Rouse on Transformation

From many years in Atlanta, I have known many UPS executives, including CEO Mike Eskew who led the transformation of UPS from a package delivery company to a global supply chain services company.  I use a case study of this transformation in my classes and workshops on enterprise transformation.  It is one of my favorite success stories.

Well, at least I thought it was until recent experiences trying to ship several boxes via UPS.com.  These recent negative experiences, detailed below, led me to the local UPS store a few times for explanations of various practices.  In the process, I discovered that the UPS franchised stores have a very arms-length relationship with the corporation that owns all the brown trucks.  Put simply, they use UPS as their shipper – as a vendor of services – but cannot help you with anything about UPS.  I might as well have asked my UPS-related questions at McDonalds or Baskin-Robbins.

I had hoped to ship several boxes by using UPS.com to print labels, schedule a pickup, and pay in advance.  I created an account on UPS.com, but found that this was not really a UPS account; it was only access to the website.  So, I needed to set up another personal account, but it would not allow this because my address is on a university campus.  When I tried a different address, it would not accept it because it was not the address associated with my credit card.

So, I called customer service.  The representative told me that I could schedule a pickup and then do all the paperwork with the driver, including printing out the shipping labels.  She could not help with the address and credit card problem at all.  When the driver arrived the next day, he would not take the boxes because I had not completed the online transaction and printed the labels.  In fact, he never prints labels.

I eventually got the boxes shipped three days later by manually lugging the five large boxes to the UPS store.  This experience caused me to explore other people’s experiences with UPS.  I found an enormous wealth of complaints, far too many to detail here.  Interestingly, one of the most common complaints is that there is no mechanism to complain, other than via your state’s consumer protection agency.  UPS clearly does not want to know about unhappy customers.  Thus, they can avoid learning and adapting to customers’ desires and expectations.

This is not the UPS that I knew ten years ago.  Of course, their Atlanta neighbor, Delta Air Lines, is also not the company I used to know, in their case twenty years ago.  In both cases, excellent service has been severely compromised in the pursuit of efficiency.  The fact that many customers now despise them is not of concern.  You have to conform to their rules and accept whatever level of service they provide, or you have to choose among all the other companies with the same philosophies of service.

Are there implications of such changes, or is the demise of service quality simply a fact of life?  My limited data on UPS and extensive data on Delta suggest that customers are very much looking for alternatives.  I have heard many premium Delta customers say, “I used to be a huge Delta fan; now I wish they would go bankrupt and out of business.  I really hate Delta Air Lines.”  Similarly, my limited UPS data says the love is gone.  Many customers are looking forward to the creative destruction of these companies by innovative new concepts and technologies.