DPD - Rant

Soldato
Joined
29 Oct 2002
Posts
4,140
Location
London
Yodel are so bad that when i saw the thread:

Poll: Do you think the force is reasonable and justified?

I assumed it to be a thread about how a yodel delivery driver/kung foo expert manage to break a nokia 3310 while comboing the parcel into the garden from the depot several days late.

No kidding

a £200 monitor was left outside my house last night just waiting to get taken away by some scroat. It was supposed to be signed for obviously but not even a doorbell ring.

Disgusting.
 
Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
33,188
Yeah the customer support guy this morning made the manager aware and OC where good enough to immediately process my requested refund that i should have back today, they apologised and did what they could but losing an order like the one i placed mystifies me, would have been a substantial box of parts as well as 2 monitors

A small or a large box, if the label comes a bit loose, gets caught on an edge and ripped off then the size becomes irrelevant, a box with no label or a damaged label is completely worthless in terms of knowing where it goes next. Also **** simply happens, a van breaks down mid route, two smaller vans come to pick up the packages, they grab the wrong boxes out of the van and lose track of it for a couple days before it ends up back in the system. All this stuff happens.

When a large order from Amazon went missing... it went missing, I didn't care, contacted Amazon and got a new package. It will always happen now and then.

I've also never got the blame a company for my local guy being a jerk thing. If 999 people say DPD is great and one person has a massive problem with them, do you think DPD sucks or one delivery driver sucks? If 999 people say a delivery company sucks and 1 person says they are good it implies a broken company, normally a cheap company that can hire and maintain only the worst employees possible.

Though precisely because some areas have bad delivery drivers all companies really should have a second delivery company as an option.
 

Deleted member 651465

D

Deleted member 651465

DPD have been the best courier that I've used.

I recall when OcUK used City Link.... *shudder* :(:(:(
 
Man of Honour
Joined
13 Oct 2006
Posts
91,045
Dunno about DPD but we've seen massive increases in theft over the Christmas trading period this year within the courier network(s) (and sadly within our own despatch department) I'm guessing most of it is down to temps. Never seen it peak like this before - it always goes up slightly when you have a load of temporary workers in but this year the numbers are like 10x previous years.
 
Soldato
Joined
12 Sep 2012
Posts
11,696
Location
Surrey
I think these days company standards are more or less the same across the board (apart from the worst of the worst), as many hire external third party drivers to deliver and it is luck of the draw who you get. Individual company policy and procedure may help reduce parcels lost due to miss-delivery but likely the top couriers don't have that much between them.

Many retailers use a company that has contracts with multiple couriers. They just arrange for couriers to come pick up packages based on delivery time and destination with the idea that the cheapest courier is used to deliver a reliable service. This way they can get the best value for money across all delivery bands, which is important as cost can vary a lot.
 
Soldato
Joined
5 Feb 2009
Posts
15,943
Location
N. Ireland
I don't recall you saying that you're having a delivery problem
lololol - makes silly sweeping statement, gets called out on it, tries to backtrack! :p

in fairness bud there have been a few negative replies in the thread about dpd, you didn't specifically state it was the op you were replying so it was taken as a sweeping statement not to use couriers. plus you have no idea where the op lives in relation to OcUK.
silly statement is silly and all that.
 
Man of Honour
Joined
14 Apr 2017
Posts
3,511
Location
London
I have always found DPD very good, between tracking, Text alerts etc.

That's not to say that at some point all companies don't make total screw ups at times though.

OR, someone at the bottom of their food chain screws up.
I live in a road in Rotherhithe, SE London, which has a constant amount of cars, taxis, delivery vans and trucks using it daily, even a German kitchen installation team were here last summer, one of the fitters said that it was the first job he’d done in London, yet they found it okay.
Just before Christmas, one of the gifts that I’d bought my wife was scheduled to be delivered by DPD.
The local DPD depot is in Mandela Way SE1, maybe 1.5 kms from my house, I received a text message that they were unable to deliver, as their driver could not find my address.
Perhaps 99.9% of their deliveries are trouble free, but telling me that my road was not able to be located was the biggest crock I’ve ever heard.
 
