For the most part I find forwarder/courier sales calls to be useless. The sales staff are nice and pleasant and reassuring right up until something goes wrong. Then they don't call back or prove to have to no ability to rectify what has gone wrong.
To be fair, their ineffectiveness isn't all their fault. It's hard to rehabilitate freight once it's gone bad. There are third, fourth, fifth, even sixth parties involved and the forwarder rarely has any direct control over what a steamship line, union, or a rail yard does.
But they seem to have difficulty controlling things they should be able to impact. Like their own staff and processes. Ocean department not following the instructions I gave them? Don't expect any help from the salesperson. Accounting trying to collect money as if I am a turnip and they want blood? The salesperson won't know anything about it. Their job is to look good, smile nice, pass out free pens and pay for the occasional lunch while pretending their company is perfect. That's it. That's all they do.
Are there exceptions to this? I would hope so, but I haven't met them yet.
So I am always leery of forwarder sales calls. They all want to meet me, shake my hand, look me square in the eye, and then disappear the second somebody bungles my freight.
I recently had severe accounting issues with a major courier, let's call them FedUp. Their accounting department literally hounded me, blitzing me with bills in quintuplicate and phone calls. 80% of the time they were trying to collect on bills I'd already paid--I was doing their work for them, reconciling their internal acounts because for whatever reason they could not manage it themselves. Yet despite blatant evidence of their flawed process, this company still threatened to close my account because I was 'past due.'
I don't respond well to threats based on someone else's incompetence.
I informed the sales reps that I didn't have time to be their accountant and that they needed to figure out what the root cause was on their end and fix it a.s.a.p. Their response? Let's do lunch. I tried again, but all I ever got were vague promises to take me to lunch.
I didn't want to go to lunch. I didn't need another notepad/pen/stuffed animal/widget with logo. I wanted to fix the problem and move on to more pressing priorities.
They 'lunched' themselves right out of my business and I've since switched to another carrier.
Don't waste my time. Not when there are hungry competitors out there just waiting for a chance to prove themselves worthy of my business.
(Next time: Developing a relationship with a new forwarder. How to discern who is ready and willing to handle your freight.)
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