Big Brown Blows Billing

Rule number one: if you expect to collect a bill, you must be able to defend it and document it.

While that is elementary, it seems a large international company like UPS has a problem with the concept. A vendor to a company I know, shipped some of its products and paid the UPS freight bill in advance. $339.00. The company receiving the product is open for business Monday through Friday from as early as 7:30 in the morning until sometime after 5 except on Fridays when they close around 4:00 so naturally UPS attempted to deliver sometime after 4:00 on the one day they close early. They did make the delivery during normal hours the following week and charged the receiving business $690.00. This happened last December. Since then, the company has been trying to get a clarification of the bill. It doesn’t seem right, so UPS has been asked to explain how after they’ve already received $339.00 they can justify demanding another $690.00.

The office manager called UPS on the 8th of December, asking for an explanation. Instead, she was sent another copy of the invoice. So, she called for the UPS rep on December 10th and left a message. She left another message on the 12th, the 31st and again on the 29th of January. No one called her back. UPS did not however, stop sending past due notices with increasing threats of legal action. Finally on the 6th of February, the office manager got a hold of someone who… sent another copy of the invoice. On the 2nd of March, the office manager sent a letter to a UPS office in Richmond. Again, there was no response.

On the 21st of April the company got a “Formal Notification” letter. Included was a phone number. The office manager called and left a message for the account manager. She left another message on the 24th. As of May 5th, she’s had no reply to her inquiries. Clearly, UPS feels, by way of their actions, that they are not required to discuss a bill with a customer.

My advice to the company is: do not spend any more time or effort with it. UPS gave up their legitimate claim to the bill when they failed to respond to the inquiries. I can imagine UPS having an enormous number of disputed charges and their current system for handling customer complaints has failed. They are not going to sue, they would not win if they did, so they’re left with not accepting any deliveries or pick ups or turning the claim over to a collection agency. A collection agency will drop the claim like a hot potato once they’re told of the circumstances. And should they restrict service, well the firestorm will surely bring someone to the forefront to deal with it.

The moral of the story is: always be able to defend a bill. If it’s wrong, fix it. If it’s correct, prove it to whoever is asking. If the amount is too small to bother with, get rid of it without delay. You’ll make more friends that way and customers will come to rely on the bills. When customers believe the bill is accurate, they’ll pay it. UPS could be flushing enormous amounts of money down the drain simply by ignoring through inefficiency legitimate charges. Someone has decided it’s makes more economic sense to under staff the customer service / billing area than to beef it up, make it reliable, and collect more.

This is where Strategic Credit Management Solutions can help. We’ve seen lots of billing systems and customer service programs. We can see what you have, find what’s making it work poorly and make the recommendations that will take care of the problem. We can assist in the implementation and the training. We’ll even follow up later to check on how things are working. It beats flushing your bills down the toilet.

Check out our website at http://powerscredit.com/. You can e-mail us at patrickpowers@sbcglobal.com. Your comments are welcome.