I took a call from a lady a few hours ago claiming to be called Susan and stating that she knows the last time she called me I told her that I didn’t want to hear from her anymore, but she had to call me to advise me that my advert was going to print soon and she needed to confirm the address to send my invoice to. (Are you liking the sound of this already….?)

I replied that I did not have the foggiest what she was talking about and proceeded to ask for some more info on the advert, to which she told me that I had “verbally agreed” with her last September that I would place an advert in her publication and now the advert is about to be published, I needed to make the payment.

She told me that as it was a “verbal agreement” she was unable to send me anything in the post apart from the invoice, which was now outstanding for £149.00. She said she was more than happy to take payment over the telephone today as this would save me “time and money” apparently? What a thoughtful person Susan is.

When I asked for the name of her company she was very vague but told me that they were called SPL Advertising and they were based in Manchester. When I asked her for the company website address, she said she didn’t know it (it gets worse….) so I asked for their phone number and the name of her Manager…she advised me she was not able to provide that as the department she worked in was outgoing calls only, so I asked for the main phone number so I could report them to Trading Standards at which point she shouted at me to stop being awkward and advised I would be sent the bill in the post to pay within 14 days.

She also said the telephone number and web address would be on the invoice/letter so I could call back and query it then. So…let me get this straight:

1. The company is nowhere to be found on the net, companies house and does not have a web presence at all.
2. A company that runs nationwide ad campaigns cannot provide a phone number for me to call back on.
   
3. It seems acceptable for employees of this company to shout at their *clients* (that be me apparently…)
   
4. I owe them £149 and it must be paid within 14 days (this is my favourite one…..)
   
5. I verbally agreed to place this advert but when I queried the advert content she could not advise me and said I would be sent a copy of it AFTER I had paid the invoice.
   
6. Her name is Susan but as company policy states they are not allowed to provide their surnames, that is all she can tell me.
   
7. Susan doesn’t like being called a liar as I found out when she hung up on me. Sorry Susan.
   
8. SPL Advertising call from a withheld number so you can’t trace the call or call them back to rant at them then hang up back…(Which I find helps my anger management)
   

When they send me the invoice I will, of course, post it up here for all to read (and laugh at) and I will send it back to them with a copy of this blog and a copy of my letter to Trading Standards, which I am sure will do absolutely nothing and SPL will change their name and carry on as usual…grrr.

Since writing this blog yesterday, I have had the same company call me on my mobile and my husband’s mobile twice today, both times telling me they were calling to thank us for our support with their charity campaign a few months ago. When you question anything they say they just hang up and the annoying thing is they call from withheld numbers so they cannot be traced.

I have also spoken to a number of people on Twitter and they have been called by the same people also trying the same scams over the last few weeks. It seems the company makes a call to you a few days prior to get the contact name and position of someone in the company (Mine was someone calling from “HMRC” to send me some new legislation paperwork for small businesses)  and they then use this name to pretend that that was the person who verbally agreed the work.

I came across this which is quite interesting reading…

http://www.adscams.co.uk/

http://www.consumerfraudreporting.org/fakebilling.php – Which actually lists SPL Publishing as Summit Publishing Ltd.

In our earlier blog we ranted about how the brilliant Royal Mail had managed to lose our letters, parcels and so on and after being made to wait 3 weeks before we could send them claim for off and then another 29 days (Out of the 30 day time frame) we finally got a call from someone who advised they will be refunding us the costs of the items AND the cost of the postage and services. How very kind of them.

See men….sometimes us women really do get places when we moan and raise our voices and this time it has paid off! Yay!!

I came across an article today whilst on Twitter stating that Amazon has decided to drop Royal Mail for all parcels weighing more than 500 grams.

What must be even more of a kick in the teeth for them is that Amazon are actually Royal Mail’s second largest customer!! It seems Ebay are now to follow suit also..

Here is the snippett from the Guardian newspaper online… www.Guardian.co.uk

It seems the backlog of undelivered mail has worried customers, particularly small businesses and internet retailers who argue that the unpredictable nature of the strikes has led to a collapse in reliability. The loss of this business will be a severe blow to Royal Mail, which was relying on the growth of online shopping to compensate for the decline of its letters business due to rising email use.

