City Link

aslco

aslco

aslco

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10 Feb 2008
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Ok, so my headphones broke so i searched the web for some new cheap ones. Found a logitec pair for just £7, with good reviews, better still if i ordered before 8pm monday i'd get it by tuesday. Unfortunatley that price doubled due to £7 delivery charge, but still id get them tuesday rater than wait till the weekend!

So on tuesday city link came, but couldn't deliver as we were not in, apparently they cant let a neighbour sign for the package unlike every other delivery service ive known. SO anyway they arrange to keep back the package at the depot till we go to collect it.

So wednesday we go to the depot...the man has driven off again with the package in the van to attempt to re-deliver to a house that will be empty EVERY TIME as the york depot already knew by this point. They say 'oh well its only mid-day he should be back here in the evnening, come then and you'll get your headphones.'

So we go back in the evening...the delivery man has been taken to the side by the police, all goods temporarily claimed, not a chance till tomorrow....but tomorrow my dad (who was going to pick them up for me) is in a course in HULL! This means i wont even have the chance of getting my headphones by friday evening. Great...i pay £7 to a delivery service that FAIL and i only get my headphones 1 day earlier for that price... Could have just got some at the weeknd afterall...

:(
 
All delivery services ive used over the past year or so wont deliver to neighbours when you are out, unless you contact the dilvery company before hand (usualy requires a form to fill in) to allow them to do so. Most companies do it because of the ammount of people who got realy annoyed with them delivering to neighbours that they hate or dont get on with, so they didnt want to risk legal action which is why most companies wont deliver like that any more.
 
Why did you pay extra for next day delivery when you weren't going to be in?

City Link did try to deliver on Tues as promised. After that it was just bad luck.

But I know what you mean. There have been times when I've bought something locally, which I could have bought much cheaper online, just so I could have it now and not wait 2-3 days for it to be delivered. But then I've been busy and not had a chance to even open it until 3 days later. By then an online purchase would have arrived and I would have saved myself £££s
 
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It's a pity really - I wish there was someway to kind of indicate to the driver of a delivery that you like your neighbours, so deliver to them.

Perhaps they could ask it and enter it on a database or something....I dunno...
 
Ironically, the last thing I had delivered by City Link was left with a neighbour.

I wasn't too impressed, as the card I got through the door suggested it was back at the depot. Sure, it had 23 scrawled on it, but how was I to know that meant the house they'd left it at?
 
vonhelmet said:
Ironically, the last thing I had delivered by City Link was left with a neighbour.

I wasn't too impressed, as the card I got through the door suggested it was back at the depot. Sure, it had 23 scrawled on it, but how was I to know that meant the house they'd left it at?
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Could be worse. Early this year city link was ment to ship my first set of open university modules for my new course, now i was at home at the time and near the door as i was waiting for my new computer parts from OcUK. Yet for some reason, not only did they not ring the bell or knock, but they left the package outside of my neighbours house (who were on holiday at the time). Now, OU packages are just books and documents with a thin bit of cardboard going around them, with some of them tight plastic straps stoping it comming undone, and this was left outside of my neighbours house in the rain, even though it said "important education documents" on the front the delivery guy still just left it there.

And it gets worse, he didnt leave me a card, so i had no idea about the package, it wasnt untill a day or 2 later i noticed on my OU site that it said the module was delivered, I checked the city link parcel tracking and it says it was signed for! It said my surname was the signiture, but i was the only one home at the time, and i didnt sign for it, meaning city link forged my signiture to try and cover up their pathetic delivery.
 
Most couriers are good most of the time.

All couriers are bad some of the time.

If anyone knows of a courier that is good all the time at a price our customers will be happy to pay all of the time please let me know.
 
Spie said:
Most couriers are good most of the time.

All couriers are bad some of the time.

If anyone knows of a courier that is good all the time at a price our customers will be happy to pay all of the time please let me know.
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cant remember the name of them, but there is a company that mainly works with the US embasy here in the UK to deliver important documents from the US embasy, like passports and such. They also deliver other items too, and because of the importancy of what they deliver they make sure everything goes smoothly. If you can find out the name of that company, i would be happy to pay a good price to ship my OcUK goods i buy with them.
 
City Link puts me off buying from OcUK. Simply because I never know when or by what means I'm gonna get my purchase. Smaller stuff I pick Royal Mail whenever I can, city link just suck ALL the time.

