Complaints, Home Delivery Network

Yodel employee speaks out against employer

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I had a comment from a Yodel employee on one of the many HDNL/Yodel posts, explaining some of the difficulties the company is experiencing with its workload, and how it is laying off many of the drivers in favour. I thought this comment was so good that it should be added as a guest post. He makes some great points, and confirms what many Yodel customers have suspected…

Author : Yodel employee

I work for this company and can really sympathise with a lot of disgruntled people who have experienced issues.

However, I have to mention that there are people that work for this company that actually care. Just like in other companies, we are just let down by people who take short cuts and don’t give a damn about the consequences on customers. For the position I work in, it is so difficult to repair situations and at times you feel helpless at the chaos that occurs around you.

Yodel came about when HDNL acquired DHL Domestic (formerly Securicor Omega), so I knew things we not going to end well.

I normally monitor the emails and am appalled at the amount of complaints, missing parcels and delay queries I have to answer. There is no concept of adhering to standards or addressing poor service/performance. Yodel have made huge staff cut backs, drafted in a host of self employed couriers (without doing background checks) but persist with them as they are cheaper than employing drivers and are continually restructuring the organisation as well as the systems we use.

As a result, we have had IT issues, problems tracking parcels and the customer has suffered. We have lost so many customers in the past year, many of whom had been with Securicor Omega. I am someone that takes pride at what I do and really try my best so seeing this damage unfolding is depressing.

Each employee is pushed to work harder and for less which kills any lingering bits of motivation anyone has. Working for this company for the last year has been demoralising and very frustrating.

Like Lee Stevens, I will also very likely lose my job as the company looks to close sites and claw back money. With that decision they will lose a lot of employees with years of experience and many who actually care about what they do.

For me though, it may be a blessing.

General, Humour

Camping is for other people

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I have a few friends who are into camping, for some strange reason. My former lodger loved nothing more than packing his rucksack, taking his tent, his mini burner and a tin of beans and heading off up the Lakes to spend days freezing his nuts off in the wilderness.

Oddly, I didn’t fancy joining him. I also have friends who are into ‘podding’ which, although it may sound as though it’s some wife swap game, is in fact a cross between camping and staying in a hotel – you stay in a purpose built wooden structure, one that is still too much like a tent for my liking.

Now it’s not like I haven’t tried camping, because I have. I have tried it once, and hated it. My loathing for this most British of tradition wasn’t down to the loathsome British weather either, as I tried my camping experience in Cannes, in the South of France, where the weather is decidedly more ‘un-British’.

The problem was that I was completely unprepared for the whole ordeal, having borrowed a tent from my Aunty (who, at the time, ran a caravan and camping shop, so you would expect success). Despite being asked, nay, ordered, by my friend to ‘check’ the tent before we set off, I presumed that, because it came from my Aunty, that it would be ok. I presumed wrong. Firstly, the tent didn’t have any poles. For some reason my aunty had forgotten these most vital of camping paraphernalia. Secondly, even if the tent did have poles, it would have been uninhabitable anyway because the last person to use it hadn’t let it dry before packing it away, which apparently you’re supposed to do before storing a tent. It stank. It stank so bad it spelled as though a rat had died in there, and had been rotting for years.

We slept in the car.

The next day I, under orders, found a camping shop where I, using my best French, managed to purchase what I believed to be a tent. The keyword there is ‘believed’. Once again my lack of care and attention at what should have been a straightforward task was set to bit me on the ass, as I delayed putting up the ‘tent’ until after we had returned from ‘le pub’. It was now dark and, in some ironic twist as though Cannes knew we were from the UK, it was raining.

As we attempted to erect this tent under nightfall, and in largely unpleasant conditions, it became apparent that it wasn’t particularly ‘big’. In fact, it was very small indeed, almost as though it were half a tent, with no roof.

It was. It was a windbreaker.

My failure at ensuring the first tent was complete and didn’t smell of ‘merde’ was compounded by my failure to actually buy a tent the second time.

We slept in the car.

So you see, camping isn’t for me. Unless you can buy tents that are inflatable buildings, where you erect them simply by pulling a chord and then sleep on a cushion of air, rather than on a sheet resting on a rock hard floor that hasn’t seen rain until the very night I attempt to erect a windbreaker, then I’m not interested in camping.

I’ll settle for hotels, with king-size beds and room service. Camping is for other people.

Internet, SEO

Link building mistakes: comment spam

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Being someone who runs, shall we say, a fair number of blogs, I get one or two spam comments posted on different websites from people looking to ‘build links’ for SEO. Some of these comments are well written, and reference the blog itself, whereas some are just utter rubbish, written either by automated systems or by people who have only a passing familiarity with the English language.

Now, while it’s very easy for me to identify which comments are genuine and which are posted purely for SEO purposes, it is interesting to see which companies and websites employ SEO companies that use these black hat, spam tactics.

So, here are a couple of the best spam comments I have received lately, complete with the emails of the ‘people’ who left them, and the websites who have been using dodgy SEO link building techniques.

