Open Letter To DHL CEO

DHL Executive Desk

1210 S. Pine Island Road, 5th Floor

Plantation, Florida 33032

United States

October 17 2014

Dear Mr. Allen, our company has been an authorized DHL shipping center since 2007 and we enjoyed the reliability of your service, your brand helped grow our company and our loyal clients come to rely on your on-time delivery worldwide.

Recently, our account 8021xxxxx was put on credit hold without notice for a small balance that was overdue in matter of days not months. This premature billing action caused major disruption to service for us and for our clients as our system suddenly stopped working and packages were place on hold in The Boston terminal.  We finally realized that DHL has put us on credit hold because we couldn’t even log into the DHL-USA.com to check on account status or even pay outstanding bills.

DHL reviews its DAS as partners and this is not the right way to disrupt your partner’s business day to day operation without notice or cooperation, furthermore DHL billing decided to take an additional 48 Hrs to remove the hold. We continue to hear about other horror stories involving your billing department that may be costing you money. In contrast with FedEx, we do twice the volume with them and in the course of doing business with them since 2006, we were never shut off or place on credit hold. We trust them 100%, their billing system is 99.9% accurate and they bill us on a credit card that we have on file with them.

The issue we run into with DHL is that billing is often not accurate, the staff we deal with changes every month and the competence level is often in question. You require 15 Day net pay while all our bills are Net 30 because our business accounts can sometimes take 45 days to pay us. But we work with our client and we never shut them off without any notice or opportunity to fix the issue. Let’s face it who is perfect these days? We all have paid an invoice late one time or the other.

DHL BILLING DEPARTMENT STINKS

Great customer service as defined and delivered by Amazon.com the leading world class online retailer is to exceed customer’s expectation so when things go wrong they own up to them and fix the issue along with an apology. I am not expecting you to apologize for our failure to pay your bills within 15 Days, but I do expect your Billing department to at least notify us by phone or mail and give us a chance to pay the bills and not to rush to putting us on credit hold.

DHL action can have major impact on timely deliveries of shipments, people are scraping every dollar and cent to ship family gifts, legal documents and we built a reputation to do right by them no matter what. That is why when I saw that this gift to India (Waybill: 187336xx3) was still on hold 24 Hrs after we paid all invoices, I called the Boston office and spoke to Karen who assured me that the shipment will be removed from hold and leave Boston 10/16/2014. To my disappointment this shipment was still sitting in Boston for no reason and now we have to take it back and reroute it using FedEx.

In summary, DHL suffered some major setbacks during recent years but we stuck by you, defended you to our customers, sold your services and posted your marketing signage on major roadways in Lowell MA and to be treated as a new client and be rushed to shut off is not appreciated. We are not a 30 day old account, we not a home office; we are not a fly-by-night online store. We are a brick and mortar store, a well-established company with 5 star ratings on all major review boards like Yelp, Google and Angieslist.com. Proud to have established A Credit Rating by the Dunn and Brad Street, a third party credit Evaluation Company.

I wrote this letter to tell you thank you for the years of service and to tell you that this world is not perfect, we are not perfect neither and we expect our vendors to show us some courtesy and work with us instead of treating as dead-beats. Your billing department continues to be a sore spot and in need of major rehab. I hope that this feedback won’t fall on deaf ears and looking forward to your response.

Regards,

Hanson