DHL Goes Way Beyond Customer Service

Wow, DHL must be nice in your area.

I had a very bad experience with them in the UK.

My package was supposed to arrive on a Friday, so I stayed in from 9AM-3PM to wait for it. No one turns up. So around 3PM, I got frustrated, I was tracking the order online and said the package was on the van and is out to delivery so I call them up.
The woman I spoke to was rude and not sympathetic; I explained my situation and all she said was "sorry, the driver has ran out of time to do the deliveries".

And I had to wait till after the weekend and wasted a whole day...thats DHL for me.

I should of prefaced this with I have had some very bad experiences in my area with DHL as well. I had a pickup scheduled a few months back for a package that had to be somewhere at a certain time. When no one showed up I called. They said that no one was available and it would have to wait till tomorrow.

The reason I still preferred DHL is because I have not seen them damage a package yet, where the other local delivery companies tend to deliver very bruised packages. Im sure that DHL has smashed its share of products but I have been lucky in that regard.

DHL in my area (Cambridge, MA, near MIT) is quite good. Fedex and UPS will both claim to have made a delivery attempt without making one (driver's in a hurry, and gets penalized if he doesn't claim to have made one), leave things outside city doors without signatures, delay things, and otherwise make jackasses of themselves. DHL does quite well -- they've always been fast, courteous, and professional. I only deal with them when I do something with Dell (a few times a year), but they've been great every time.

Most of the time, I go for USPS. They're cheaper and much more reliable than either Fedex or UPS. I haven't shipped things with DHL personally, but now that I think about it, I should start.

You had a lot better experience with DHL than I did.

That's pretty impressive. I've always thought that UPS is the good ol' trusty, but quite obviously they've gotten fat on their reputation and don't even have to worry about upholding their promises. I've had so many late packages from them.

I had a particularly horrible freight delivery problem with Old Dominion Freight Lines. I bought a motorcycle that was to be delivered to my door. Foolishly, they assumed that a semi truck would be able to fit on my little residential street and unload the package with a lift gate into my driveway. They never even called to ask how big my driveway was or what sort of area I was in.

I feverishly watched the tracking on their site all day, it was "out for delivery" for hours, then finally, at about 8 pm it changed to "scanned back into warehouse." I called and apparently the truck driver went past my house and decided that he couldn't do it. He promised me that a driver would bring it on a straight truck the following morning. Again, I watched the tracking all day, but the same exact thing happened. I called again and they had "completely forgotten" to take care of that.

Finally, on their third attempt, they got it on the right truck, and even got it to my house (however, not first thing in the morning as they promised. More like around 5 pm). The driver was a nice guy and he even said that it would have been cake to get a truck in there and said that nothing but laziness could have made a driver decide it would be too hard.

Hope no one else has to deal with that company.

I've never had a good experience with DHL. Never.

I don't think it's down the company, it's down to the local office. Mine had lazy drivers and half-arsed management. Yours apparently is great.

This may be DHL in the USA, but don't use them or FedEx in South America. Many things are stolen before delivery, or the valuable stuff will be removed from the box. They over-charge horrendously for shipping out ( 40.00$$ for a legal sise letter????)and will try to jack you for non-existant "import duties" and other fictional taxes and fees for things like personal documents, letters, trade/industry magasines etc...
It is rampent gown here and DHL USA; the parent company has done nothing about it despite years of increasing complaints.
I don't know how they continue to stay in business here; I guess it's all the people in the US whom have no idea what goes on when their package leaves the USA....

I've had nothing but terrible experiences with them in the D.C. area. In fact, a driver came on Wednesday and I didn't have a money order ready because I didn't know they were coming. Well, my mom told him to come back tomorrow, unknowingly I wouldn't have the money order then either. He came back Thursday and when I didn't have the money order, he yelled at my mom "You told me to come back tomorrow !!" and jumped in his truck and left. He hasn't been back since then. Now, aren't they supposed to make three attempts anyways?

I worked for a retail chain for a little over a year, and the three people to come through for deliveries were UPS, USPS and DHL representatives. All three were extremely nice, with the USPS having a couple days of vacation, and his replacements being nice and welcoming/talkative/friendly as well as he was. Even the USPS guy, when he wasn't on vacation or on another route, was brilliantly personable. His replacements were somewhat different, with one being even more of an honorable gent, and another with the , "just doing the job," outlook.

