Just before Christmas I rang up a friend of mine and asked if she had taped a television program that I had missed, and if she had whether she could send me the tape. She had, but she was due to fly off to Italy the next morning and I hadn’t realised this. I told her to worry about it when she got back, but she decided to be nice to me and send it anyway. There is no post office in the terminal at Stansted airport but there are a couple of post boxes, and she put what she thought was correct postage (from the limited selection of stamps she had) on the package and posted it to me. As it happened she made a mistake. She put stamps worth 68 pence on the package. Correct 2nd class postage was 69 pence.
Now, what did the post office do? They actually noticed that the postage was one penny short. Rather than receiving the package I received a card on December 30 saying that insufficient postage had been paid on a package for me and that I had to come to the local post office parcels office to pick it up. I attempted to pick it up on December 31, but the office in question was closed due to it being New Year’s Eve (not actually a holiday, but a good enough reason to close the post office parcels office). I came back on the second of January, and the office was open. I took the card to the counter, and the man behind the counter took close to ten minutes to find the package. I was then charged one penny additional postage and a £1.00 “handling charge”. Total wasted time for me due to two trips to the parcels office: a couple of hours. Total wasted time for post office staff: probably about 15 minutes. Plus I was inconvenienced by not receiving my video tape until three days after it should have arrived.
And this is all about a single penny not paid, which was clearly a mistake and not a genuine attempt to defraud anyone. I tend to think a certain amount of flexibility could be shown in cases like this. In fact I think I would prefer to send my mail via one of the Royal Mail’s competitors that is more concerned with providing good service to customers and less concerned with inconveniencing both customers and themselves with idiotic bureaucratic inflexibility.
However, I can’t. Such competition is illegal. The Royal Mail has a monopoly on mail in the UK for which postage is less than £1.00. Other companies such as Federal Express can carry any packages or letters anywhere they like, but they may not charge less than that minimum amount. This is designed to protect the Royal Mail’s monopoly, because it is feared (by Guardianistas at least) that without the monopoly they will not be able to maintain their universal (crappy) service throughout the UK. And of course, the Royal Mail has not been privatised (although the Major government did flirt with the idea for a while) and resistance to privatisation is high. Somehow the same Guardianistas believe that this would corrupt the Royal Mail, and it would only be concerned with profits, and that this would prevent it from providing a proper service to poor people.
Or something.
Compare this with the customer service I received from another organisation a few days earlier – in this case a private company that is only concerned with profit. I was out doing some last minute Christmas shopping, and I was hungry and in a hurry. I popped into the local McDonald’s for lunch. I ordered a Quarter Pounder Extra Value Meal, and the girl behind the counter went to get it for me. I took out my wallet and realised that I could not find the £5.00 note that I had thought that I had. I looked at the coins in my pocket, and realised that I had just over two pounds. (My food should have cost £3.19).
I explained this and apologised to the girl behind the counter. She asked me how short I was. I explained that it was about a pound. She said she was allowed to still give me the food in such circumstances if I was a little short, but not if I was that much short, but that as I had enough money for the Quarter Pounder on its own, why didn’t I have that? I said fine. She said that it wasn’t ready but that if I sat down she would bring it over to me when it was. I waited about five minutes, and then she did bring me the burger. She then told me that she apologised for the wait, and that she was allowed to give me a free fries and drink as a way of apologising for the delay, and she did so. (I have had this happen to me before when there was a delay, so I know that McDonald’s staff manual does allow for this). So I got the full amount of food I had ordered initially, despite having been about a pound short.
But I was quite amused by this outcome. McDonald’s really do encourage their employees to provide the best possible service to customers. They really want to make a good impression so that customers return. This will increase their profits, oddly enough. In this instance an employee was so determined to provide me with good service that she found a way within the company’s rules to give me my food, even though it was my fault that I did not have enough money with me, and although the rules didn’t initially appear to allow it, and even though I wasn’t even remotely upset, it being my fault after all. I was impressed.
If only McDonald’s ran the postal service.
It’s the same thing here in the US. However, you Aussies and Brits should be thankful; at least your postal employees don’t go on shooting sprees.
Ah, the wonders of Gov’t owned and monopolized postal services. Here in the US I had the wonders of x-mas packages simply getting lost in the mail. Ordered 3+ weeks before Christmas even!
Due to being out of town for the holidays I only just recently got back and checked on those packages. Turns out they made it to the local post office a few days before the 25th, were verified as being at the local post office, yet were never delivered. Nor has any notice ever been sent. So now I get to waltz on down to my local PO and haggle for hours on end trying to figure out just what they did with my packages.
