This is going to contain all the things that piss me off about Evri, the budget package delivery service that eBay forces you to use in order to remain competitive. I will update this whenever I want to seethe about it some more.
Fake Evri Parcel Shops
There are many parcelshops on the map which don’t actually exist, you can go to several without finding one. And then you need to find one that you can use. The last time I went to a different area with a parcel the first evri shop I tried to use was fake so this seems to be standard for evri.
Intermittent Service
“Come back tomorrow? But you said that yesterday!” It’s common practice at Evri parcelshops to send you away with the parcel. Why? I don’t know exactly, but it’s annoying as hell. If you want to plan your day around being able to drop off a parcel at a predictable location – you are out of luck, evri don’t provide such a service. It seems part of the problem is that the drivers complain and don’t want to take the parcels.
Tesco Isn’t A Post Office
Due to a partnership deal of some kind a number of evri drops are inside tescos. Great, how convenient! Except the staff are store clerks, they are not posties & don’t always know all about the service. I’ve been told I can’t send an item that was within the carriage limits & that the driver might not want to take the parcel if it was above 10 kilos (the limit is 20). One time they told me to come back tomorrow and then took the parcel after I kicked up a fuss, so that looked like a collection issue.
Drivers Don’t Pick Up Parcels
One time I was asked by a parcel shop manager to leave my number in case the driver doesn’t take a parcel so I can come get it again. Literally – can we take your number in case the driver doesn’t want to take the parcel. Another one from the post office queue; apparently sometimes the driver takes a picture of the post office to prove that he has been then leaves without picking anything up. Maybe they don’t have enough vans to service all their locations.
Whatever the reason the practice of going to the location and pinging the GPS to prove that they have been there but without actually collecting or delivering is extremely common with Evri drivers, I would say it is standard operating procedure. The system must pay them per drop and the evidence of the drop is just the GPS ping so again there is an incentive to lie.
Items Go Missing
By my own experience Evri have a 3:1 lost parcel ratio vs Royal Mail. That means for every parcel RM loses, Evri loses three. This is not counting the ones which go missing without the tracking updating & then appear mysteriously weeks later.
Drivers Lie Outright That They Have Been Told Not To Collect Parcels
Much like the post office queue story, when you book a collection with Evri & you wait in all day long for the parcel to be collected the driver will walk past your place to get the GPS location on their tracking system & then lie that the parcel doesn’t need collecting or that no one is in. Then your tracking will go like this, and you have no recourse – no customer service, no callable number, nothing. No one will even talk to you about a refund. So the driver walks away, gets paid for screwing you over and you are left screaming into the void. Fuck you. I hope you fall into a canal.
No Communication Options
It is not possible to communicate with Evri by any means. Their entire system is run by a dumb chatbot which has pre programmed options & often crashes or reaches a dead end in it’s flowchart. You cannot call them, you cannot email them, you cannot chat with them, there are no physical service points anywhere. Prepare to be brickwalled.
Not Even Their Delivery Partners Know What Services They Offer
According to parcel2go, Evri do not offer the service I booked in my area. But this was only discovered after wasting a week of my time waiting for evri to collect the item which included reaching out to Evri several times to no avail – leave messages, call – no one is home. This is what parcel2go said: “when we re-book via EVRI it gives an error: Country/Postcode is not covered”
eBay simple delivery is quite good, actually
eBay abstracts away a lot of the issues you get with Evri. Having to deal with them directly is insufferable, they do not allow you to inquire about anything & no refund process is obvious. When using eBay simple delivery, it is *eBay* who refunds the screw ups, not Evri, so if you’ve only used Evri through eBay you are probably not aware of how their customer service really is.
Now imagine you’ve paid for a heavy item to be collected & you wait in all day pumping the refresh button, only to see this appear:
This is obviously a lie as I did not tell them anything, but the driver was right outside the door according to the GPS tracker – literal inches away from me. And they didn’t knock or ring. And I know the bell is working because I double checked. Well, just call them to come back – right? Wrong!
You can call and message them 100 times, no one will answer the calls or read the messages. Don’t be fooled by the “customer service” number on their web site, it goes directly to voicemail. I was so flabbergasted by this absolute joke the first time I used it that I flipped out. If I had used eBay simple delivery it abstracts all this bullshit away.
Incidentally I have seen drivers do this at parcelshops too, literally just walk past and pretend there was nothing to collect.
Maybe I Should Go Turbo Karen At Their Managers
When it gets like this I can become Turbo Karen so I went on LinkedIn to find their customer experience director & CEO to evaluate the available harassment options. Elaine Turley, Martijn de Lange, I’m looking at you. Turbo Karen will find you, don’t think you can hide behind a chatbot without employing staff. This is all part of the customer experience. Unfortunately I think this will take more than complaining – this is systemic.
Bad Customer Service Flows Cause Bad Staff Experiences Too
When your entire customer service UX is dedicated to preventing the customer from bothering anyone then by the time they get to someone they are far more likely to be mad as hell. This is part of the problem. I don’t know what the staff churn is like because I have zero visibility into the system, but I still have not been able to talk to anyone about my inquiry. I daresay plenty of people decide to unload on the driver as they are the only emanation of this company that is accessible. Tesco staff probably get it too. I’m not the only one. So the drivers do some of the emotional labour traditionally reserved for customer service operatives.
I think drivers are incentivised to lie & fail to deliver service.
I was looking into joining Evri to destroy it from the inside and so I checked out how their drivers are paid. The drivers seem to be on commission based routes so they are incentivised to take as many drops as possible whilst making those drops as easy as possible for themselves, in other words they are incentivised to not pick up parcels & lie about having checked, lie about people not being in, etc. This is what they are directly incentivised by Evri to do, this is what their commission structure does. So it seems like they are doing a good enough job of destroying all by themselves.