Company Response
Paul Wilson from
Shippingmasters LLC Submitted this response.
Response Date: 10/20/2017 7:15:00 PM
At Shippingmasters, we strive to be transparent and provide excellent customer service to every customer who contacts us.. We did book a motorcycle shipment for customer S Speet and referred him to the shipper he noted for the scheduling and transport of his motorcycle. As it turned out, he canceled his shipment and requested a refund of our Shippingmasters down payment broker fee. We issued him a full refund of our fee that same day and sent him a refund receipt via email. We normally have a $40 processing fee on all canceled shipments, but we waived this fee in his case. Additionally, we apologized to customer S Speet and contacted the shipper for a full review of the incident and to develop an action plan to prevent this from happening again in the future. All of this was prior to getting a statement from the shippers driver about the incident.
Additional information regarding this shipment:
Shippingmasters is a licensed and bonded motor carrier broker. We do not have trucks and drivers. We refer our customers to shippers that schedule and transport motorcycles with their trucks and drivers. Customer S Speet submitted a shipping quote request through our Shippingmasters.com website quote request form on 10/01/2017 to ship a motorcycle from AZ to NC. We provided the customer with a few different shipping options to consider. The customer booked the motorcycle shipment through Shippingmasters on 10/03/2017. In order for the customer to submit his quote request on our website quote request form he was required to agree to the Shippingmasters terms of use. In our terms of use we note that "You and/or your points of contact will need to be flexible with the pick up and delivery days and times." Additionally, our email quote that we sent to the customer up-front prior to booking his shipment also spelled out this same requirement in the details of the quote.
On 10/05/2017 the customer contacted us with a concern about the pick up of the bike the following day on 10/06/2017. He stated the the shippers driver wanted to pick up the bike the following afternoon but his origin point of contact in AZ (his son) was unavailable to meet the driver until after 4pm. The customer did not mention this time frame restriction to us when he booked his shipment. The driver told his son and the customer he could not wait all afternoon at the pick up location for his son to get off work in order to pick up the bike.
We told the customer we would check to see when the shippers next truck/driver would be in the pick up area and/or we could refer him to a different shipper we had quoted. We contacted the original shipper and tried to get the drivers inputs on what happened. We could not get the drivers inputs right away since he was on the road. Customer S Speet then said he did not want to use this company nor any other companies we could refer him to. At that point he asked for a full refund of the Shippingmasters $70 down payment broker fee, which we gave him.
Each shipper we refer our customers to has their own refund policy for the balance of the shipping fees they collect directly from the customer. The Shippingmasters terms of use contains the following statement and so does our email quote - "The shipper we refer you to might have a separate refund policy, please check with the shipper for their refund policy." The shipper we referred the customer to does have their own refund policy. Additionally, they do have an attempted pick up fee if the customer is not available for pick up. The customer filled out and signed the shippers booking contract form that contains detailed information on their cancellation fee ($100) and their attempted pick up fee ($250). Through our intervention, we were able to influence the shipper to waive the $250 attempted pick up fee.
To be fair and just, we feel it is our obligation to provide the shippers side of this story per their customer service managers comments as follows. "We spoke with our driver and he provided a significantly different account of how his conversation went with the customer's son and the customer. Our driver said the customers son was very short with him and was completely inflexible and unwilling to meet the driver earlier in the day. The customer's son was not willing to ask someone else to meet the driver earlier for pick up either. Our driver said the customer's son and the customer both told the driver he needed to sit in front of the sons house until the son came home from work in order to pick up the bike. Additionally, our driver said the customer was verbally aggressive toward him when they spoke about the pick up of the motorcycle and hung up on the driver twice. As it turned out, the driver finished his other stops at about 3:30pm that day and called the customer's son back to see if he still wanted the bike picked up after 4pm. The customer's son told the driver that they canceled the shipment and hung up on the driver."
It appears customer S Speet and his son did not read or fully understand the requirement to be flexible with the pick up day and time. We will review our processes and those of the shipper and attempt to make this requirement even more clear in the future.