No doubt it’ll simply turn up lost and they won’t cover a damned thing.
I suppose Macdonalds has to make up in customer service what it lacks in the food department: recently I ate their product for the second time in my life, by accident when I dashed into Fleet Services on the M3 to grab a quick breakfast, and found the fast-found annex I’d entered was run by the Big M. I felt positively ill after eating half the sloppy, greasy mound I was served… Never again. And I could barely understand the foreign counter assistant, who was presumably some sort of indentured labourer or slave from SE Asia.
As for Royal Mail, yes, it’s dodgy – though I personally have had very few things go astray. My wife arranged for a parcel of salmon to be sent direct from Shetland to Germany two weeks ago by the special Airsure option, and it hasn’t arrived – but Royal Mail flew it to Germany within two days, so it’s the local service at fault. And when I wanted to ship a rifle scope back to Leupold in the US, Royal Mail told me they didn’t offer insured delivery because the US Postal Service was so unreliable…
I too would prefer to see competition in ordinary mail delivery, but I’m not sure how it could be an economic proposition for any private company to offer a comprehensive service.
The decentralized franchise model of McDonald’s means there can be huge disparity in quality of service and food from one restaurant to the next. I’ve walked into the one at 40th & Chestnut in Philadelphia several times to see a crowd of annoyed customers and no one taking orders.
Does anyone have any similar holiday season stories of sending a parcel with too much stamp value on it, and subsequently receiving a card from the post office offering a personal visit by a PO employee bearing in their sweaty palm the penny or two paid in excess….? I think not, chaps. But why not?
You can alert Mickey D’s HQ about sloppy franchises, and I bet they’ll give you a food coupon or two for your time. Plus, it might even get the sloppy service cleaned up!
Not so with the Post Office.
I’m reminded of something I read as a letter to the editor in the UK years ago (late 80’s.)
“Yesterday I received a letter franked 3/11/99. Am I to understand that Royal Mail took over 88 years to deliver my parcel or did they move faster than light? Either way, they are to be congradulated.”
My favourite experience with the US postal service was getting a letter returned for insufficient postage after having original sent the damn thing from a US post office where I had it weighed.
“And this is all about a single penny not paid, which was clearly a mistake and not a genuine attempt to defraud anyone. I tend to think a certain amount of flexibility could be shown in cases like this.”
I think you underestimate the information cost inherent in a system which could decide that a penny difference was not significant. From your individual perspective it seems trivial but from the perspective of the process designer it would be a huge task.
As a thought experiment, set down and create a list of rules to handle the situation you describe in the way you would like it handled. Remember that: the rules will have to govern every piece of mail, someone will try to scam the system, end users will have to remember the rules to make consistent use of the system, the rules must be implementable by automated systems.
I doubt that privatization would help this particular case. Fed Ex et al, can profitably deliver packages with superior service in part because the information cost of delivering a high-value large-margin package is the same as a low-value near zero-margin post card. Were they forced to deliver the same kinds of mail as the postal service they would develop the same type of rules as the state monopoly.
A favorite trick of UK postal workers, when they’re running a bit short of time, as they need to be in the pub by twelve with their mates, is to deliver you a card saying something like “we could not deliver your parcel today as you weren’t in, so you’ll have to go out of your way tomorrow morning, and go to the faraway sorting office to pick it up yourself, oh, and pay for parking near the sorting office too, otherwise you’ll get clamped”. Well, it’s not exactly like that, but you get the picture.
How they manage to do this, WHEN YOU’RE ACTUALLY AT HOME THE WHOLE TIME, amazes me. They must sneak up real quiet to the door, and slip the collection note under the door if they can hear you wandering about upstairs.
Or are they just giving these notes to the regular postmen to deliver with the letter mail?
It must save them a fortune NOT actually delivering parcel mail, the service paid for, and getting you to collect it yourself.
So one must admire their initiative, really! 🙂
Don’t ya just love government service.
I think it’s time for the UK’ers to quite whinging. I’ve experienced both US/UK mail services and apart from the Royal Mail running at a huge deficit I’d wish other countries to have that kind of service. Where I live (not UK/US ) I get mail twice a week – if I’m lucky and on New Years Eve I received a small package that took seven weeks in transit.
Actually, the US Postal Service is not that bad. Maybe I had low expections when I moved here years ago from France. Being told for years how “awful” US public services were – years of brainwashing have convinced most in France that quality of service is positively correlated with the amount of taxes paid, and they believe it despite the moutains of daily evidence to the contrary – I guess I had low expectations. It works.
I live in a small village. The local PO is quaint, the employees friendly and helpful. Never lost anything. Can’t complain.
