If you are active on Twitter or Facebook you can’t have missed the Fedex guy who drops a PC monitor over a fence. In case you have, here it is again.

In the UK a parcel delivery driver gets £6.10 an hour approx $10. The driver has to deliver between 80-100 packages in their 8 hour working day. If they fail to deliver, get stuck in traffic or can’t locate the address then they will run late and run into unpaid overtime. The driver may be new to the route and new to the area and that can cause delays.

Would you work unpaid?
In most cases you wouldn’t work unpaid but you would expect your delivery driver or courier to do so just so you can get your parcel. When you ordered your goods did you look at how they were going to be delivered? Or did you find the cheapest possible supplier with the cheapest possible delivery service?

If you opted for cheap, it’s no surprise that you are outraged that the driver dropped the monitor over the fence – you want great service but you are not prepared to pay for it -you bought on price and price alone.

But before you start thinking it’s just Fedex, think again – it’s every parcel delivery company out there. Go and check You Tube, you’ll find hundreds of videos (and they are several years old in a lot of cases). Nothing has changed since people got outraged about the first guy throwing parcels across the warehouse. The parcel companies pay minimum wage, they work their staff hard, they have to make a profit for their shareholders and that’s you and me. We make them work that way so our pension pots are bigger.

You can stop them, you can start by remembering your courier service is run by human beings. If something is valuable it could cause someone to be tempted by it. If your goods are fragile, package for the fact they will be thrown around. You can remember that these drivers are worked real hard so you can have “free delivery” for your goods.

Want to do something about it?

• Get the right courier services for your goods.
• Stop expecting your parcel couriers to be saints, it won’t ever happen
• Remember you get what you pay for so if you have the option of cheap delivery over bespoke delivery, weigh up the options wisely.

Remember – you do have a choice and if you choose the option that gets your goods broken; it’s your fault. Pressure the retailers to use reputable local couriers who will deliver respectfully and pay their staff decently and treat them like human beings. You never know when you may have to drive a mile in the delivery truck or van.

Sarah

Happily trading in our tenth year without breaking or losing a single package.

My friend in Spain @grahunt recently posted about the 51 things he learned from selling Spanish Property this year. I thought that it was an interesting post and I could share with my readers the 51 things that I have learned from delivering the freight and other things this year.

1. Some of our customers really care about getting their good delivered intact
2. A minority of our clients are not bothered about delivery
3. New customers find our excellent service saves them money in the long term
4. We have had 100% delivery success rates this year
5. We delivered wedding cakes 200 miles in the snow so a happy occasion was perfect
6. Our drivers keep their clothes on
7. Our drivers are more than warm and breathing
8. We have delivered more furniture this year 
9. More couriers have arrived on Twitter – Yay!
10. They still spam people as they can’t be bothered to learn how to use Twitter
11. More couriers are blogging – Yay!
12. They still write adverts rather than a proper blog post
13. More US companies steal my content than UK based couriers (ask for a guest post chaps, I don’t bite unless you are a thief)
14. More clients are searching and finding us on LinkedIn – thank you Andy Lopata
15. We still get cupcake ladies ring up and get shocked at the price of delivery
16. Fuel saving guides are popular, you can still grab a free copy
17. Video drives me nuts…
18. My parents still don’t understand what I do for the company
19. And it’s not haulage
20. Kev’s parents tell people he is unemployed rather than he has run a transport company for nearly 10 years
21. It’s hard to guest blog about transport
22. It’s great to talk to so many long term, happy customers on a daily basis
23. I never get to deliver for Disney to Paris. Another driver always gets that job
24. A great deal of satisfaction delivering medical equipment 
25. I spend a lot of time educating people about the diverse price range when it comes to delivery
26. No breakages this year, no breakages ever now that I mention it
27. Parcel delivery and how it works still confuse some people
28. Customers have yet to realise that they shouldn’t send food or liquids through the mail service
29. Parcel companies are less than honest when it comes to telling people about what’s covered by insurance and what is not
30. We still deliver wine to restaurants, public houses and other locations
31. We are winning more contracts, I think the 100% perfect and no failed deliveries help 
32. Networking is fun, yes we are back sponsoring Business Scene in Essex
33. We don’t deliver stolen goods
34. Despite people being gently educated that we are not hauliers but same day couriers, they still insist on telling me I don’t rank for the phrase haulage (and that I am missing out on 6 trillion searches… here’s why I don’t care)
35. Next day delivery isn’t always next day delivery
36. Some companies will hire in staff to deal transport issues and extra customer service staff and pay for more staff training rather than spend a little extra on their delivery. It’s a false economy. 
37. Couriers on Twitter are happy to inform me that I am idle as I spend time chatting there. Ha! I wish…
38. Our Complete Courier Guide is still popular
39. I let one of team post on the blog…. yes I did…  Summer driving with your clothes on
40. That post reassured a lot of new customers of our professionalism
41. It also made a lot of male readers cringe
42. One of our blog posts was featured as an article in the 4Networking community magazine. Thanks Guys
43. Customers still request “cheap” delivery as they don’t understand the value of professional delivery. I am thinking of ringing those looking for cheap and haggling their prices for what they do, down.
44. We have our own Google plus page – Couriers on G+
45. We delivered in the snow last year, it was challenging. 
46. We guest posted about what white van men eat in their sandwiches
47. The Moving Check List – keep yourself and your movers organised is very popular as it’s incredibly useful
48. Referrals are welcome but our friends still struggle with what same day delivery actually is!
49. Writing about transport can be tough at times but we still do it and we win customers by doing it
50. Competitors really ought to have a better comment strategy than “nice post”.
51. If it really is an urgent delivery pick up the phone. After all you wouldn’t tweet the fire brigade if your house was burning down.

