My Experience, Review and Grievances with Africa Courier Express (ACE)

21

@ercin_eksin: Are you familiar with the saying: “Customer is king?”

We all know customers are not always right, nevertheless, it is the duty of great businessman to make the customer feel right. It is the duty of the businessman to accept all “insults” from the customer as along as he feels good and continues to pay for the services you are rendering. At the end of the day, it boils down to revenue, not whether you, @ercin_eksin, or your company felt “insulted” or “abused.”

I think you need to learn humility or totally stay away from interfacing with customers in anyway. Customer relationship management seems not to be your strong point.

A growing business like yours shouldn’t do any that will result in this level of negative PR.

8 Likes
22

Yeah, I remember telling you about signing up also some weeks back.

Honestly, its not as terrible as the first provider I told you about but it has its own issues too.

Try it out for yourself though but what I write here are things I experienced and from their replies, you could see that I didn’t exaggerate the facts

23

The first time I saw this post it sounded too ridiculous to be true. I actually thought it was a cheap blackmail attempt. But from facts emanating, I think we should take this seriously. I am going to speak strictly from a business point of view.

  1. Businesses as brands have an image and sometimes this image is more important than anything else. I don’t think ACE, as it is today is doing enough to protect their image.
  2. A business that drives a customer so crazy as to write vulgar language cannot be said to be customer-centric.
  3. A business where a customer has to shout and send mails to the CEO just to get some attention is either immature or unprofessional.
  4. A business that charges the customer for every “breath” he takes (cancellation, returns etc) is simply selfish. Why is it called premium then.
  5. A business who’s policies seeks only to protect itself is simply selfish. A loss to the customer is directly or indirectly a loss to the company.
  6. In B2B business loosing one client could be a big deal.
    ACE is a relatively young business, the quicker you learn the better.
    Thanks
19 Likes
24

@tunde_kehinde @ercin_eksin

Another thing I wanted to point out is that, you guys are doing great with the technology aspect of the business but the delivery part has some issues still. Orders take too long to deliver (3-6 days averagely) and we recently had an item that took about 4 weeks to deliver.

The charges can also be better. I’m glad you acknowledged that we’re all growing businesses and we don’t need to be oversubsidizing these fees. Most deliveries within Lagos are N500 while the rest are free. The average Lagos successful delivery on ace costs about 875.

If this two can be sorted. A lot of merchants will be delighted.

Cheers guys.

1 Like
25

Thanks Jay. Great having you as a merchant and look forward to growing further.

You raise an interesting point about delivery prices and lead times on which I would like to dive deeper for the benefit of the readers on here.

  1. Re: Lead times, our Lead-times for Lagos are in general 2 to 4 working days depending on when the customer would like to receive the item. We find that ~35% of customers choose to reschedule delivery times to a time that suits them. That being said, for the majority of our customers we have lead times within 1 to 2.5 days in Lagos, 3 to 5 across Nigeria with 99% success rates for Prepaid items and 85%+ for pay-on-delivery

  2. Re: Average price. The average price of a package depends on what the merchant would like to ship, value of the item, the weight, distance and the additional services you would like from us. We have merchants shipping for as low as 510 on our Gold program and other merchants who have higher fees but request more services (ie full insurance, pick-up at their location and payments collection). Our rate card and service suite is flexible to accommodate the full spectrum of last-mile service requirements.

  3. Re: Delivery Pricing Tactics. We hold merchant discussion sessions once a month where we advise merchants to charge for delivery. What we find is the end customer is typically willing to pay up to 500 naira for delivery in Lagos (higher willingness to pay outside Lagos). With this, even in your NGN 845 case (which is not the average price), the merchant then has an effective delivery charge of NGN 345 naira for that package ($1.5 USD). Which considering the services offered (pick up from your location, real-time tracking, pay-on-delivery and last-mile) we find reasonable.

  4. Lastly, like all businesses we are not above mistakes…but what I can say is the guys and girls at ACE are hardworking and customer centric. We deliver the large majority of packages we handle reliably and on time…and for those cases when we don’t we fight like hell to fix the issue and please the customer.

Tunde

4 Likes
26

From all indications, @tunde_kehinde should be responsible for customer interactions IMHO. I don’t know his role though.

27

Truth. @tunde_kehinde tackled the issue professionally.