Wish I could say the same thing of a lot of other services.
Good Old Dave,
He always has the exception to the rule!..:-)
It should be noted that although the US Postal Service is technically owned by the government, it doens’t receive a single peny of funding from taxes; it’s entirely self-sustaining and all of its funding comes from its own profits.
And its service isn’t really that bad at all.
I blame Herb Caen, San Francisco columnist.
Years ago, a letter with postage due would be delivered along with a little envelope for you to put the postage due in for repayment of the postman. Herb mentioned in a column that sharp Hippies were geting revenge on utilities by intentionally leaving off the stamp. Soon after the law was changed and the adressee was not given the opportunity to pay. That brought the little box that said put stamp here or else. Forget to put a return address as I did once, and you get the letter back 2 or 3 months later.
A friend of mine had ordered a digital camera. The first one was sent thru “classic” mail parcel delivery and got lost. The second attempt (he had to pay new delivery charges) was done by a private firm. The neighbour saw the delivery person throw it over a 2 meter high gate onto the terrace. No, it wasn’t damaged but it makes you think.
Does anyone have any similar holiday season stories of sending a parcel with too much stamp value on it, ……
Glad you asked. I did just such a thing about 15 years ago when living in Toronto. I had to pay a bill by such a date and the cost of stamps had gone from 39c to 42c or there abouts. Rather than buy some 3c stamps, I put a pair of 39’s on the envelop and called it a day. A week later my letter was returned rubber stamped [yes they have one] “excessive postage”.
I put a thick black line through the return address and remailed it. I have not used return addresses since.
Well, I have actually paid excess postage on plenty of occasions. The normal reason is the same as yours, which is that I have wanted to post the item right now, the post office is closed or a long way away, and I have some stamps in my wallet that I can put together to make up something greater than the actual amount owing. The normal result has been the sensible one, which is that the package has been conveyed normally. But that is a wonderful story of bureaucracy gone nuts.
I’ve regularly been a victim of the “can’t be bothered to wait for him to answer the door, let’s just drop a card through the letterbox” scam. And the only time I’ve needed to send a letter by recorded delivery, it arrived without delivery being recorded (useful extra service at only four times the usual price).
Over the New Year, though, I received a postcard from Thailand. It had made its way via international postage carriers, halfway across the world to the UK in just four days, putting Phileas Fogg to shame. Unfortunately it wasn’t for me – when the Royal Snail got hold of it, they delivered it to the wrong address.
Well perhaps a tender would be in order…a buy-out of the Royal Mail. Eh? If there is so much marginal and unrealized profit lying about in the postal service, why not privatize it? Has anyone — and I imagine they did under Thatcher? — ever looked at the numbers?
Could a private postal service — but with the social constraints imposed by a postal service with national goals e.g. a flat rate from Land’s End to John O’Groats (excuse me if I get it wrong) — actually work?
Zorlack noted that while the U.S. Postal Service is owned by the Federal government, it is run for profit.
Leaving aside the fact that a government owned firm run for profit smacks of fascism, it doesn’t change the lack of competition. The U.S. Postal Service has a legal monopoly on paper mail delivery in the United States. As such, it has no motivation to reduce costs, improve services or create new services.
Could a private postal service — but with the social constraints imposed by a postal service with national goals e.g. a flat rate from Land’s End to John O’Groats (excuse me if I get it wrong) — actually work?
My older brother is a director of a large multinational logisitics company and has been working on this question on and off since TNT got into bed with the Dutch Post Office.
Asking him that question directly, as I have, and the basic answer is no. The margins are barely there for high value premium delivery. He’s currently working on a business plan for when premium deliveries are de-regulated but they don’t want the sub £1 ad hoc business.
Having said that, if the post office are operating at a 1p per item posted loss (or there abouts) I am tempted to say they should first address their cost base. A first class stamp is too cheap anyway.
Whenever I have something I really want coming through the BPO, I bite my fingernails. The best example I can think of was from about 1993. A friend at Boeing in Seattle sent me copies of the Commercial Space Report … twice. Neither one arrived. In all the years I’d lived in Pittsburgh I can’t remember even once having mail vanish or even be significantly late.
And yes, I remember the Postage Due. I used to collect stamps and had a number of them in my album.
Interesting, my experience is the reverse, we lost post all the time in California but I can only recall a couple of times in my life when I’ve lost post in England.
Probably for both services the actual lost mail numbers as a percentage of total shipping are vanishingly small.
I am largely with Dave. I find the Royal Mail generally okay in terms of getting the mail there, and in a reasonable time. It is other aspects of their customer service that I find to often be bad. (Of course, I have only lived in the South-East of England. Other parts of the UK may be different).
