that are simply accidents or other issues.  Packages slip between cracks, trucks break down, someone—I dunno—actually goes postal?  Anyway…

Two things:

One:  Sure, it’s an estimate.  So that time that a two-day delivery ‘promise’ is missed and it arrives on day three, or even four, okay.  Again, things happen.  But hey, whoa… this was way off and y’all totally blew it.  Not even close.  Don’t pass Go!  Don’t collect.  But they already had, of course, collected.  And that brings me to:

Two:  Okay, but so what sort of compensation/goodwill gesture can you do for me?  Throw a guy a bone for so obviously failing.  You can’t fix it by now, but you can make a good-faith move.

The response:  Nothing.  Nothing?!  Like, at all?!  That’s right.  Sir, because it’s just an estimate, we’re not authorized to refund you for this.

Okay, I said.  How about this:  Is there a class of delivery for which the estimate between my zip code and the recipient’s zip code of a package of this weight and character would be a week and a half?  Sure.  Okay, please just refund me the difference in the price I paid and what that would have cost me.  After all, I’m not sending live organs; it’s not the end of the world that it took that long, but why should I pay for an expectation of two days if I can pay for the slower service knowing that’s what I’d get anyway?  Again, no dice.  (And at this point, no surprise.)

Full disclosure, the agent did tell me that there is a (much more expensive, natch) service for which the delivery is actually guaranteed.  But what does that matter?  If it’s actually guaranteed at that level of service and price, they had better deliver at a 100% rate, right?  And if not, what do I get?  A simple refund?  For that matter, why even have an estimate on the service I used this time if it’s meaningless and the only way it actually is a reliable ‘estimate’ is if I pay more for the better class of service?

What we have here is a brand with zero incentive (at least none operationally) to deliver on a promise to its Customers.  Since there’s a policy that, their professed estimate is only (and literally) nothing more than an estimate (an estimate they don’t hold themselves to in any meaningful way), it costs them nothing to blow it.  Even regularly.

In that spirit, I’ve got a thought.  Offer a class of service that goes like this:  Any package, any weight, any contents, between any two locations in the continental US (not including Alaska or Hawai’i); we’ll deliver it in four hours for a flat rate…say, $600.  (It’s meant to be preposterous, so pick any price you’d like.)  Technically, considering small regional airports and chartered flights, this actually could be done with just about any package.  Obviously it’s impractical, but who cares?  If the response when you don’t deliver on it is simply, “Meh, it’s an estimate, sorry,” why not just do it?

Here’s the bottom line:  I’ve had my issues with UPS and FedEx over the years.  Amazon, too, since we’re going down this road (DHL’s not that prevalent in the US, but ironically, they frequently rely, as do these others, on the USPS as their ‘last mile’ partner, so there you go).  They’ve each blown ‘estimated’ delivery timetables.  Okay, but you know what each will do when they get it wrong?  They’ll try (granted, with differing results) to make it right.  They’ll offer some sort of attempt at a face-saving make-good, if just for the sake of their brands.

We can joke about US Government entities and their lack of efficiencies and Customer-centricity.  But the USPS is—at least on paper—a quasi-for-profit organization.  I wonder how long it’d survive without that ‘quasi’.

Could your brand learn a lesson?  Do you rely on a crutch of your own?  Rather than being ostensibly supported by taxpayers, perhaps you have the corner on your market and are using that as a crutch to not deliver on your promises?  Who’s going to come knock you off your perch, after all, if you’re the biggest player in your market (akin to being propped up by the US taxpayer)?  You may be surprised.

 

*Normally, I don’t call out a brand if I’m sharing a negative experience, but in this case, I’ll risk enduring the wrath of the very US Federal Government, no less, since masking who’s responsible would be an unnecessary and impossible task anyway.