I am always being asked by customers who have large parcels of tapes or cine films to be digitized “How shall I get them to you?”. Up until now I have always said a decent courier or Royal Mail as in 17 years I have never had a parcel go astray with recorded delivery or Special Delivery (The Royal Mail Silver Sticker). After a terrible experience with DHL, really, really awful. Involving a £990 parcel and a £31.75 delivery fee, fortunately through me selling something on eBay rather than a customer’s films or archives. I find I cannot recommend them as a service. It’s not a delivery service when the recipient, my customer, has to drive across town to pick a parcel up from someone else’s house where the parcel ended up three weeks after I posted it “Next Day Delivery”. The comedy phrase “Computer says No” springs to mind. If you want to spend £31.75 having a parcel delivered within a few miles of it’s destination some time later then maybe they should be your company of choice. Maybe you might be the kind of person who believes Luton Airport really is in London or East Midlands Airport is “Quite near” Birmingham.
Ultimately it was a problem that would have been really easy to fix, both during the problem and afterwards.
My dear Dad always used to say “Don’t judge a company by when things go well, judge them when things go wrong, what do they do to put it right” and in this case it did not go well and very little was done during or afterwards to make better. Frankly if my during or after sales service was that poor I don’t think I would be coming up to my 17th Anniversary next February.