I first will point out that in general FedEx has great shipping rates, great personnel (especially our agent), and generally does an excellent job in both handling & shipping time.
Updated 12/22/11
| Update with the viral video shown of a FedEx driver throwing a computer monitor over a fence, even though the recipient was currently home. FedEx Delivery Goes Terribly Wrong First, I will defend FedEx in that this problem from our experience of shipping 1000s of packages and as well knowing many FedEx drivers and other staff is rare. That said, there is a lot of pressure on the driver this time of year (Christmas), as well their are always going to be “Bad apples” at any company. My complaint (after doing more reading) is really not with the driver, rather what this post/article is all about; FEDEX CLAIMS. The recipient reported that he attempted to get this quickly resolved, yet FedEx Claims balked as is often the case in the very rare breakages we incur. Hopefully FedEx learned a valuable lesson in PR, as this proves my complaint; and with this lesson they will shake up their claims department in what is otherwise an EXCELLENT company to do business with (far better than UPS or USPS from our experience). |
As I previously noted, FedEx is a great company in most instances.
HOWEVER, it you ever need technical help or worse if one of the relatively rare instances of FedEx breakage occurs; LOOK OUT!
FedEx’ claims department is like Obama on steroids as per their integrity, honesty, lack of returned calls, lack of follow-up, misinformation, etc, etc, etc.
We had a Monday in early May of 2011 where at least 5 packages were damaged. We resolved 3 of these on our own (at our cost both in time and product repair cost), in fact one of these had the box severely damaged yet the product was in usable condition, so the customer told us he was “good” with it.
This resulted in us only filing claims on two packages that also had declared value placed on them. I should point out that we have shipped literally over 1000 of these UV Sterilizers and even more noteworthy on the particular UV Sterilizer in question, we un-box and the re-box with layers of bubble wrap, THEN another couple of layers of bubble wrap outside the main box before adding another box over this. This particular UV Sterilizer is shipped to us form the UK with only the outer cardboard box and to this date only one has arrived broken.
However attempting to get FedEx to honor this claim, you would think WE committed murder with every excuse being used and disinformation, and lying the standard of the day. I once had a car accident that was my fault and I was treated vastly better than this, yet this was clearly FedEx mishandling.
If FedEx had any integrity in their claims department, they would fire half the staff to start with, then also look into how much a business ships versus their claims percentage. FedEx would quickly realize that we make only 2-3 claims (usually low dollar) versus $40,000 plus in shipping (up to this point it comes to .005 in dollar value of claims versus shipping expenditures with FedEx)
Another silly aspect of FedEx claims is why bother placing declared value on an item if FedEx is going to find every excuse to not pay for their own mishandling. Just on this one UV Sterilizer alone we have paid about $1500 in these fees (not all the sterilizers or other products that we add declared value), this is well above all claims for every item ever shipped and damaged by FedEx in 6 years of using their services. This logic of FedEx’s claims department is just incredible IMO!
Here is a list of Reasons FedEx lacks any integrity/honesty in their claims department:
- Asking for information then changing the rules and asking for more but then only when contacted by the FedEx customer. Providing a completely different answer depending upon who you speak with. Basically; LYING!!
- (Similar to above) Lack of communication/ability to contact the FedEx customer when further information is necessary.
Even when contacted few calls are ever returned, even from upper management! - Looking for any loop hole to disqualify a claim (Basically; no integrity!!)
- Ignoring the statistical facts
- Ignoring Customer Shipping History (come on FedEx; .005% claims versus amount spent with FedEx certainly shows our ability to pack well, especially considering 70% of our shipments are fragile)
- Treating customers that have spent Thousands of $$ like criminals
- The scam that is declared value
Further;
I will also point out in dealing with FedEx’ Technical department, while not as dishonest, they are rather condescending with little interest in providing the businesses such as ours what would improve our business efficiency (such as a usable and reasonably sized Address book and ability to cross use this between our employee sub accounts).
There is more, but I will leave it at that as we have come to learn to deal with this aspect of FedEx shipping and could “live with it” if it were not for the extreme lack of integrity of their claims department especially Debbie (beside being clearly in the wrong line of work, she cannot accept any responsibility for hers or her companies actions).
In fact Debbie kept attempting to call this a UV Bulb when it is more better defined as a UV Filter that has a bulb inside it, this was her dishonest attempt to use legal fine print to get out of paying a claim that was clearly the fault of FedEx. This attempt to mislabel this product was ludicrous and the same as attempting to get out of paying for a damaged laptop computer based on LCD “lights” and similar that are part of the computer.
Updated 9/30/11
In another case a package with lights and an aluminum reflector, FedEx dropped something heavy on this box, crushing the neck of this reflector.
The dishonest claims person never made any attempt to contact us with any questions (which is typical) & denied the claim based on e a picture where the customer attempted to put together the shipping box, leaving the bubble wrap to the side (which she lied about as we and others looking at this picture could clearly see).
This FedEx employee cited paper as the reason for denial, ignoring the stated fact that this box had bubble wrap and layers of card board over this neck. She also ignored the fact that we have shipped literally 100s this way (and so does our distributor, MINUS the bubble wrap!!).
Her manager had the condescending audacity to state we should contact a department at FedEx to learn how to correctly pack; WHAT? In fact I and our shipping manager have been working in shipping together for over 8 years, including a couple years at Candy Factory where we listened to this same lame story from another FedEx employee. In that case in 2004, we stopped using paper as a spacer and instead substituted styro peanuts as was suggested in this recent case. The result you might ask? The candy shifted much more resulted in this high end candy looking very scuffed and resulting in many un-salable boxes. In the end we went back to paper.
This is not to say we do not use styro peanuts as these are great for single light bulbs which we wrap in bubble surrounded by peanuts and whip 100s per month with only very rare breakages, but with larger items we have found using bubble wrap around the items, followed by cardboard dividers and paper to fill the gaps and finally extra layers of cardboard works quite well, but to FedEx this is a way to deny a claim which is ludicrous at best and dishonest at worst
In summary; as I noted FedEx has a lot to offer a small business that needs reliable reasonably priced shipping, as well our account manager (Trevor) is awesome (& hopefully if any reader either has a FedEx account or is getting one is lucky enough to have a good FedEx representative).
I will also point out another positive is Sharon at the Atlanta CAT (CAT stands for Customer Advocacy Team if I am correct); was VERY polite and understanding, so my hats off to her too.
However if you use FedEx as a shipper or are thinking of using FedEx and your items are even remotely fragile (assuming you package very well too I might add), I would recommend taking a step back and re-considering the cost of the time to package (the item I referred to we spend almost 40 minutes re-packaging, only for FedEx to make every attempt to not take responsibility for their poor handling in this incident), the cost of your time in dealing with FedEx (we have lost over 8 man hours from this one bad day of shipping by FedEx), and simply the aggravation of dealing with persons with absolutely no integrity to do the “right thing”.
Posted by cstrohmeyer 