1 Like
28

I was gonna say so … @tunde_kehinde should handle customer issues.

Nigerians ain’t easy to deal with… That ercin guy should learn from smile customer care.

Could also be that these guys are nice to save their image

29

UPDATE!

Tunde reached out to me yesterday as regards this issue and both parties are finally on a path to resolving the problem.

2 Likes
30

Every business needs to rid itself of High Risk Clients and High Risk Employees.
Engineering this conversation is a High Risk Behavior on both ends.
So Jimi, If any of your employees in future whether they are acting in the capacity of CEO or Founder, should manhandle a client, it is okay for the client to drag them to dirt like you have done regardless of the circumstances.
Is it possible that this could not have been resolved by walking into the Office at ACE?
Well, in Nigeria face-to-face don’t work for startups because you can get to the office and you are told to send an email to someone who is standing right there. That is story for another day.

Also, let me use this opportunity to ask the merchants and ACE.
Why cant you have a “before COB” within Lagos even if it is going to cost NGN5-10,000k? Why cant we have high level premium service? I think the merchants should offer this directly because even if they get an airport cab to do the delivery, they will still earn a profit. I get to the office in the morning and the projector is broken and I need a new one in 3hrs max. I have to get into the car and loose valuable time.

31

We respect for every individual and client. We fully agree that “Customer is king” but Profanity is not. That was the only single reason that we cancelled that account which is also acknowledged by the account holder in his first post.

Who would want his/her daughter, wife/husband or son be physically or verbally abused in front of everyone? That we will stand for any given day. Jimi refused to acknowledge that was wrong before taking it to this platform but now he did so we move on.

We are more than happy to receive feedback. Thanks a lot for the feedback. At the end, we all want to create a better environment for ourselves, our community and people around us. That’s what drives us as entrepreneurs.

32

Through my 6 months use of ACE service i always had one complain or the other, right from my first delivery with them to the last i felt real pain… For each delivery done with ACE i had to budget about N750 recharge card to follow up until my orders are delivered and tell my customers to expect delivery in 7 days even though ACE assured me a 3-5 day delivery time.

The last items given to ACE for delivery took almost one month for them to deliver, i took it all easy because i had built a relationship with the customer involved and they blamed it on National Fuel Scarcity for the delay in item delivery…

On some days customers complained that their items were opened before delivery, i even had to confirm by ordering a phone from my store and having ACE deliver to me in Port Harcourt. The phone came after 3 days OPENED…

I felt real pain with these guys, there is so much wrong with their service. on a rating scale of 100, i would do them a 20/100 for service quality.

1 Like
33

Hi Daniel,

It’s Tunde here. Thanks for your feedback like the rest of the people on here. To comment on your post, 1st, whenever a merchant is unhappy, I like to dig in personally to see our history with the merchant.

From our records over the history of your account, you assigned 4 packages to us for delivery, all of which we delivered for a 100% success rate.

However, we noticed a few things with deliveries like yours.

  1. Our issue resolution channels were not clear for the customers. What have we done since then? a, simplified way to have questions answered. Merchants can can reach us easier via our hotline - 0803 901 2600 and email: customerservice@ace.ng

  2. Our client management needed more focus. We have now segmented all our merchants into specific portfolios so client managers that can spend more time 1. setting expectations for delivery and lead-times, 2. answering any questions on the services we offer and 3. Giving tailored advice to help our merchants grow their sales - our approach is; as you grow, we grow

  3. We needed a channel for a direct voice of the customer. Everyone at ACE is willing to roll up their sleeves and dig into the details. We have set up a “genius@ace.ng” email that goes directly to our issue resolution team and the CEOs office (Ercin and I directly) so we can hear direcly from our merchants. The team manning this email is tasked with solving all customer issues within 1 working day (or faster)

Like all businesses we have evolved. The phase one of our business was focused on delivery, getting the item to the customer. Now as we are scaling, we are making sure the holistic experience you have with ACE is fantastic. We say what we can do (and do it) and also inform you about what we can’t do upfront.

Any doubts send an email to genius@ace.ng and test us out!

Lastly, I can say unequivocally, we never, ever open any packages before they come to the customer. Intuitively, I would suggest we would not have such success rates if we did, as the large majority of merchants would not trust us with their deliveries (repeatedly) to their customers and majority of customers would not accept their packages if this happened.

