So, my blog is normally pretty focused on the various topics I post on, but I’ve been motivated enough today to write about ‘yodel’ (http://www.yodel.co.uk) who without doubt have to be the single worst courier company in existence today that I have ever had the displeasure of being on the receiving end of.
I can only suspect that their fees to companies must be really low as many large companies seem to use them, but I can hand on heart say that they have been a complete and utter disgrace, to the point where if I know a company now uses them as a courier, I’ll choose to avoid using that company and buy from somewhere else
Let me explain a little of my experience with yodel
Case 1: The first time
We ordered some shoes for my daughter from a large UK sports retailer who choose to use yodel.
The first paid for ‘next-day’ delivery date came and went, despite my wife waiting in the entire day for the delivery (7am to 6pm!). We called the courier company, and I begrudgingly arranged a re-delivery date.
Guess what – the redelivery date came and went and still no delivery – but this time I was watching the tracking data all day from the website. At 6pm in the evening, the status showed that it was out for delivery, then at around 6:30pm, the status changed, not to a failed delivery, but to a successful one, at around 3pm – with the comment that it was posted!
- It was shoes in a shoe box – my letter box isn’t that big!
- They needed a signature so they shouldn’t have posted them
- How/Why did the status change at 6:36pm to a 3pm delivery status!
I called yodel, but they wouldn’t talk to me, said it had been delivered, and that I’d have to take up any complaints with the sending company.
So I called them, explained the situation – they said they’d investigate, and would get back in-touch – I also personally contacted yodel through twitter to complain, and they initiated a separate investigation, but ultimately got back with a ‘your parcel was delivered’ … no it wasn’t!
Eventually, guess what – they found my parcel at the service centre and sure enough it hadn’t been delivered, but by then I’d already told the supplier that I wanted a full refund and wasn’t interested in entertaining yodel do yet another delivery that might get botched and didn’t like the insinuations that I was trying to pull a fast one! Sure enough, the supplier did refund, but only once the parcel had turned up, because as far as they were aware, they’d delivered it because Yodel had said so!
Case 2: The straw that broke the camel’s back
Order from Argos this time – I wasn’t aware they used yodel otherwise I’d have picked it up myself from the store, but as it was furniture, I figured it would be easier to get it delivered rather than try and squeeze it in the car.
Paid Argos extra for Saturday delivery, and waited in all day. I called Argos after 6pm come and went without a delivery in sight – guess what… apparently I was ‘carded’ just before 10am.
No way! I was in all day, and actually in the front room where you’d not only hear the delivery but also see it. I live in a small cul-de-sac and any lorry/van is easily noticeable. I noticed a Sainsbury’s home delivery around the time I was allegedly carded to one of my neighbours, but not the phantom yodel van.
On calling Argos, they mentioned the service depot it left from and I knew immediately that it was yodel and my heart sank. I’ve now had to arrange re-delivery and have got to wait around another day for a delivery.
—— Update 2nd October ——
The yodel woes continue – Argos rearranged the delivery for Wednesday and provided me with the tracking ID. You can imagine my surprise when I checked the tracking ID on Wednesday the 2nd October to find that it had been ‘successfully’ deliver on the 30th September. Wow… that’s great news, they just weren’t delivered to me.
Another call to argos, and some more information – they were left in my ‘Summer House’ in the back garden. Guess what – I don’t have a summer house..
So – yodel had successfully delivered the item to the wrong address – fantastic.
Argos arranged for them to recollect the items, and redeliver them. Sure enough, this happened on the same day… finally our package arrived from a courier who was less than ecstatic to be doing so (and that is putting it politely)
But it’s not the end! When I got home from work, I took a quick look and the boxes of the wardrobe were a complete mess, tears, crushes, polystyrene ruined, and low and behold, the wood was damaged where the box had been damaged and it was on a visible part of the wardrobe. This was probably cause by all the ‘messing’ around!
Now yodel are coming back again on Saturday with another new wardrobe, and to take the old one away…. maybe… lets wait and see, they’ve never managed a successful Saturday delivery yet!
—— Update 05 October 2013 ——-
Guess what….. still no delivery! It goes from extremely bad to simply unacceptable.
