DPD are terrible

There are few things more tedious than waiting for a delivery. One of those is waiting for a delivery, seeing the van turn up and just drive off without delivering the item. Worse still when the driver says it was your fault.

Published on the 9th of January, 2012 and read 81 times.

We moved house at the beginning of September to a small town in Norfolk. Our new house has a name, not a number, in a street full of houses that only have names. You would normally expect that to be more of a couriers to deliver to except that our postcode only covers about seven houses.

When we first moved we had a lot of deliveries. We found that we might have to explain to the drivers exactly where we were, but this wasn’t a problem as they’d be able to get within spitting distance (quite literally) and see our house.

Last week our router blew up. It was 5 years old and covered in dropped Christmas tree needles. Pair that with a storm and we weren’t shocked that it died. I ordered a new one with next-morning delivery from Currys (oddly the cheapest place for the Netgear DGND3700 - odd because it’s rare that the Dixons Store Group are cheapest for anything). They sent it by DPD. The same day I ordered a Bluray burner and DVB-S2 PCI card for my desktop. This time from Overclockers and they also use DPD but just the standard next-day service.

The next day came and by 8am we had a new modem/router. Hooray. We thought they might batch up my other order with this one (to save fuel) but they didn’t. Oh well.

I went onto the tracking site and saw they had allotted an hour-long timeslot at ~3-4pm but 4pm came and went. No parcel.

Nothing on the tracking site happens while the drivers are out and about. I don’t think they upload their data until they get back to depot so when I checked the next morning I saw the notice:

We were unable to deliver your parcel as there was no one present to sign for the delivery

So time for some facts:

• There were two people in the house. Harri (my better half) was ill, sitting in the front room, watching telly, trying to feel better. I was upstairs (front of the house, again) working in the office.

• We have a very, very loud doorbell that even I can’t sleep through.

• We have a gravel driveway that you can hear people walking up, even from the back of the house.

• No “we missed you”-note was left.

• We are locatable. The morning DPD driver found us just fine.

• I have a phone! DPD have the number! If you can’t find the house, call the phone!

In short: we were in, the driver hadn’t been anywhere near our door. He lied.

Delivery day two… Things get stranger.

So furious as I was, DPD assigned us another hour-long delivery slot the next day. Slightly later this time, the top end being at ~6:15pm. Again the slot passed without event.

I was getting itchy at about 6pm and started looking out the window at every possible van noise. Even I think this is odd behaviour for a grown man, but that’s what I do when I want something delivered.

At 6:20pm a DPD van arrived. Right outside our house. I could hear the driver making a phone call over his in-van speakers and saw him tapping on his sat nav screen. He then got out of the van and started walking around it to the back.

At this point, I headed downstairs to the front door. When opening the door, I heard a van door slam and expected to see the driver walking up our drive but to my bewilderment, the van was driving off.

What the hell is going on?

So that night I checked the online tracking again. No lies this time but the parcel was tracked back to depot.

There are two contact options. I wanted an immediate answer so I gave them a call. Unfortunately their 0844-number seemed to be exclusively by a rather bossy automated voice who was very reluctant to put me through to a real person. After about five minutes of just swearing at her, she buckled with something along the lines of “it seems like you’re having problems, if you want to speak to a real person press #”. So I did.

And then I waited. And waited. And waited. During this time some awful music and adverts for DPD. They really need to spot the irony in this.

After another five minutes of this, I Googled how much an 0844 number costs to call. Few pence from a BT line, but I was calling on my O2 mobile so it’s the low, convenient, “always thinking about our customers” rate of just over 20p/minute. I wasn’t getting anywhere. I hung up and wrote them an email.

It’s now nearly 72 hours since I sent that email. No reply.

I checked the DPD tracking site again today. Another day. Another timeslot, again, in the early evening. I’m strongly considering deploying a stinger to stop the van getting away this time because this is getting stupid.

Does anyone know how to best lodge a complaint with DPD? I’m going to contact Overclockers now but I don’t expect them to change couriers over little ol’ me. I do expect them to get me a portion of my delivery cost back though.

Less than an hour after posting…

It arrived. Just 4 days late.

4:16pm Heard back from DPD an hour after delivery. They apologise for taking so long to reply, note that they’ve finally delivered it and apologise “for any inconvenience caused”. But no explanation. Rather a limp email.

5:20pm Overclockers got back in touch (2-hour response time) and told me they’d elevated the issue to management and that “management will speak to the head at DPD to ensure this does not happen again and raise a full investigation”. Also a refund of my delivery costs. Much happier to know that somebody is doing something to try and ensure this doesn’t happen again.

Of the two replies, Overclockers certainly show how much better their customer service is.