agreeing date and time of deliveries

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maurello
Posts: 29
Joined: Sun Jan 11, 2009 1:52 pm

agreeing date and time of deliveries

Post by maurello » Wed Apr 05, 2017 1:54 pm

This topic has been discussed many years ago. Hopefully something changed for a more efficient service.

We regularly buy stuff from Amazon.de since they have more variety and they now deliver it for free to Finland. Different sellers use different postal services. However, even when at the origin DHL is used, at Finland end it always goes to Posti. Posti delivery date and time are totally unpredictable. They just try out of luck, of course during business hours, when most people are at work. Result is that we most often just get a letter saying that they tried to deliver something. The main issue is that they do not ask to agree on a 2nd proper delivery date and time, they just say "go and collect it yourself at the post office"... Which is very inconvenient since we just relocated from Singapore and haven't yet bought a car.

On top of that, even when we are at home, we came across very odd customer service. Last but not least a guy delivered a heavy parcel and refused to deliver it even at our door. He claimed he was paid to deliver it only to the street, which is 10m from the door. Result, my wife with two young kids could not move the package, which stayed out in the rain... Luckily stuff did not get totally spoiled. We got the same service from IKEA, that delivered a mattress just dropping it on the street...

Main question is: is there a way to agree upfront time of delivery? it would save --> 1) Posti out of luck tentative (i.e. their employees time spent for nothing) 2) people discomfort to go to post office to pick up their stuff 3) post office queues 4) unnecessary commuting/traffic/pollution

As a side note, just for info, in Singapore home deliveries go with multiple tries, they are often agreed upfront online, and often there are many delivery people bringing stuff inside the house with courtesy and customer-centric mindset, not because of terms and conditions.



agreeing date and time of deliveries

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harakka
Posts: 95
Joined: Mon Aug 10, 2009 7:10 pm

Re: agreeing date and time of deliveries

Post by harakka » Wed Apr 05, 2017 2:32 pm

If you live close to a pakettiautomaatti ("Parcel Point"), what you can do is to re-route your parcels into the automaatti instead of Posti. Apparently it doesn't work with all international parcels though.

http://www.posti.fi/private/receive/rec ... items.html

StellaS
Posts: 49
Joined: Wed Apr 04, 2012 1:53 am

Re: agreeing date and time of deliveries

Post by StellaS » Wed Apr 05, 2017 3:41 pm

Ikea has different deliveryoptions. Kadunvarsitoimitus means they bring it to the street outside your house, kotiinkuljetus that they bring it inside into your home. You get what you pay for.

maurello
Posts: 29
Joined: Sun Jan 11, 2009 1:52 pm

Re: agreeing date and time of deliveries

Post by maurello » Tue Apr 11, 2017 11:33 am

StellaS wrote:Ikea has different deliveryoptions. Kadunvarsitoimitus means they bring it to the street outside your house, kotiinkuljetus that they bring it inside into your home. You get what you pay for.
Actually we ordered door delivery since we live in a house on the ground floor. The clerk said the stuff will be delivered at our house door, but not upstairs. The delivery people though just dropped it at the main street, which is like 50m from the main door. I am not sure if this is some confusion / lost in translation effect, but we thought we paid to have it at our house door.

Moreover, the attitude of these delivery people is what left us even more shocked... They behave annoyed as if they are doing us a favor instead of having a customer-mindset, i.e. being thankful we order so they can have a job...

maurello
Posts: 29
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Re: agreeing date and time of deliveries

Post by maurello » Tue Apr 11, 2017 11:34 am

harakka wrote:If you live close to a pakettiautomaatti ("Parcel Point"), what you can do is to re-route your parcels into the automaatti instead of Posti. Apparently it doesn't work with all international parcels though.

http://www.posti.fi/private/receive/rec ... items.html
We live in Kulosaari, closest post office is Herttoniemi. It would still be quite of a hassle to collect heavy packages. I had to do that by taxi few times since it was heavy and big, i.e. impossible to carry by hand.
And you are right, it seems impossible to agree this upfront for international parcels. It looks just random how they end up being delivered here :shock:

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Piet
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Location: Finland

Re: agreeing date and time of deliveries

Post by Piet » Tue Apr 11, 2017 8:57 pm

maurello wrote:
harakka wrote:If you live close to a pakettiautomaatti ("Parcel Point"), what you can do is to re-route your parcels into the automaatti instead of Posti. Apparently it doesn't work with all international parcels though.

http://www.posti.fi/private/receive/rec ... items.html
We live in Kulosaari, closest post office is Herttoniemi. It would still be quite of a hassle to collect heavy packages. I had to do that by taxi few times since it was heavy and big, i.e. impossible to carry by hand.
And you are right, it seems impossible to agree this upfront for international parcels. It looks just random how they end up being delivered here :shock:
I order a lot at ebay, and I have had a big fight with the posti for not leaving a pickup notice at all so my packages were sent back to the sender, very bad for your buyer reputation at ebay if you have to open a case in 50% of your orders because they do not arrive. sometimes I get parcels 6 months later than the mentioned ETA when buying, in most cases there was a note from posti that they regret this parcel was dropped behind some sorting machine or whatever bulls**t they come up with.

If you moved here recently, you will find out pretty soon that eventhough the Finnish economy consists of about 80% service jobs (administrative / healthcare / police / postal services / State services like Kela / cleaning firms / repair services), the level of service in Finland is way below what someone would expect from a developed country like Finland is.

The major reason is that most people have a !"#¤% salary anyway and they have trouble paying their bills at the end of the month, and when jobless this will be no different, so there is no-one working in these jobs that actually benefits from being at work at all.

