I was looking forward to today, I was going to go to Tesco Home Plus in Chelmsford and collect my shiny Nexus 7 to replace my broken one I returned. If you’ve never ordered from Tesco Direct before, it’s usually pretty good – you place an order for something and it’s delivered to a local store ready for collection after 4pm. I’ve done it plenty of times, and it’s usually been pretty seamless. Until today.
It appears Tesco use HDNL / Yodel to get their goods from their warehouse / stockist and deliver it to the store. When your item is on its way to the store you can get the tracking number from your Tesco Direct account. This morning I checked the progress of the Nexus 7..
Things were going well.. it arrived at the Chelmsford Depot at 1.32am this morning, I checked the status later in the day and again, it appeared to be stuck at the depot, no mention of ‘Loaded onto a Van’ or ‘Out for Delivery’. I assumed this was probably a mistake and that the tracking info hadn’t refreshed, it does sometimes happen with nearly all the couriers.
After having a rather busy day full of work, we drove to Tesco about 18.50 to collect my new toy. As I drove my text message alert fired, I stopped at the traffic lights to have a look.
WHAT?!?
How could it possibly be delayed, the parcel is in the right town, and merely 4 miles from the store, it arrived at 1am into the depot and didn’t get put on a delivery van?! What a fucking joke. Even worse that Tesco waited until nearly 3 hours after the collection time to tell me! Why didn’t they know it wasn’t arriving at 4pm? Why did nothing happen until 3 hours later? Why didn’t a member of the Tesco team ring Yodel and say ‘Er.. where is this missing parcel of our customer?’?! There is no joined up thinking here, it’s just tough luck all round. If they had told me earlier I could have driven to Yodel myself and collected the fucking thing!
I got in touch with the @UKTesco Twitter team, who are very good when your grocery order fails, and happy to refund you / compensate you when things go wrong. It seems with ‘Direct’ orders, they can only look at what has happened, and log your comments. I don’t want my comments logged! I want someone at Tesco to put a rocket up the arse of someone at Yodel, and get it sorted. I’m not even sure why Tesco are using bloody Yodel anyway, their persistent failures are well documented with features on Watchdog. Yodel have got so annoyed with people slagging them off via Twitter they got
several ‘libellous’ tweets and accounts taken down.
Here’s a tip Yodel. Stop putting resources into throwing your weight at unhappy customers who tweet their disdain, improve your operations so parcels actually get loaded onto vans, you know, that’s what your company is MEANT to do.
Will my parcel get loaded tomorrow? Maybe.. Maybe not?
Will Tesco do anything to make things better and stop this happening? Unlikely.
Plenty of unhappy Tesco Direct and Yodel customers
can be found on Google, when will Tesco get a reliable courier company to do their deliveries?
Update 1 – 27/07/2012 – 9am
Well the parcel is still sitting in the Chelmsford Depot according to the tracking, and the @UKTesco Twitter team have told me someone from Tesco Direct will call me.. I’m not holding out much hope of getting it today.
Update 2 – 27/07/2012 – 1pm
Hope is fading fast of seeing it today @UKTesco have washed their hands of it now and it’s being dealt with by their ‘Direct Team’. I’ve been told they are calling the depot and then calling me back, this was several hours ago. @YodelOnline have been in touch, taken my tracking number and gone quiet. What the fuck is going on?
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I ordered a camera through tesco direct on 29th aug supposedly being delivered 31st August, I received a tracking number that morning but nothing seemed to be recorded on the yodel site by the afternoon, so I phoned tesco direct who said the camera had been received by yodel but they don’t know what has happened since, so they will send a replacement to be delivered monday 3rd sept.
Sunday 1st Sept I received another tracking number from yodel,all seemed to be going well until 14.03 3rd Sept parcel delivered to customer – guess what I never received it!
It’s now 6th Sept and after daily calls to tesco direct and yodel head office I have no idea who has received my parcel and apparently they haven’t managed to get hold of the driver to hold an investigation. I am now over £300 out of pocket with nothing to show and no idea when this is going to resolved. Seriously now thinking of going direct to the depot to find what is going on and where my parcel is, though I don’t think I’m going to get any answers.