Any that I have missed? Leave us a comment.

Sarah

Often we get enquiries about our courier services and the customer has a guide price in mind.

Not one of our white vans... thankfully

This is great except for when a customer doesn’t really know what service they require. For instance there are three main types of courier service -

• Parcels, generally delivered by Royal Mail and parcel carriers.
• Pallets, often delivered by a hub / national network.
• Express (Same day courier) delivered by all sized companies.

And the price differentials between each type of service are huge. Royal Mail can deliver a package for £5 from one end of the country to another. You ask an express courier to do that and you won’t get a lot of change from £700. Now when you don’t know what type you require that can seem like a huge difference and fell like you are being ripped off.

That’s not the case.

A parcel courier collects and delivers multiple parcels. You have a rough idea (if you are lucky) of delivery time and the package is small and can be carried with many other packages and parcels. A same day courier picks up and collects one parcel and delivers it directly to it’s destination.  You know the time of collection you know the time or arrival and if it fits on the truck it can be delivered. The driver that collects the item is the driver that delivers it.

That means if you have a a CD or iPhone as a gift, you need a parcel carrier. If you have a Rolex, then you need a same day courier. Hang on a minute you’re thinking, a Rolex is a small item. And that’s where another factor comes into play – the value of the item.

Parcel couriers tend to only cover an item up to a certain value. Usually £500 and sometimes £2,500 if you are lucky. They also exclude items made of glass, liquids, foods, explosives and jewellery and items that are over 25kgs.  In other words if it’s robust, can be thrown around then they are happy to deliver the items. If it needs extra care… then they are not.

So when you are looking at guide prices for your courier service you need to factor in all the variables. The time it takes a driver to drive to the collection point, load and then drive to the end destination and unload, speed limits, the price of fuel, the drivers wages, the insurances etc are just a few of them.

When you ring up for a price and you tell us that your fragile item needs to travel 600 miles, remain upright and not be moved you are not going to get it delivered for a £5. If you are getting it for a fiver then there is something seriously wrong with your courier service and you may land up losing all your goods.

The more conditions you add to the delivery, the more it will cost is the general rule of thumb. It’s a bespoke delivery that is needed and something that requires delivery specialists. Like us.

Kevin

The 800lb Gorilla may not be the only one in the room

Err, actually no it isn’t.

I was reading a blog post the other day about headlines and it happened to mention that if you were in haulage you should mention haulage as a keyword in your headline. The comments were closed, which was a shame (can’t leave a comment there) and as that is often a technique to get links back to the post I have decided you will just have to take my word for it when I say there was this post about…

I wrote a post about haulage and why people search that phrase a few months back. It was after a call from an SEO expert to tell me I was missing all these qualified leads… hundreds, thousands… trillions of leads all because I was not optimised for the word haulage. I’ll excuse you for yawning because it is going to get boring now. When you want something delivered you type a few things in your search box – flower delivery, pram delivery, courier delivery, shed delivery, ebay delivery and you get more relevant search results. No one is looking to a hire a haulier and the only people who type haulage in the search box are people looking to flog me a fuel card.

Even though we have been trading 10 years people still treat couriers as idiots and incapable of changing fuel cards if they are unhappy. No, they imagine we are so busy from all those lovely haulage related phone calls that we need a phone call to change our fuel card supplier. The reality is different, we are a very proactive business. We want something we just go right out and source it from our suppliers. And we don’t optimise for a word that doesn’t bring us business. It’s a waste of energy.

As a business we are all about efficiency. Faster, sleeker delivery. Relevant business services to our market place and our delivery services have different names to capture people seeking those kinds of logistical solutions.

So in a nutshell, haulage isn’t what I do.

Think back to companies like Cadbury. Does Cadbury indicate what they do? Nope. Virgin? Amstrad? Not every company name reflects their services and products.  I will be totally honest here, a lot of our suppliers are relationship based. We get to know them and they get to know us, which means they know what we do. Assumptions in all businesses are dangerous and assuming that I do haulage and should be mentioning it causes us both problems. I’ll assume that you are a fool and you’ll assume my 22 years in business were spent polishing vans.

We’re both wrong and that does neither of us any favours.

Sarah