Customers of eBay have already been particularly vociferous, claiming the strikes are causing damage to small businesses that suffer negative feedback and lose their online reliability ratings. (Ah ha – it’s not just me then!)

Now the Guardian has learned that Amazon.co.uk has cancelled its long-term contract to use the Royal Mail for parcels over 500 grams and will use a rival service, Home Delivery Network (HDN), which also delivers for Tesco and Argos.

HDN declined to comment directly, citing commercial confidentiality, but the Amazon contract is thought to be worth at least £25m and is one of the first times a major sender of medium-sized parcels has chosen to defect from the Royal Mail in this way. Until now, the state-owned operator has won the bulk of new internet business.

HDN’s chief executive, Brian Gaunt, said he expected others to follow suit once the national strike ballot was passed. “We are seeing a number of our customers preparing to start marketing their deliveries as free of Royal Mail risk,” he added.

Two years ago Royal Mail lost a smaller Amazon contract worth £8m to deliver second class parcels during the last national strike, but fought hard to win the business back, claiming improved industrial relations. Losing the new, bigger contract will exacerbate the operator’s financial woes, which lay behind its need to cut staff, but more worryingly sends a dangerous signal to other suppliers about Amazon’s faith in the network during the crisis.

Even if private sector rivals do step in to take some of the contracts, it is unlikely to prevent major disruption. HDN says it would be unlikely to get enough resources in place at short notice to compensate.

More importantly, there is very little alternative for delivery of letters, with private operators such as TNT and DHL using Royal Mail for crucial parts of their delivery infrastructure.

Our first blog is a negative one and is directed at one of the countries’ biggest companies. So big in fact, the queen has put her name to it. Now usually I wouldn’t start a page off with something negative and trust me, in future, the posts will be more upbeat.

Royal Mail. Yes, the super efficient Royal Mail.

Recorded Delivery

We have recently been doing lots of Credit Control work and signed up a new client a while back which would involve sending lots of important letters, Invoices and Legal documents to their suppliers and clients all over the UK. Now, I must add here that we have agreed to send everything Second class Recorded Delivery as the Royal Mail website states this ‘guarantees’ delivery within 3 -5 working days and has the added bonus of being trackable, it also allows you to claim compensation if the items get lost. So due to the importance of the documents involved, this was our only options it seemed.

Moody!

So…off I go to the post office, pay my monies to the moodiest woman in the world who calls herself a ’sub postmaster’ and moans at me every time for some reason or another. The last time I visited her I was scorned at from behind the counter for using online postage rather than buying my postage in store and according to the lovely lady in question “It is people like you that are causing our local post offices to close down”.

It couldn’t possibly be the fact that her face screams ‘I hate my job and I hate you too’ every time someone approaches the counter.

Now being the efficient worker that I am, I always check the Royal Mail website a week later to ‘track’ the item and make sure the package has been signed for and safely received. There never used to be a problem with this but over the last 3 months I must have spent around £200 on online postage and sent around 50 recorded items.

So it was quite a shock recently when I logged on and started the arduous task of tracking 30 or so items, that 4 of them presented me with a message stating. “Your item was received at ****** Post Office on the 8th September and is currently working its way through our systems”.

Faster than Santa…

Through our systems! Some of these items were posted 30 days ago! Father Xmas delivers quicker than these guys!

So I call the Customer Service number and after listening to an annoying robot make me choose around 50 different options, I am eventually allowed to speak to a real person who doesn’t have a clue what they are talking about. They tell me that once the item is 15 working days late, I can complete a 3 page claim form and send it off to the ‘Security’ department who will take a look at the whereabouts of the item and get back to me within 30 days. They also told me that they know of parcels sent well before mine that are still ‘lost in the system’ and they aren’t sure how long it is going to take them to catch up with deliveries. Brilliant, just brilliant.

There are a number of issues I have with this along with millions of others it seems, but will our moans get us anywhere? I imagine not. All I can say is – sort yourselves out Royal Mail, you are a joke.