Other parts of the UK may be different
The glib answer is yes, they are.
I used to live in Willesden and basically to get a Doctor’s appointment you’d need 2 weeks written notice from the practise nurse. We moved to Surbiton where it was marginally better. Then to California where we couldn’t find a Doctor at all, and then to a city in the West of England. Our current Doctor’s offices will get an appointment for you on the same day if you call in the morning, or normally with 2 days notice if its for a specific Doctor. Hospital or specialist referals take a couple of weeks if its non life threatening.
I suspect it has a lot to do with the regional loading patterns and parts of the South East are under serious strain.
Short of forcing the government to move all those cushy government offices out to the North and hand the keys of the city over to real business, I’m not sure what there is that can be done in a space that small.
In Australia, although there is a “national health system”, GPs and most specialists work for themselves. If you want to see a doctor, you go and see the doctor and you pay the doctor’s fee (which he is free to set as he fits). The government then refunds a set amount of money for the particular service rendered. The patient is therefore out of pocket for the difference between what the doctor charges and the government pays. (This “gap” may be anything from nothing to quite a lot).
This means that doctors are far more connected to the market than in the UK. It is usually easy to get an appointment with a specialist within a couple of weeks. You may (or may not) have to wait to get an appointment with your regular GP, but if you wish to go and see another GP because you are suddenly ill, there are plenty of medical clinics that will allow you to see a GP almost instantly without an appointment. You probably won’t get to see a doctor for as long or with as much attention than if you went to see your regular GP, but if the situation is “I need a course of antibiotics” or similar, then just seeing a doctor is easy. In London it can be incredibly difficult.
Oddly, though, the regional pattern in Australia seems to be the reverse. There are lots of doctors in Sydney and other large cities, and there are severe shortages in rural areas. Finding doctors who actually want to live in the country is difficult. Yes, it is cheaper to not live in Sydney, but doctors don’t seem to care and want to live in Sydney anyway.
And of course, rural people are constantly complaining that the doctors who do set up practice in rural areas charge more than doctors in the city do. But that’s life, I guess.
Thuriam is a technology consultant providing world-class services, Customer interaction in varied application areas and focused on BPO & Knowledge industry. Thuriam assists in the identification and development of business opportunities in the emerging BPO & Knowledge Services markets.Offshore outsourcing of your Business Process is a compelling business strategy. At Thuriam we attempt to identify the possible outsourcing opportunity and present our capability as an integrated Technology and process Outsourcer catering to all your needs. We would be your partner to provide end to end services across the value chain.Our integrated analyses provide industry, competitive, customer and technology innovation along with strategic, tactical, and operational recommendations to help maximize the bottom line from business strategy, service delivery, marketing and sales efforts. We provide high end services by utilizing the latest technologies and at low costs.
Our Services:
Knowledge Services
Medical Backoffice Services
· Medical Transcription
· Medical Billing
· Medical Coding
Legal Consulting Service
· Legal BPO
· Legal Documentation
· Legal Research
Data Research Services
· Data Collection & Extraction
· Database Services
BPO Services
Digitization Services
· Transcription Services
· Media Conversion Services
Data Processing Services
· Form Processing
· Data Entry
Data Conversion Services
· Electronic Publishing
· Prepress Services
· Data Capture
Medical Transcription:
Our endeavor is to constantly re-engineer the dictation/transcription process in order to take full advantage of the latest advances in computers, networking and digital technology. Combining these technologies with competent transcription skills allows us to provide cost-effective solutions to meet your transcription needs. We offer clients a set of core competencies, which are invaluable to the health information management professionals as well as other professionals who must dictate a steady stream of reports and correspondence. We are specialized in the following Reports – Discharge Summary, Death Summary, Progress Notes, Clinical Notes, Emergency Notes, History & Physical, Radiology Consultation Reports, Office Visits, Physician Letters, and Psychiatry Reports etc.
Medical Billing:
In today’s competitive business world medical billing acts as a key in the revenue management of health care industries and hospitals. Medical Billing plays a major part in the income of the respective organization. Any inaccuracies made in pricing, missed charges, errors in coding during manual procedure will turn out as a very huge loss to the organization. Billing process includes patient registration, charge entry, patient statement and enquiries, standard reports and accounts receivable management. Thuriam’s medical billing service enables to eliminate these loses and accurately process your medical billing. more…
Medical Coding:
In today’s business world Medical coding is considered to be a serious business among the health care industries and hospitals. Manual errors while performing this task may create a major problem and huge loss to the organization. Thuriam’s Medical coding consists of combination of numbers and alphabets adhering to different coding standards. These codes help medical insurance and others to understand what was wrong with the patient, whether treatment was necessary and what services were administered. All these coding helps the non-medical staff at the insurance and other health service providers to handle the claims and make payments on predetermined basis. more…
Legal Consulting Service
At Thuriam we have highly dynamic and high growth Off-Shore service delivery space of Legal Consulting and Back Office Services, where most of the initial process delivery opportunities are moving towards commoditization, we have invested significantly in creating a unique Solution Based value proposition.
