Here’s a first. Yesterday I needed to pay a Fedex bill and had lost the original invoice. I had the second sheet with the backup detail but there was no mailing address on it. Their return envelope just has a clear window for the address to show through, and unlike most remittance envelopes it was not preprinted with the bar code for the ZIP code, so that was no help.
So I went on fedex.com and tried “contact us” and searched for “mailing address” and “pay bill by mail”. No luck. So I called the 800 number, pushed 0 for an operator, told her I’d lost the address and needed it to pay the bill. She says “I’ll get that for you” and puts me on hold—for 5 minutes! By now I’ve done a search on Google and found a mailing address so I hang up.
How many layers of incompetence are at work here? The invoice printing people, the envelope printing department, the web folks, the telephone staff… not one had seen fit to solve a problem that must come up many times each day. It’s their money, folks, I wanted to send it to them!
Ask your payables department about Fedex and they’ll probably have a story like this. Every customer does. Good thing they’re better at shipping packages than at managing their own customer accounts.