Then, the DHL guy: not only did he deliver every time there was a package sent via DHL, but he cracked jokes and made the entire experience, however routine and mundane, seem as though you were meeting a person, and not a paid hired-on. I love all 3 guys (4 if you count the second UPS guy), but the DHL guy seemed to have been the most personal and, surprisingly enough, timely, having always arrived at roughly the same time of day.

Then again, those deliveries were to a business, so I had constant contact with each person, whereas they would have been somewhat less likely to befriend a residency's occupant.

This is something you might send over to the folks at www.consumerist.net.

Sorry, that's www.consumerist.com, not .net.

This is such an anomaly that I'm tempted to claim this is a corporate attempt at a viral 'positive spin' PR campaign.

I'm an international importer/exporter and have actually heard the phrase: "What do you expect, this is only a $61 shipment - it will take some time?" from a trademarked inept customer service rept...

I have spent hundreds of thousands on shipping in my day, and DHL represents nothing but subpar service across the globe, from southeast asia, around the globe to the mideast, take my word for it.

Thanks for taking the time to write about this. Normally people only complain when things go wrong, and don't say a thing when they get exceptional service. Thanks.

James Mcowan clearly has the raw data, but then his company may have engendered a poor relationship with DHL; there is no way to know.

My own experience parallels the original post. When I had critical medical documents sent by DHL from the U.S. to Ireland, and they were not due until the next day, I nevertheless called the airport office to inquire. The manager was the last one there, at midnight. He confirmed the package was there. I said I was enroute. He allowed that he was about to go home. I asked where his home was. His route passed by the hospital in question. He named a familiar pub as the rendezvous, and handed the records to me at about 12:45am.

Another time DHL charged me $645 dollars for same-day delivery to Asia. OK, it cost a pretty. But even if I was paying some travel junkie's airfare for a two-week vacation in Hong Kong -- they delivered.

I would not be surprised at poor DHL performance in S.A. It takes a while to figure out a culture, and longer to work around it.

Worldwide I've found FedEx to vary from competent but rigid to utterly inept.

I have no foreign experience with UPS, but after tens of thousands of domestic shipments I personally know that management is intelligent but hopelessly rigid; it's the drivers that make it work.

And if you see a battered truck coming out of the mirage in the red centre of Australia, pile high with goods lashed on, it's a fair bet that the sign pasted to the side will read "DHL".

Your mileage WILL vary, and in my experience it will vary depending on both origin and destination country. International shipping venues are strong in x to x, or weak in x to y, or tolerable in y to y. There was a time when USPS was invariably second-day to Boston and third-day to Los Angeles -- from San Francisco.

They did what they were paid to do: deliver your parcel by a certain time. Don't be so impressed.

Hey, just curious, was it an ATI X1650 XT?

it was a Radeon 9800 Mac

Respectfully:
"all be it" should be "albeit"
http://www.answers.com/albeit

I only mention it because this made me pause for a moment to try to figure out what you meant.

Nice story. :)

Things like this are excellent reminders that, whether they're working at DHS, UPS, FBI, CIA, DHS, Kinko's, WalMart, or a mom 'n pop store: People are still people, and they're generally good, despite what the 6 O'clock news would have you believe.

Wow, a million miles away from my experience with DHL in the UK, I had an engine sent via DHL, I was out when they attempted it so they just dropped off a scrappy little note with no contact details or even a reference.

Ended up the engine got returned to sender and I had to go get it myself.

Customer service was a joke and no help at all, didn't even get an appology.

I now don't buy from anywhere that ships DHL. Worst of the delivery companies IMO (and given some of the cowboys out there that is saying something!)

While your card got deilvered on time what about the other packages for the people that didn't complain? *Good* service would have been them to send out another van and get everyones delivered not just yours. All you've had is good customer service rather than a good delivery service.

I use DHL almost exclusively. The driver in my area is fantastic, and I have had nothing but good reports from the hundreds of customers all over the US and Canada that receive my packages.

I, too, import/export on a regular basis. DHL is my preferred carrier for small to medium-sized packages.

"Peter said:

DHL in my area (Cambridge, MA, near MIT) is quite good."

I would disagree with you.

I work at a Biotech startup in Kendall Sq (where MIT is located). We had a contract with DHL for several months but they were consistently terrible by misplacing packages, separating packages that should have been shipped together, and shipping things late. Needless to say we canned DHL and now we use FedEx.

I've always had great results with DHL here in the US. I remember when DHL did all the shipping for Outpost.com (now owned by Fry's). I could order products as late as 6PM, specify ground shipping at lowest cost, and the products would arrive before 8AM the next morning. I still can't figure out how they did that at all, let alone made a profit.

