DHL - Epic Fail Again

Most postal addresses in Germany consist of the name of the recipient, a street name and house number, a zip code and city/town. In my personal case, that's it. I have a jumbo mailbox clearly marked with my name on a fairly indestructible (supposedly vandalism-safe) nameplate, a house number that's clearly visible from a car passing by on the street, and a street in a fairly central location of my hometown. Nothing that would ever make anybody suspect there could be delivery problems with this address.

Well, there are none - at least for Hermes, DPD, UPS, Fedex, GLS, TNT and a few other services occasionally delivering parcels to my address. There are major problems only with the poor guys from DHL. It seems I do not live in house number 14 but in 13 3/4 - and this is invisible to the muggles employed by DHL. Even now that DHL has switched for my town from the abominable "service partners" (read: unwilling, underpayed sub-contractors who have to deliver large numbers of DHL parcels per day, so they are busy well beyond the allocated working time) to DHL's own delivery staff, the situation has not really changed. While service partners usually have their trouble with reading and speaking German, DHL staff typically is fluent in German. So, I now can't even blame it on linguistic deficiencies.

An example: an order of March 21st should have arrived on March 24th... far from it, though. After seeing the parcel "loaded onto the delivery vehicle" at 09:47 or so on that Saturday, March 24th, the next scan status I saw on the DHL tracing website was of 13:18 and read "building/house number is unknown". It also said, this item would now be subject to an address check. The address check happened over the following days earlier this week - and also failed. Meanwhile, the parcel was returned to the sender without me having any means of telling DHL that I do exist at this address. Of course, curious as I am, I requested a photo of the address label from the original sender, which I luckily got. There, my address was clearly and correctly printed, and an additional, orange label said that the address check was performed and confirmed the delivery person's statement, i.e., "address unknown". Wow, great job!

So, just to get this straight: while everything was addressed correctly and legibly, first, the delivery person failed to recognize the address (or claimed that), then the address check (which seemed to be at least documented on the orange label by another human) also failed. I wonder what an "address check" really comprises? The hotline of DHL was equally surprised to hear that (yes, they are always surprised to hear something goes wrong in the perfect DHL world) and happily announced to me that the sender would then be entitled to a free re-sending of that parcel. Well, what if the second delivery attempt also fails for the same reason? In fact, out of the three parcels I ordered from this particular online shop in Hamburg over the last four months, all had delivery problems.

The quite creative hotline also suggested that

(1) maybe I had only recently moved to this address (nope, I have been living there for almost 15 years now)

(2) maybe this is a tiny street hard to find (nope, it's a district road from the central roundabout of this town)

(3) maybe my house number is not visible from the street (two digits, clearly visible, not even on the house, but on the wall next to the mailbox)

(4) maybe the address label was printed with an incorrect address (that I have been able to check myself, nope - no mistake)

(5) maybe I have never received any DHL parcels there before (nope, plenty arriving - some fail, though - the last successful DHL delivery was only one week ago)

After exhausting the possibilities, the hotline expressed the wish to end this conversation as the only one who should inquire about this case is in fact the sender, not I as the recipient. However, if the delivery person and the address check person both agree my address is unknown, something very elementary must be wrong, so I did file a complaint. Based on previous experiences, I will not expect to get any other feedback than "something went wrong" if I check again with DHL in a couple of weeks or so regarding the status of this complaint. Maybe I'll even get one of these letters saying "we're sorry to hear that you are not happy with our service" - no real apology or even acknowledgement of something having gone wrong. They never do that.

An interesting side-note: in the last quarter of 2017, I subscribed to Amazon Prime, mostly to get faster delivery of parcels for Christmas. It's quite funny to see that all parcels sent via Amazon Prime really reached my address without any problems. The label says "DHL PRIO". Wait a second, the other label only said "DHL Paket", no PRIO. The service description for "DHL PRIO" on dhl.de reads "reliablility & speed through delivery on the next working day" and "money back in case of delivery delays". Can it be that the plain parcel product of DHL is a "yah, we'll try to do our best to deliver - it may work" offer, while the real thing you'd expect is called "PRIO" or "premium" and really delivers? I am not surprised Amazon is now trying out their own delivery logistics to replace DHL and other partners.

In any case, I continue to recommend to anybody not to use DHL if there are any other reasonable options available. Reliability is not their strength at all.

PS: And in case DHL should choose to point out the vast number of parcels they handle correctly everyday, and the occasional, few, random losses with such volumes, I have to add that I acknowledge and appreciate their achievements, and could readily accept a randomness of losses hitting me every now and then. Given the miniscule probablility of losses, they would affect me only very rarely. This effect (which not only occurs for me but also numerous other colleagues as I found out), however, is far too frequent and happens in a too systematic way to be really random.