Another thing I noticed in my previous work (am retired) There is no high labour morality in this country, just look at the working hours, they start at nine, the order and find out what to do that day until eleven, then it is time for lunch which will be done in a restaurant and driving there and back is not considered (by the worker) as lunch time so they will be back at one, then they make a call to a college to ask what the standard password of their workstation was and this develops into a discussion that lasts until 2, then it is time for a coffee, so before you know it is 3 o'clock and they start to prepare for leaving home at 4, and on Friday this happens an hour earlier. so you see there is little time to actually do some work. :lol: :lol: :lol:

And guess what happens on a Monday, half of them still smell like alcohol or report sick.

Of course this is a satiric point of view / exaggerated case, but you will find a lot of truth in it if you care to observe people here in Finland closely.

In general, Service is something that was definitely not invented in Finland.
If god would give us the source code, we could change the world
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PJG
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Re: agreeing date and time of deliveries

Post by PJG » Wed Apr 12, 2017 12:00 am

I've lived in Finland for 4 years. Never had the problems mentioned except on one occasion when the delivery driver said they attempted delivery, I got annoyed and complained, only to realise the door buzzer was silenced in our apartment. :beamer:

In that time I've had over 200 deliveries from ebay, amazon and various other online shops in Europe to our home, ranging from electronics and books through to a washing machine and furniture. Never any problem.

I've spent a lot of time in Singapore. I know what you're used to there in terms of service approach and a culture of courtesy generally from businesses towards customers and consumers. It's not the same here. It's not a bad thing once you learn how things work. It's just different. It takes time to adapt your expectations.

So, accept that most parcels will not be delivered to home, going instead directly to the local post office. That's how it works here. Get a car in time, pay for a taxi, get friendly with a neighbour and ask for a lift (easier said than done). It may not be convenient or easy, but it's your problem to deal with, not Posti's failure to give you something they generally don't give to anyone!

Nobody who has enjoyed the generally superb level of customer service (and the truly great service attitude that come with it) likes how things are done here. But if there's one thing you should learn immediately, it's that any kind of hostility on your part to anyone working in service industries here is more likely to backfire than to work. People don't take confrontation well here, even when you don't mean in personally. They don't see the difference. There's no broad experience, or different past experience to lean on and it'll take a long time before service thinking really affects everyone along the line. So, ask what the rules/system/process is, then learn to adapt your own approach to fit better with it. That way, fewer surprises for you, fewer points of frustration in life.

All that is meant to help you. It's Finland. It's not Singapore. Hell, it's not like anywhere else. Deference to customers wishes is an alien way to think for many people here. They might have been told it, been instructed to show it, but it's not cultural and so it doesn't last long in the minds of service staff people in their day-to-day life.

It's very much the opposite experience in my humble opinion based on many visits to Singapore dealing with all types of suppliers, hotel, restaurant and service staff. Think of everyone here as being like a taxi driver in downtown Singapore, just before his shift change, when you tell him you don't have cash and want to pay with a Mastercard. You can fight with that driver and still get nowhere, or you can just make sure you get a blue Hyundai taxi cab instead. :wink:

riku2
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Re: agreeing date and time of deliveries

Post by riku2 » Wed Apr 12, 2017 11:15 pm

maurello wrote: However, even when at the origin DHL is used, at Finland end it always goes to Posti.
i think you are mixing up DHL express and DHL.

DHL is essentially the german post service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Post
DHL express is a business owned by them, similar to UPS, FedEx: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHL_Express

When I get parcels sent to Finland only the DHL Express ones are handled by what is known in Finland as "DHL" (yellow and red logo). Posti handle the ones sent by "DHL". The tracking numbers are separate for the DHL and DHL express parts of the organization.

For the packages that Posti handle, very few are delivered to my door (I live in the countryside). I think it depends what kind of service is paid for (about 98% of my packages are from outside Finland). For the majority the postman leaves a printout with tracking number in my letterbox and I take that the post office counter (which is now in K supermarket and open 7-21 weekdays and also sundays). Often I don't bother to wait for the printout but go to the posti online page and enter the tracking number (which is shown in aliexpress for example). If the tracking code ends in two letters (eg "CN") then it's the kind of package that the post office hold. if the tracking code is only a number then the package arrives in my letterbox.

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Oombongo
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Re: agreeing date and time of deliveries

Post by Oombongo » Thu Apr 13, 2017 7:16 am

I ordered crap load of furniture from IKEA back in July 2015 when I moved to Espoo. The delivery was done by DB Schenker and they delivered all the stuff in my home at 3rd floor.
Obviously I paid for that delivery service.

Now, if you paid for home delivery but got your stuff on street then you have a right to complain about it to IKEA, and heck can even take the case to customer ombudsman. However, the decision is gonna take time.
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DMC
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Re: agreeing date and time of deliveries

Post by DMC » Thu Apr 13, 2017 10:01 am

riku2 wrote:i think you are mixing up DHL express and DHL.
I don't know about the OP, but I had certainly not understood the distinction so thanks for explaining that. I have received items sent by "DHL", some of which have come to my home and some to the local Posti, and never understood the difference.
One thing I have noticed is that most items I have to collect from the Posti go to the Posti in one town, 27km from my home. Items sent by DHL have to be collected from another town, also 27km from my home but in a different direction. Have you any idea why that would be? I ask mainly out of curiosity as it doesn't really matter except on the odd occasion when the notification card I get in my post box doesn't say which Posti has my parcel.


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