I think the key here is, corporate accounts get superior handling by any shipper. The little guy doesn't do enough shipping to draw their attention, but a big account will get special handling and extra effort to keep them happy.

I may have to agree with DHL_Hater_Maybe as in the UK are an awful company. 1 has run over our cat, another just threw the parcel onto our doorstep and another ran into our car. Parceline are nice.

I worked for DHL for 13 years in the Caribbean and Latin America. To the guy who said their service is crap in LatAm, that's not my experience.

We did everything we could to prevent theft as a corporation, but people are people. I believe we provided the best service possible. Latin America is not an easy place to provide this kind of service. Drivers would get robbed on route. Streets don't always have names or numbers. The place is big. It's not England, or the US, or Europe. It's different. You have corrupt Customs, corrupt police, coup d'etats, wars to deal with. And still we kept on delivering. I remember walking down a street in Panama with fresh bullet holes in every building. And coming out from the office one night in Chile right into a full-blown, tear gas and water cannon police/demonstrator battle. I remember the company trying to re-construct the package details when one of our planes flew into a mountain in Colombia, so we could recompense the shippers.

We worked our butts off 24/7. Customer service ran 2 shifts because the girls would be too stressed out from the abuse they received from customers. We hired ex-police to check shipments because drug lords were ALWAYS trying to ship cocaine out. We intercepted cocaine in computer monitors, even in a frigging 2-ton electrical transformer.

The idea that DHL is or was anything less than professional, is sad. I left due to health problems but I enjoyed the adrenalin rush of working in a really interesting and innovative company. DHL invented the modern express service industry. They still do a great job against incredible odds in Latin America.

As a guy who works for DHL in the USA, (and no...I'm not here as an official company rep.) I pay attention to what goes into the blogosphere about DHL. I have a google alert set to cover mentions of DHL. Thats how I got here. I'm delighted to see this good service report. Theres actually quite a lot of this kind of thing that goes on daily with DHL, FedEx and UPS. The drivers really do care. (the companies do too, but the volume is tremendous.) In the end its the drivers that do the service work and make the end customers happy.

I'm delighted to see that this worked out well. Makes me feel good as a guy who cares A LOT about whether the company I work for does well for those who buy our services.

Eric

They delivered the parcel late. What's to get excited about?

Since you bought the story about the broken down truck, next time they'll probably tell you your parcel has been washed up on a tropical island and will be delivered as soon as Tom Hanks finished carving a canoe

That's what you get when you use the German Post Office (DHL) for your deliveries... :-p

Hi guys..

Just to share my experience with DHL here at India. They drop my parcel to a person named Raghu and praying that Raghu will give it to me (nice rite!!) .

The parcel was arrived on 27th August and thanks to DHL who do the delivery but they give it to someone else and hope that guy will do their job.. it is very irresponsible of DHL people. I only received it on 29th on August which is 3 days late from the delivery date because i am looking for a person name Raghu.

I dont understand how can an establish and leading courier company can drop a parcel to a stranger. The worst thing is this Raghu did not call or contact me saying i have received a parcel neither do the DHL people (If you wanna drop a parcel to someone else at least call me and ask for permission) isn't that the rite way to do. Poor service of DHL.. :(

i am a former employee of DHL.. the driver bringing you that package on his way home WAS his choice.. DHL as a whole is crap.. but there happens to be some drivers that really do care about the customers and they go above and beyond their job. I was one of those drivers. DHL will never be as successful as FedEx or UPS because they do not value customer service or the employees that provide exceptional service. They only care about more packages being delivered in a smaller time frame. (overtime is severely frowned upon). P.S. the driver that brought you that package- i can almost guarantee you he didnt get paid to do it. Nice to hear some people appreciate good drivers.

You were lucky. I've not had a good experience with them since I moved here to Russia from the US. I shipped an envelope containing 5 sheets of paper (memos) from the Hotel Baltschug in Moscow on Mar 29, 2008, destination Texas. They took almost $100 US for this "express" shipment. It took them almost all of the day on March 31 for the shipment to even leave Russia, finally leaving at 9 pm. It finally hit the US on April 2 where it sat for two days in Ohio "on hold." When I complained via the website, one of the local Russian offices contacted me and stated customs was the hold up and I could not have any refund. Personally, I'm baffled as to how customs could possibly hold up a simple envelope with a few sheets of paper in it for two business days. DHL must never deliver anything on time, if that is the case. By the way, as I write this, the item has yet to be delivered. I am still trying to get a valid explanation and my money back. I'll never use them again.