Soldato
Joined
6 Apr 2010
Posts
2,848
Location
Midlands
I will always order with DPD where possible. Regardless of where I have lived they have been great at deliveries. You may have just had bad experiences from one employee. I remember when OcUK tried DX Secure deliveries...wow what a shambles that was. Every order I placed was either very late or lost.
 
Associate
Joined
31 Oct 2005
Posts
1,385
Location
Wirral
It all depends on the driver. Most of the time the usual local DPD driver around here is fantastic.
Sometimes the replacement drivers are a joke though.
A month or so before Christmas I had a DPD delivery expected at my workplace, delivered on the other side of town. The address wasn't similar and neither was the name of the person signing for it.
I was lucky that my works number was on the label and a security guard rang me to let me know so I could go and collect.
I mentioned it to the usual DPD driver a couple of days later and he told me there was a replacement driver who messed the whole route up, didn't even do collections in the evening and probably wouldn't be coming back again. lol

I really like the tracking for DPD where you get to see the driver on the map and it tells you where you are in the queue. The app even alerts you when the driver is like half an hour away
 
Man of Honour
Joined
24 Sep 2005
Posts
35,492
Just to add, the app is awesome! Constant updates and you can even track the van on a map as it makes it way to your house... with how many deliveries it has to go. Stunning tbh - the future! Hence said tattoo.
 
Soldato
Joined
31 Dec 2005
Posts
11,179
Location
Glasgow
Dpd have been alright for me. Worst carrier ive dealt with has been Yodel easily. If there is a problem with a parcel there is no human being you can speak to there its all automated website and answerphone rubbish.

Businesses should explicitly state what carrier service they use tbh.
 
Soldato
Joined
13 Jul 2004
Posts
20,079
Location
Stanley Hotel, Colorado
DPD I find superior to many, good tracking and they'll rearrange delivery quite easily. It does depend on the staff in your area also but you could do far worse. One time I had a courier used by a manufacturer after RMA where it was lost for 2 weeks and when it arrived it had been damaged worse then when I sent it off, left out in the truck during a bad frost I think it must have been; thats officially bad service. Always been prompt and properly done with DPD hence I got to put a +1 for them :)

I thought OCUK used royal mail sometimes anyway, ask them for that if you have had trouble.
 
Associate
Joined
16 Dec 2008
Posts
373
I'd say DPD are the best courier available based on past experience(never had a single problem ever)


Hermes and Yodel on the other hand I've actually wondered if its possible to get my address blacklisted so they cant even attempt to deliver anything to me.
 
Caporegime
Joined
25 Nov 2004
Posts
25,828
Location
On the road....
Having sub contracted for most of the major couriers when I worked for Eddie Stobart, I found DPD to be the best of the lot by a long long way.

Their distribution centres are modern and highly automated and the staff seemed to take good care of parcels.

On the other hand, Hermes distribution centres were shockingly bad, dirty, staffed entirely by agency staff who clearly didn’t care about handling parcels, rather than the conveyor belt sorting systems found in DPD’s centres, parcels were literally thrown into cages whilst being sorted.

I remember one Christmas they (Hermes) must have been struggling for transport contractors as the site I was at was loading a tipper trailer with parcels (the kind that carries gravel from quarries!) the driver was doing it as a quick earner he’d found on a “return load” app - where hauliers find jobs to cover their diesel when return from a delivery - he said he’d done a few for them and when he got to the destination he simply raised the topper and dumped the parcels in a heap in their yard, wet or dry!

Their own trailers are loaded loose i.e. just filled with parcels from floor to roof with no thought to anything getting crushed, DPD’s trailers are loaded with parcels contained in cages to prevent crushing or damage.

Hermes are the one carrier I would never even consider using.

DPD show the others how it’s done.
 
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