Our diversified business practice represents a wide range of commercial, industrial and financial enterprises, both publicly and privately held. Thuriam has the following work departments: corporate, employee benefits, health law, intellectual property, private clients, regulation and government affairs, tax and trial. We offer Legal Drafting, Deposition Summary, legal coding, legal billing, paralegal, legal research, to documentation service. more…
Data Harvesting Service
We believe that our Value Proposition framework when tailored to meet our client’s specific business and process delivery requirements will further enhance the value we passionately deliver to our customers on consistent basis. We understand just how critical building and maintaining directories and databases is to any business, educational or research organization. Our expertise in data harvesting domain includes Data Capturing Service From The Web, Online data entry and internet search, Catalog / database management, Internet research, email mining and customized list making, Portal management support, e-Newsletters / e-Clippings, Secondary Research / Market Intelligence. more…
Data Conversion Service
Our world leading data conversion capabilities include services such as e-Book Conversion, XML, SGML, HTML, PDF and Tiffs. This apart, Thuriam converts data stored on paper, proprietary file formats and many other formats into the choice of data and medium that you would desire. Worldwide users of our data conversion services include major publishers and manufacturing companies, academic and research libraries colleges and universities, and public utilities.
Many organizations are faced with mountains of non-standard source material created over the years by a variety of organizations and individuals. Their current and future business goals depend on converting this data to a standardized database. Thuriam offers a full range of consulting and data conversion services to help organizations meet this critical need. We not only convert data, we understand your objectives in a broader context. That’s why we proactively suggest improvements in database design, and identify simple solutions that add power at little or no cost. We foresee and resolve integration issues, always focusing on improving the ease, reliability, and speed of your database. more…
Digitization Service
At Thuriam, we provide the specialized Digitization with the combination of individual project management capacity and experience by retrieving the contents from videos, books, images, archives, photographs, government records and collections, and any other documents and converting in to comprehensive digital formats for universal access, web delivery uses, copying, and other means of distribution. more…
Data Processing Service
Data Processing is a constraint to be done by all government agencies, institutions, companies, industries, etc. for purposes like purchase requisitions, travel approvals, time off requests, and expense reports. Thuriam initiates Data Processing by receiving the forms from you and create a new database for the information in your forms. Then follows designing of the form structure, quality check and delivery of product. more…
Our Strategy Consulting includes
· Business Strategy & Design
· Market Analysis
· Competitive Intelligence
· Portfolio Development
· Product & Service Innovation
· Blueprints for the future
· Project Management
· Process Development
We are looking forward to the prospect of increasing India’s share of the world market in BPO & Knowledge Services outsourcing through the advisory services offered by Thuriam.
To learn more about our service packages, specific to meeting your business objectives, e-mail us at: info@thuriam.com.
The Land Marvel Group is one of South India’s most well-known business conglomerates : with
interests in Properties, Information Technology, Animation and BPO.
Started in the year 1995 by four young brothers from Chettinadu – a region where financial
discipline and traditional business values are a way of life – The Land Marvel Group, today, is a 1300 strong team of professionals. Clear Vision, meticulous planning and hard work have resulted in the Group achieving a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 200% year on year from its inception.Land Marvel Animation Studios, a part of Land Marvel Group with substantial investments in high-end infrastructure, has built up the capacity to deliver products and services of world-class quality.
The Studio has an optimum mix of management experience and animation talent, which has
attracted and retained the best of the Industry’s professionals. It aims to be an integrated
one-stop-shop providing a wide range of Digital and Multimedia services to its Clients.
We offer following Services:
3D Animations
2D Animations
Pre Production
Animation Walkthrough
VFX
Post Production
Games
Interactive Web3D
for more information please log on in to our website(Link)
I find the Royal Mail very good, and when a friend payed the wrong postage, about £1 short the postie still posted it in our letter box without any problems and without us having to pay. But I have just posted something via Airsure to the USA insured for £150 and it hasn’t arrived after 15 days. Their quoted aim is 5 days. It made it to JFK NY airport, but it hasn’t been seen since and hasn’t been tracked by the USPS like it should have been.