Posted by: mark clayson
URL: markclaysoncomputers.com
Email: VercherArrollo90@gmail.com
IP: 217.219.115.133
Submitted on 2011/10/05 at 10:07 pm

Hi my loved one! I want to say that this article is amazing, great written and come with approximately all vital infos. I?d like to look extra posts like this .

I’m willing to guess that ‘Mark Clayson’ didn’t post this himself, as the English is so poor it’s clearly not from someone who has English as a first language. The email address used, a disposable Gmail address, is a clear giveaway that the poster is in the habit of posting bulk comments and isn’t actually Mark Clayson.

Posted by: language blog, job market, bilingual jobs, multilingual jobs, expat employees, language jobs, blog
URL: blog.toplanguagejobs.com
Email: VerenChronister3005@gnumail.com
IP: 89.175.182.190
Submitted on 2011/10/06 at 12:11 pm

Thank you a bunch for sharing this with all people you actually recognise what you are speaking approximately! Bookmarked. Kindly also consult with my website =). We can have a link change arrangement among us

This meaningless drivel was posted on the same day, using a very similar email address format. What I like about this comment is that it’s absolute garbage, making no sense, yet is promoting a website offering ‘language jobs’. What a cracking advert for the website! I bet the marketing department at toplanguagejobs.com will be thrilled to have their website and brand associated with this kind of crap.

Building links for SEO is important, but not as important as building them properly. If you employ an SEO company or link builder that uses link building techniques such as this you’ll end up with some seriously poor quality links, and your brand damaged by the nature of the links – and you might end up as the subject of a blog on MrDaz.com, which is far worse!

Complaints, Internet, Rants

Groupon lies about over charging on Clouds Memory Foam offer

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I recently purchased four memory foam pillows on Groupon from the company ‘Clouds Memory Foam’. The Groupon offer gave a great discount by offering 4 pillows for £55, instead of £239.96 – with just a £4.99 delivery charge (as you can see from the link).

However, when I came to place the order the delivery charge was £10 – not £4.99. As you only have a limited time to redeem your Groupon vouchers I had little choice but to pay the £10 and quibble about it later.

Knowing Groupon as I do (I’ve never had a transaction go without a hitch of some kind) I tweeted them immediately about the issue, and received an instant response saying to email their UK support team, which I did.

However – I received the following reply from Groupon’s email support:

Pal, Sep-27 00:05 (BST):
Hi Darren,
Thank you for your email. I am sorry to hear that you were charged £10.00 delivery fee for your Clouds Memory Foam Pillows.
I have checked our system and cannot find any other customers being charged this amount.
Please find below the contact number for the partner, to request a refund for this fee:
Phone Numbers: (+44) 203 086 7423 & (+44) 207 760 7562
Email: contact@cloudsmemoryfoam.com
Also did you follow the below procedure to place your order:
– Go to www.cloudsmemoryfoam.co.uk/bedding/pillows-3/super-deluxe-memory-foam-pillow-1
– In the checkout, enter your voucher codes
– Have your credit/debit card details ready to pay the £4.99 postage

It was the ‘I have checked our system and cannot find any other customers being charged this amount’ that interested me, as this means they have checked, and nobody else has been charged £10 for delivery – except of course that they have, and Groupon has lied. Not only has Groupon lied about this, they have knowingly attempted to deceive as they have indeed checked, and have sent me exactly the same email as someone else has already received – so they looked up the problem, found someone else had reported the same problem, saw the email they had already sent to them, and then forwarded it to me.

Pal, Sep-26 23:27 (BST):
Hi Lianne,
Thank you for your email. I am sorry to hear that you were charged £10.00 delivery fee for your Clouds Memory Foam Pillows.
I have checked our system and cannot find any other customers being charged this amount.
Please find below the contact number for the partner, to request a refund for this fee:
Phone Numbers: (+44) 203 086 7423 & (+44) 207 760 7562
Email: contact@cloudsmemoryfoam.com
Also did you follow the below procedure to place your order:
– Go to www.cloudsmemoryfoam.co.uk/bedding/pillows-3/super-deluxe-memory-foam-pillow-1
– In the checkout, enter your voucher codes
– Have your credit/debit card details ready to pay the £4.99 postage

How disgusting is that? They must have known for a fact that someone else had been charged the £10 in order to send me the exact same email. Groupon clearly can’t be trusted. Mistakes happen, that’s a fact of life. When a website becomes as successful as Groupon has become these mistakes will be more frequent, but it’s how you deal with these mistakes that sets you apart – and to knowingly lie to customers marks you out as a company that simply cannot be trusted.

I wonder what Groupon will come back with now, following this response:

That’s funny, because someone else has received this exact same email from you (GroupOn code error (ticket #906501)).

Seems you’re lying through your arse on this one. How many people have you sent this exact same email to, claiming nobody else has been charged £10?

This is a disgraceful lie that has been found out. I suggest you tread very carefully with the way you reply to this.

