BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

As you already know, I have no love for US Postal Service. In fact, I almost expected something like this to happen soon. Crisis makes all kinds of shady deals get more shady.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Massive deficits could force the post office to cut out one day of mail delivery, the postmaster general told Congress on Wednesday, in asking lawmakers to lift the requirement that the agency deliver mail six days a week.

If the change happens, that doesn’t necessarily mean an end to Saturday mail delivery. Previous post office studies have looked at the possibility of skipping some other day when mail flow is light, such as Tuesday.

So if you were wondering – what does it take for a commercial entity to make money, now you have a clear answer. You have to do less work. Less work – more money. Got it?

Usually I try to avoid using UPS, but when both hard drives in my laptop died on a same day and I called Lenovo for replacement – there’s little choice to be had. Last night I found a familiar brown-yellow-white note on building’s doors saying that UPS has made a second attempt to deliver the package. It’s not that I was aware of the first attempt, but who’s counting, right?

Well aware of all the issues facing me I called main UPS number and quickly found out that my package is resting peacefully at the station across the town. We’re only New York City’s most populous borough, with 2.5 million residents and the second most populated county in US, so we only get a single UPS station to pick our packages.

However, much to my surprise, the station is open from 8pm to 10:30pm (that’s right, night hours) for package pickup. Nice location (some warehouse neighborhood), friendly parking spots (half the streets around this huge UPS yard are marked “No Parking Any Time”), easy access (I only had to walk one and half block from the parking spot I found to a small entrance in a fence with no lights on) – all makes it a pleasure to visit and pick up the package.

The staff, though, is very friendly – either on the phone or on the location. I didn’t hit any lines (understandable, given the place and the time) so I got my stuff in well under 20 minutes.

Nice to see a movement in a right direction for UPS. Now if only I wouldn’t have to drive 30 minutes from home to UPS yard – it would have worked much better.

Yet another example of customer service gone wrong implementation that I had stumbled on this morning. My wife ordered some of her stuff online from HSN.com, order arrived in two pieces, one of them wrong. It happens. This morning I fetched a customer service phone number from order’s e-mail and wrote it for her so she could call and request an exchange. As I was leaving I heard her dialing the number and… guess what? An overly-cheery loud and annoying female voice happily announced that she has reached a rewards center, “probably by mistake”. Right… hung up the phone, double-check the number and dialed it again. Oops. Same voice, same message. I stopped, went into HSN’s web site to check the number. Yes, we’ve got the number right, but it still says “rewards center”.

After trying out a few other numbers, we figured the right one. Customer service rep helped my wife out, doing whatver it is they’re supposed to do in order to fix such an issue. However, the problem remains the same – why would someone post a rewards center phone number as a customer support? My guess is it was some marketing genius that decided it was an easy way to upsell existing customers.

From my stand point – it is not.