I’ve wasted 2 whole Saturdays waiting around for Yodel to do the seemingly impossible and deliver a package – something they’re supposed to be the experts at!
This morning I called yodel to find out the tracking ID for the redelivery and got through to a very pleasant lady who was more than happy to help. She pulled out the tracking IDs and provided them to me and then I proceeded to track the item throughout the day checking pretty much every hour as I didn’t have any confidence in them being able to deliver (and my lack of confidence wasn’t wrong!)
Following on from my first experience above (Case 1), I decided to take screen shots of the tracking screen as I checked this time.
Their track events aren’t real time even though they appear to be that way.
(Note – I’ve had to edit these screen shots to protect identity as the yodel website is completely un-secure around tracking of orders. It prompts for an ID and postcode but proceeds to subsequently ignore the postcode. Any thieves out there take note, you can cycle through the number orders, find those that are left in a ‘safe’ location, and proceed to remove them from the ‘safe’ location before the owners return! – you just need to order something to know the format in the first instance)
Take the following example from today
The screenshot of their online tracking at 14:30 – all looks ok so far.
Then came the 15:30 check (or thereabouts!)
Hold on a minute, is that a 12:06 track even that appeared some time between 14:30 and 15:34, and oh look. It’s an address problem – guess what, yet another messed up delivery by yodel.
But wait, an address problem, this is the same address they’ve already managed to deliver the damaged item to on wednesday, and even more so, I’d even put special delivery instructions on the order so they could find the address (assuming the driver could read that is)…
So, I’m still the proud owner of one damaged wardrobe, yodel still have another wardrobe that they have allegedly sent out and now returned, and all as Argos can do is rearrange delivery yet again… who’s to say next time around, it won’t be damaged again now that it’s been loaded/unloaded and then subsequently loaded onto a van again.
This order was made on the 21st of September.
I never got the delivery from yodel… having been on the phone to argos for a while, I’ve cancelled the delivery and collected from store instead.
—— Update 07 October 2013 ——
Hahaha – guess what they turned up this morning to deliver even though they had an address problem, and even though I’d cancelled.
—— End 0f Update 07 October 2013 ——
I don’t know if it’s just contract staff, drivers, or the regional yodel service centre here that is terrible, or if it’s a national thing, but I suspect its more their processes (or lack of) rather than the people given the numbers of complaints on the internet and the fact that they’ve even managed to make the BBC Watchdog TV programme (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mg74/features/yodel)
So if there are any ‘C level’ staff of large internet companies who happen to stumble on this – if you do use Yodel and want to retain customers, please think again. it might cost peanuts, but with peanuts you get ???????.
Alleging delivery when they haven’t, alleging ‘carding’/missed delivery when they haven’t, and to add to that now, an ‘address problem’ when they’ve already been just 3 days ago to deliver a damaged item!
A courier company has to do two things well:
- Courier items on time and schedule
- Track the status of these items accurately.
From what I can see yodel does neither of these!
I’ve worked with some very large and some smaller courier companies in my job as an IT consultant, all of who I know can track parcels, deliveries, and the vehicles/staff throughout the entire process all of which guarantees customer satisfaction – Yodel if you’re reading this I recommend you seriously take a look at your business processes, systems and staff if you want to turnaround the woeful financials assuming the numbers I’ve seen are to be believed!
I’m confident that yodel complete large numbers of successful deliveries every day and I know that many of the staff will be dedicated and excellent – the response I got from the twitter team was courteous and efficient, but couldn’t resolve the issue ultimately. I’ve never ever experienced such lies and poor service from a courier company – only once has one other courier company come close to being this bad in the last 10 years and they managed to redeem themselves.
Yodel you really are a disgrace.
Shout it from the hill tops, yodel it in the mountains – you certainly give people something to shout about – your shocking service!
Disclaimer just to add that these words are solely my own personal opinion, and also that the dates / times and events from case 1 are what I can recollect from memory as I can’t pull back much information on this now given it occurred a few months back. Case 2 is about as date/information perfect as I can get
[social_share/]
I only found that Yodel had not delivered a parcel when I found a card stuck in my gate. I was in all that day and the lazy B*** couldn’t even bother to walk 20 feet to my front door and ring the bell (or even leave the parcel in the porch). The card was completely blank apart from a pre-printed reference number.
