Yesterday, I received about the worst, the cruelest ,and the most disrespectful customer service mistreatment from two employees from a large, multi-million dollar Minnesota firm, the worst experience of that kind that I have ever had the misfortune to experience. They knew they were wasting my day, breaking our verbal agreement, and made no effort to let me know what was going on.
We have a recreational property at Mora, Mn. We winterized the RV a week ago, and I checked our 500-gallon propane tank to see how full it was. We will be up in 6 weeks for deer-hunting so we needed enough propane to run the furnace in the RV.
The gauge read 25% full, so I called a large, prominent gas concern to place an order for 300 gallons of propane gas deliver. We agreed that the driver would deliver the gas to our property yesterday (9/20/23) between the hours of 8am and noon.
I was up at 430 am, left the house at 630 am, to get up there by 8am, an 89-mile drive from Bloomington. I got to the property about 10 minutes late, but I called the company at 803am and said I would be there soon, if the driver, if there already, could wait 5 minutes.
The dispatcher, who monitors all of his trucks with GPS tracking, so he knows where they all are at all times, told me confidently that the truck had not left Mora yet, so it would be fine and I said great, I will meet him out there.
I work a shift from 230 to 11pm as a maintenance engineer for a small, private college, so I hoped to have the delivery made, lock up the gate, after providing the driver access to our property, and then get back to town by 1pm to get some lunch and then head to work. None of that was to be.
Let me provide some background information. This petroleum and propane firm is headquartered in the metro area, and, as far as I know, dispatching is controlled and dispatched from the corporate headquarters here in the Twin Cities. This company is vast though local, with branch sites in Western Wisconsin, and at spots all across Minnesota or over most of it.
I also found out later in the day that Mora has a site (we are 4 ½ miles north of town): the northbound route (the one assigned to make our gas delivery) on Highway 65, with daily deliveries to Duluth, much of the Iron Range and probably to Aitkin. There is another driver and truck that go south from Mora to the Twin Cities and northern suburbs. Apparently, the two drivers cannot help each other out, or refuse to help each other out, or it is a company policy that they cannot help each other out, or the dispatcher is too lazy or indifferent to move the drivers around to fill in service gaps where miscommunication occurs.
The dispatcher at corporate told me at 807am that the truck would be coming. By 10am no sign of the delivery vehicle, so I called corporate and they put me through to this dispatcher. He said, yeah I gave you bad information, I (the dispatcher) gave you the southbound vehicle and driver which does not deliver north of town. Your northbound driver is 125 miles north in MacGregor doing 4 deliveries, but should be able to make it by noon.
I now believe he was lying, because, logistically, the northbound driver, with his assigned number of stops on the return trip, would never make it back to Mora before 2pm. I believe the dispatcher was telling me whatever he thought I wanted to here, not to solve the problem, but to get me off of his back for an hour or so. It is one thing to be incompetent, but it is evil to mislead and show no accountability, not seeking to clean up a customer dispute.
I told him I have to be out of here by noon to make it to work, and he did not apologize for screwing up the schedule and botching the service delivery as planned.
I waited until 1145am and called him back, but he would not answer the phone, so I complained to the receptionist and she kept me on hold and walked over to his office, to get him to talk to me.
He said he had set it up with the northbound driver to make a delivery in the early afternoon. I said I would call my boss to get the day off as vacation so that I could stay at the property to meet the driver. My boss was fine with the unscheduled vacation day.
By 2pm there was no delivery. I called this guy back and he had gone home. I got the secretary to get the service manager on the phone. He said immediately that the dispatcher had given me info on the wrong truck. I told him I had to burn a vacation day, and that I was 6 hours into being at the site to receive the delivery. From MacGregor to Mora is about 100 miles so I asked where my northbound driver was, and I asked are you even going to bother making the delivery at all today.
He said the GPS locator showed the driver was at McGrath, about 30 miles north, and that he was to make the delivery that afternoon, he did not apologize for the poor service and nor did he offer me a discount for lousy service.
I called him back once or twice more and told him I wanted that delivery today because I have all this time and effort invested in this, so we need closure, so where is the driver?
Finally at 242 pm, the driver showed up at the property. He was a 50 year-old white guy, and he looked a little sheepish. I was mad but I did not take it out on him, but I explained to him what I had gone through, that I had 7 calls into corporate to get this gas delivered, and such a simple, straightforward transaction should not require heroic, herculean nagging from the customer to help callous, incompetent office workers to function.
He apologized, had the tank topped off in less than 15
minutes, and I could tell that he was a skilled, competent, courteous,
considerate worker that took care of his customers. I paid him for the gas delivered.
Before he left, he wrote down his company cell phone number for me, and said, do not ever contact corporate again. When you need a refill, contact me directly and I will take care of you.
He also told me that he had left Mora at 630am that morning to be 150 miles northeast to meet a customer in Cloquet, Mn. I thanked him, and he left. He was never there to make the 8am delivery to our property, and there would have been no delivery at all until I was so persistent about nagging them to do their job.
When I talked to that dispatcher that morning at 807, he knew the northbound driver was in Cloquet because his digital locator told him so. He did not know his northbound driver did all deliveries north of town, and that the southbound driver, still in Mora at 807 am, would not or was not allowed to do the run 4 mile north of town to get our needs met.
Either he did not have the critical thinking skills to have the driver still in Mora go north for one stop to get us taken care of, or he just didn’t care, and it might be both.
I sat there for four hours waiting for a truck that was never coming, and the dispatcher knew it and let me twist in the wind for four hours.
That courteous, competent driver that bypasses corporate callous, incompetent scheduling of delivery to customer is typical of what I have noticed for some years, that private corporations are now as ossified, corrupt, discourteous to customers, and are generally screwed up as are government hierarchies.
The workers keep these places functioning and profitable and able to deliver fairly decent service for the public, and that keeps these institutions afloat. Once workers quit caring and trying, Minnesota and America will fall apart.
We talk among ourselves at home, and note that we workers clean up Administrative and managerial messes all the time. These two clowns that were the keystone cops, seemed to have concluded, that they could never get it right so why bother, why compensate, apologize. If the company loses a certain amount of customers, so what?
Great customer service is often not due to the managers and owners, but do to employees filling in the gaps. I will not be doing business with this company again.
No comments:
Post a Comment