Tunde

34

Hi @tunde_kehinde, thank you so much for your quick response Sir, if i did get this quick response from your guys when i complained of issues, i don’t think i would had to write a review like this in the first place or stopped using your service.

I am sorry Sir as the above information is wrong, items assigned to ace was more than the stated figure and i never had a 100% success rate Sir as my last order was canceled by the customer after he didn’t get item for close to a month.

I am happy to see the above solutions, i think Bernice was helpful though in handling most of those issues.

Sir, i wouldn’t say this if i am not sure and certainly not in a public place as this. I complained of this particular issue but i was told the same thing by members of your team…

My first delivery to Abuja, the customer complained that her laptop was opened, i took a delivery of a phone and it came opened, the last order of a laptop which was to Delta State that was unfortunately canceled by the customer, i had to pick up from your YABA hub. I complained also that that laptop was opened from beneath. Because of this, i had to sell this laptop for way below the price we purchased it.

Thank You

35

Hi Daniel,

As always, thanks for the feedback. We can agree to disagree on certain points you’ve mentioned but I am glad we are having the conversation.

You can always drop me a line at genius@ace.ng

Look forward to partnering more in the future.

Tunde

1 Like
36

Thank you so much anyways… I am happy to have read from you…

37

I can see that Ercin is playing the “emotional card” well.

Here is my version:

Who would want his/her daughter, wife/husband to be denied of their livelihood?

I take my business seriously and I know my customers well. I do not take them for granted. Their business puts food on my table. I don’t run a 9-5. This is my livelihood. When they complain about my delivery, I have to complain to you because that is what I pay for.

Plus we all know that delivery is a fundamental part of any Ecommerce business. People pay you for your items, you don’t deliver, it damages your reputation. Even when they order without paying, if you don’t deliver, it damages your reputation. We all have preferences between the top two online stores in Nigeria and 9 out of 10 times, we chose one over the other due to the satisfaction that we have gotten from the item displayed to what/when it was delivered.

You can’t shut down my business for a week and expect me to be happy about it. Its terrible what I went through this week because I sent a mail with the title “I’m sick of your b****hit”

That was the one sentence that made both MD’s suspend my account.

I get it that you have a stand against profanity and I apologized for it immediately here but you could have gotten your point across the moment I sent that email and at the same time, solve my problem.

I mailed you because I had a problem - not to insult you. I mailed you because I was frustrated and I had a problem. It was the 6th issue in 3weeks of doing business with you.

I got to your hub before 8am that morning when I dropped off the orders. I had other things to do, but this client wanted it delivered asap, so I dropped it off early, hoping that ACE would have it sorted before Monday morning but it wasn’t done and I complained about this bitterly that night.

You ignored my problem and suspended my account, do you know painful that was?

For you to pay for a service, you complain and you get shut down?
For you to send orders to a courier company that you have paid, only for them to refuse to deliver your order?

This week was meant to be eventful - first week after workers got paid (a couple of customers had shifted their orders to Sept.), but I couldn’t conduct any serious business thanks to your “executive decision”.

I had paid ACE more money a couple of days before this incident and I was stuck when this happened. I’m still stuck!
You know why?

Because I didn’t for once, ever imagine that you had the power to suspend my account by sending just “one email”.

I don’t have free/extra delivery money to throw around because this was practically impossible until Tuesday when you shut me down. The agreement I signed with you, didn’t state that. There is a section for cancellation and procedure for it.

Ercin, I’m not an Employee of ACE. I’m your partner or Merchant and my relationship with you is based on an agreement not some company policy. You can’t take an “executive decision” on my account, if such is not stated in our agreement. If such was stated there, i wouldn’t have complained.

Do you know how insecure a Merchant would feel, if he/she knew that the MD’s of ACE can just wake up tomorrow and suspend your account just because you said or didn’t say something?

But, I apologized for the email the moment you stressed it here - if I’m wrong, I admit it. No question asked. We all want to build better lives for our loved ones and leave a legacy.

I desperately want to move on from all of this because it isn’t getting me anywhere. Right now, we are just going in circles pointing accusing fingers.

11 Likes
38

I have dragged them to the dirt by posting it here or by talking about what they did to me?

Which one is it?

39

you just spewed thrash.

42

Can I know how many packages do you guys deliver daily on the average?