UPDATE 13/03/13: City Link have apologised for the situation. My friend has received a full refund from the supplier, and the matter is being looked into. Below is a transcript of said apology.

UPDATE 30/06/14: I’ve disabled comments here for the same reason I disabled them on my DPD post. This happened a while ago now, and while I appreciate that people might have opinions they want to share, this really isn’t the place for it. I am not a consumer blog, I write music for a living. If you have anything to say regarding City Link or any other courier, Twitter seems to be much more effective. I also think it’s interesting that, in the past week, I’ve had more pro-DPD/anti-Yodel/Hermes/whoever (maybe some people find them more unreliable, I can only report on personal experiences I’m afraid) comments on this page than in the entire past three years combined. Make of that what you will.

Dear Mr Fielding,

Thank you for contacting us.

Please let me begin by expressing my apologies regarding your concerns about the level of service you have received, I have thoroughly read through your complaint submitted on 8th March and indeed your recent blog post. City Link Ltd takes all complaints extremely seriously and we appreciate you taking the time to provide us with feedback.

I have personally looked into your consignment on reference: (reference removed). I have subsequently looked into the issues you have experienced and it is with regret the service we have provided has been unsatisfactory.

I apologise that your parcel did not arrive as you expected and you didn’t receive a card at all. I do understand how inconvenient and frustrating it is to wait for a delivery when there has been an issue of this nature. The driver said he attempted the delivery on both 7th and the 11th March, as you have said you were in at the time, I can only conclude that the driver has attempted to deliver at the wrong address.

We take great pride in always delivering to our customers successfully. I must assure you that this type of incident is rare. I am disappointed that on this particular delivery we have let you and your supplier down.

I have collated your comments, along with the information from the consignment into a case that has been passed to the depot management to look at the events so that we can take appropriate action and isolate this with the driver. We are confident that you will not have a similar experience if you choose to use City Link again in the future.

If there’s anything else I can help you with or if you would like to discuss this situation further, please do contact me. I would like to apologise once again, on behalf of City Link, for any inconvenience or distress this may have caused.

Kind regards,

(Name Removed)
City Link Milton Keynes

Original post:

Well, how’s about this for déjà vu? Apologies in advance for the wordy post!

A good friend of mine bought me a present for my birthday last week, which was rather smashing of him. My birthday was on the 7th March, and – had things gone to plan – I would have received my present, happy as can be, last Thursday on the 7th. That is, after all, how express delivery works – you place an order, it gets dispatched and it arrives quicker than the regular post. Pretty self-explanatory stuff. If you want stuff to arrive at the same speed as the regular postal service, you use the regular postal service.

However, as you can probably guess from the title of this post, things didn’t go to plan. In fact, as far as I’m aware there have been three attempts to re-deliver (maybe… I’ll get to that in a minute) and, as of the 11th March, I have yet to receive a thing. Well, I say that – there have been three attempts to re-deliver the package but, so far, I have only received one “we have been unable to deliver your package” card.

So… let’s start from the beginning, shall we? Here’s a nice little summary of the status of said package during it’s many travels so far.

My package was supposed to arrive on the 7th March and, as you can see, there was “no one to receive the goods at the delivery point so a card was left”. Well, first of all – no card was left. I only found out that my stuff hadn’t been delivered when my friend got in touch with me saying that a delivery had been attempted and no-one was in. If that was the case, why wasn’t there a card? Secondly, I was in at the delivery address all day. I was getting stuff together for the release of the instrumental versions of my first two albums but, knowing that I should have been receiving a package, I kept things quiet and kept an ear out. I didn’t hear a thing. Whether a delivery attempt was actually made or not is open for debate, but the “so a card was left” thing? That’s a complete and utter fabrication.

So, my friend got in touch with City Link and, to my knowledge, arranged for a re-delivery. From the above summary, though, you’ll notice above that this didn’t really get very far. It looks like my package had a very busy day on the 7th, so it decided to have a nap and stay in on the 8th. Bless. So, this marks what should have been the second attempted delivery of my stuff. I figured I wasn’t going to get it over the weekend, so went to the website and arranged for a re-delivery on Monday 11th – which is today. I also made an e-mail complaint because, hey, why not. As of the 11th, I still have yet to receive a response of any kind to said complaint. Classy.