Spie, going back to your generalisation, City Link just suck all the time, every delivery I've had with them has had something go wrong, thus picking any other courier (there's hundreds) would be an improvement over CL, applying your rule of most couriers are good most of the time, all couriers are bad some of the time, and my rule of CL suck ALL the time. :rolleyes:

I know I would pay more if I was presented with different options, just to AVOID city link.

I've never seen another thread crying about any other courier, and this most definitely isn't the first to cry about city link. That might be a decent hint, so stop defending this shambles of a company and switch to a more competent one, or present a few options of different couriers.

It's not like it's a small courier division of some larger corporation, they're a courier, it's ALL they do, and when they're so crap what they do they should fix themselves to maximise profit.

/rant off
 
Spie said:
Most couriers are good most of the time.

All couriers are bad some of the time.

If anyone knows of a courier that is good all the time at a price our customers will be happy to pay all of the time please let me know.
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Hi Mark.

Your above statement is almost spot on. No courier is good all the time. There are huge regional variations as well, CityLink in Barrow-Upon-Soar might be fantastic but the equivalent BusinessPost depot in Beaumont Leys might be terrible.

I know that CityLink were chosen by OcUK after a polling session and suspect that other factors were involved as well.
Spie will have no doubt compared their rate card to those offered by other couriers.
He will have made sure they collect at a suitable time (for instance, what if DHL offered great service but have a cut-off time of 3pm in Fenton? No good at all to OcUK)
He may have also considered the strenght of the network - some couriers like DHL go towards having lots of depots (over 100 in the UK) that cover small patches, others like us (TNT) tend towards big new depots but we have less of them. There are benefits and drawbacks with both, little old depots have less freight to worry about but don't have the resource and facilities to cope with problems so well - and a higher number of depots inevitably means a higher chance of misroutes and mis-sorts.
Service recovery may have been another issue - when things go knickers up some couriers are pretty good at rectifying the situation, others either can't or won't help, or are simply always uncontactable.

Lots of factors go into choosing a courier!

One of the main benefits of CityLink is that they are cheap, which means a saving can be passed on to the end customers. Not many companies make any sort of real profit on shipping, it is just a necessary evil that they have to pay out for to trade.

I'm willing to bet overall service performance would increase with a switch to somebody like UPS (who are generally acknowledged to be very good) but their operation in the UK is very small and they are expensive - and the small network means lots of stuff gets subbed out to people like CityLink anyway thereby defeating the object of using UPS to an extent.

Anyway enough rambling from me!
 
Spie said:
Most couriers are good most of the time.
All couriers are bad some of the time.
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Exactly, these threads are silly and would happen even if you hand delivered every package.

The problem with every buisness is that it needs the people working for it to do there job properly, unfortunatly within a buisness as large as city link there are people intent on doing as little as possible or who are just plan rubbish at thier job.

One of the most frustraighting things I have to fill out is a "corrective action report" detailing how I will stop a given fault happening ever again, most of the time its due to a numpty not doing the job properly, how do you correct that ?
 
lozzick said:
i ordered before 8pm monday i'd get it by tuesday. Unfortunatley that price doubled due to £7 delivery charge, but still id get them tuesday rater than wait till the weekend!

So on tuesday city link came, but couldn't deliver as we were not in,
Click to expand...

Right, I think I see what happened here.

Actually, I've just read a post on the City Link forum about dumb people who pay for specific delivery dates then go out.
 
Ok, two people are already accusing me of paying extra just for next day delivery. NO....it costs that much to deliver regardless of the day.

Don't call me dumb, my past experiences all deliveries have ALWAYS been given to the neighbour, and if not we thought we could use the York depot. I never said sepcifically deliver on Tuesday at an exact time when i'd be out, it just hapens they came mid-day. They just said it would come then or be in the vicinity of York. Pitty thier so crap that they actually take it away from the depot everytime we ring the doorbell as it were.

To make it worse, today they called to say their delivering again on Friday, and due to the person on my end of the phone not being me or too aware of the history of the delivery, just immediatley said OK. Even so, City Link already knew we are NOT IN ON WORKING DAYS, so why do they keep asking when weve told them twice now. We now cant get through to their phone, this really is taking the Mick.
 
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My local citylink driver is fine, leaves it with neighbours if I'm not in, bangs like hell on the door first. Always pleasant to speak to. Guess it depends which driver you get.
 
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