I await the next chapter with bated breath.

Football

My old football trophies

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While packing up some of the mountains of crap that I have collected over the years this week, I came across three football trophies that I won as a teenager. Now, don’t start thinking that I was any good at the game, I wasn’t, as the nature of the football trophies will show.

Rather than winning awards for ‘player of the season’ or ‘top goal scorer’ (I actually never scored, well, at the right end anyway) I instead won the following three awards in the two seasons I played for my local team:

  • Clubman of the Year
  • Most Improved Player
  • Most Improved Player

Let’s start with the ‘Clubman of the Year’ award first. This is the award you give to someone for, basically, turning up. I turned up every week, even for training, and didn’t cry off for any reason – therefore I got a trophy… nice.

This award was of course nowhere near as bad as winning the ‘Most Improved Player’ award… twice.

Just how bad do you have to be to win a trophy for improvement two years in a row? The level of the team was fairly low to begin with, and I was, in fairness, the worst player there when I started. We regularly lost games 6-0 (ironically in one of those games I scored an own goal and won man of the match) and we never went higher than second from bottom in the league.

We actually made it through to the semi-final of the cup in the second year, after receiving a bye in the first round and beating the worst team in the league in the quarter final – quite a cup-run. We lost the semi-final though, badly, to St Julians and a player who was reportedly the cousin of Nathan Blake (a former Cardiff City player).

Anyhow – I have football trophies, something every man should have from their youth. I just don’t have to tell everyone exactly what they’re for… assuming they don’t read this of course.

Complaints, Home Delivery Network, Humour

HDNL driver crashes through gate

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This video was added in one of the comments on a post about HDNL had rebranded to YODEL to escape all of the bad press they have been receiving – and clearly it’s working if this dissatisfied customer is anything to go by. While waiting for a delivery from Amazon (who really should consider dropping HDNL/YODEL when they get tarred with the same brush) the customer’s CCTV caught the delivery driver ‘attempt’ to open the gates to his driveway, before giving up and forcing his van through the gap – damaging both the van and gates.

What sort of utter moron does this? Good work from YODEL – I wonder how long it will be before they rebrand again.

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Humour, Internet

The Student Property Shop has their domain name forcibly removed

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If you remember a certain Leeds based letting agent named Providence Properties, who featured on many websites a few years ago and on BBC Watchdog, you may remember that they disappeared almost over night and new company sprang up in their place. Where Providence Properties once sat, The Student Property Shop rose like a phoenix from the flames.

The Student Property Shop

For legal reasons of course I should point out that I’m not in any way suggesting that Providence Properties and The Student Property Shop are connected, they just have the same premises, the same staff, the same vehicles and their websites are (or were) on the same server. No connection whatsoever.

The Student Property Shop was also the subject of a student demo a while back, over fees that weren’t being returned.

Anyhow, things have taken a new twist once again; you see, the real Student Property Shop (website www.studentpropertyshop.com) are absolutely nothing to do with the Leeds outfit ran by the Zamans. The owners of Student Property Shop were keen to distance themselves from the whole sordid affair years ago when they emailed me to point out the distinction, and now they’ve emailed me again… this time with some very good, and very funny, news.

You see, if you register a domain name that encroaches on someone else’s trademark or company, you can have ownership of that domain challenged – and Student Property Shop (the good guys) reported The Student Property Shop to Nominet, the body that governs .uk domains, and they have upheld the complaint. As a result the Leeds letting agent The Student Property Shop has had their domain name forcibly removed and given to the real Student Property Shop.

This means their website no longer works, their email no longer works and they can’t be found on Google. Freakin’ hilarious!

The email from the real Student Property Shop stated:

Following our complaint to Nominet (the industry regulator controlling the registration of .uk domains), the ownership of the domain name, thestudentpropertyshop.co.uk has been transferred to us.

Nominet’s ‘Dispute Resolution Service’ commissioned a report from an independent legal expert, who concluded that “an Abusive Registration” took place by the previous owner of the domain name, who would be taking “unfair advantage” of our rights to the ‘Student Property Shop’ name; the recommendation was to the transfer the domain to us on 19th August 2011 to protect our trade mark.

Of course, Providence Properties lost their domain name a while back so the whole Internet can see just what has happened during the course of this story. That’s two domain names that have been lost by companies at the same premises in Leeds. I wonder what they’ll do next?

Complaints, Home Delivery Network, Internet

Home Delivery Network Complaints Department

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HDNL, or YODEL as they’re now know, have been added as one of the founder companies to a new complaints website, The Complaints Department. This site has just launched, so is a bit sparse in content right now, but with listings such as Home Delivery Network it’s only a matter of time before the website is brimming with complaints from dissatisfied customers of the incompetent delivery company.

Who knows, perhaps even some of the HDNL drivers will get over there and mouth of as well? We can only hope.

Be sure to leave your opinions on HDNL over at their own page on the Complaints Department website.

So much anger, so little time