So I went online to trace the parcel – and guess what? The reference number “did not exist”. So I telephoned the number given and the robot asked for the reference number – which did not exist. So I tried inputing no details (as would have been the case if I only had an old-fashioned dial telephone) and the robot told me that she couldn’t help as I hadn’t input any details – disconnected my call.
Of course I complained using the online form and have heard nothing, nor do I expect to.
It is quite clear what happened; the delivery person stopped outside my house and stuck a generic card on my gate hoping that someone else would pick up the problem and do the work he or she should have done.
I intend, whenever ordering online in future, to put in the “special delivery instructions” rubric “DO NOT USE YODEL” – and I suggest everone else does the same.
Ode to Yodel
Yodel have my parcel
It’s stuck in their collective ars*hole
This I surely know
As they wont let it go
It’s been there a long time
And you know its bad sign
When they are no longer able
To scan their own label
It’s out for delivery so customer services says
No! its been in your warehouse for the last few days
Open your eyes and look
I know Yodel don’t give a f*ck
I’ve spent today playing “find the parcel” with Yodel. This was a business to business delivery and had to be here by 10am today. Tracking information said that they’d tried to deliver at 5.05pm yesterday and had left a card last night and had delivered at 10am this morning. In fact, they wouldn’t have been able to try and deliver last night as after 5pm the whole of the delivery area is locked down and a security guard is watching it. No card was found and at 4pm this afternoon we still hadn’t seen a Yodel van. Repeated complaints to the sender resulted in a 4.30pm arrival, by which time the delivery was about as useful as a chocolate teapot. I’ve told the supplier that if they want to keep my business they will never use Yodel to send anything to me.
I am currently chasing them (Yodel) for some festive treats ordered on the 3rd Decemebr. I am also requesting some compensation due to the amount of chasing I have had to do.
Oh they are nightmare…
10th parcel sent to wrong address…
I moved flat so ordered quite a lot of furni from argos and later from homebase, both use these company of lost souls called yodel to deliver.
my address was given perfectly on all 10 orders, and were registered correctly with Argos/homebase, but when the info went to yodel the house numbers were replaced by zeros or missed digits… they never delivered anything, due to unrecognizable address, but would not call to ask, either me or the supplier (argos/homebase) .
After missing my deliveries for a month with many phonecalles to both end of the business with many people promising many thing, and apparently lieing , I managed to get the almost last parcel a month and a half later, all (!) were damaged or missing parts or not what I ordered… I spent the last 4 saturdays of 2013 waiting for their promised deliveries, that never came… and just got fed up, had so many argument daily with argos and them just got nowhere. Now I am waiting home for the last parcel promised to be delivered today. The address is wrong again, just got off the phone from yodel, shouted their head off as it’s missing a digit again…
At some point Argos offered me vouchers to compensate, I told them to shove it up to their ass as they can bloody bet on I will not ever use their company again till i am alive, and make sure i spread the word. So here I am spreading the word, leave stress out of your life, do not order from companies that using yodel to “deliver”.
update: i\’ve just seen on parcel tracking they delivered it and left it at a safe place… very interesting, no one knocked, rang or anything, and definitely did not left me with my parcel today…I walked around the block in the rain trying to figure where they could have left it…. I saw a package inside of the hallway of one of the houseblocks around , being left at a doorstep, i was trying my luck, tailgated after someone and voila that was my parcel, \”delivered\”=left at a wrong address… if I am a 80+ elderly, I wonder how this story would ended… absolutely ridiculous. Never ever.
They are the worst courier company out there but worst thing is unfortunately we are not given any choice who will deliver the goods we order…
In my case they says they tried 3 times to deliver the goods n left a card..B**S**..If it was up to me I’ll never use them..
From this blog we get to know few things about Courier Companies. Each and every company has few advantages and disadvantages. Some of them are already discussed in this blog. Thanks for sharing such nice information.
Biggest bunch of tossers i have ever come across. fin useless
Yep, I agree, they are shite – completely shite!