That brings us nicely to today’s shenanigans, on Monday the 11th. We were having some electrical work done in the morning, so the electricity was off for a bit. I couldn’t really do a lot in the time so I decided to read a book. In silence. Next to the front door. I’m sure I don’t need to point out that I’m not particularly hard of hearing, and I should point out that the electrical work being performed was incredibly (incredibly!) quiet. Still, somehow, at 11am City Link snuck a card through the letter box saying that no-one was in. Note that this is four days after the initial delivery “attempt”, and that this is the first time I had received a card, after what should have been the third delivery attempt. There’s no doorbell here so the driver would have had to knock on the door, which – last time I checked – does not require electricity.

I was unaware that City Link were hiring ninjas but, hey, there’s a chance that I was suffering from a bout of selective deafness. Still – if hiring stealthy ninjas for delivery drivers is City Link’s thing then they should probably know that, evidently, ninjas are unaware of the concept of knocking on the door to get someone’s attention.

You’ll also notice that this delivery attempt has been strangely omitted from the delivery summary above. I have no reason to make this stuff up, but I do wish I’d taken a screen grab while the 11am failed delivery was still there. You’ll have to take my word on this one, though having said that I do have the scrunched up card in the bin if anyone really desperately wants to see a scan.

So! I decided to call the City Link people (3 minutes after this failed delivery attempt) and arrange for another re-delivery. Good news! They’d make another delivery attempt in the afternoon, and call the land-line to make sure I was in and heard the door. Excellent. Imagine my frustration when, just before 5pm, I decided to see what was going on as I hadn’t received my stuff. I checked the tracking site and read the same “there was no one to receive the goods” bit at 1:21pm. No phone call, no card and, as far as I’m aware, no real delivery attempt. I was listening intently for the door and even had a guy come round to read the gas and electricity meters in that time. I phoned up the City Link people again to vent my frustration and, apparently, they’re going to try again tomorrow. They might actually call me this time. The funny thing is, I actually received another package from a different courier company this morning. I had no trouble hearing the driver knocking on the door that time. I wonder what this driver did so differently?

While there are similarities between this and the DPD fun I had a couple of years back, I will concede that at least this time I wasn’t waiting on important computer-y bits. My world isn’t going to end because my present hasn’t arrived, but I feel really bad for my friend who ordered this stuff – what was a really genuinely nice gesture has been kind of soured by this whole experience. I’m still excited to get it though, the suspense is killing me!

I don’t like keeping an ear out for parcels – which I think is perfectly understandable given that a very sizeable chunk of my living depends on me generating noise. Something else I don’t particularly like is being lied to and having my time wasted, which is exactly what’s happened here. Including the now absent 11am delivery from today, I should have received at least 3 (4 if you count the apparently ignored re-delivery attempt on the 8th) “we couldn’t deliver your stuff” cards through the post. Unless my letter-box is consuming those cards, someone’s being incredibly economical with the truth.

I had quite a few people comment on my previous DPD rant saying that delivery drivers have a tough job and have incredibly unrealistic targets to meet. As such, I feel it’s only fair to say that if these delivery attempts were genuinely made and I simply didn’t hear them (very, very unlikely – but there’s a slim chance) then I sincerely apologise for wasting the time of the drivers.

However – I strongly suspect that this is not the case.

Still, I don’t think it’s fair to place the entirety of the blame on the delivery drivers, rather the courier/corporate mentality that it’s ok to take on an unrealistically large volume of orders that you have no hope of fulfilling while imposing ridiculous targets for delivery drivers to meet.

There’s a very simple term for people or entities that knowingly take on jobs that they can’t possibly fulfil – it’s called “being unprofessional”.

Avoid.

edit: I received the package on the 12th. My instructions to phone the land-line before delivery were totally ignored and the box was pretty heavily battered. Thankfully the contents were fine.