Singpost's amazingly terrible policies and customer service

Many of you would have ordered from amazon before, for those of you who have not i suggest you buckle up and prepare for a ride, my experience with ordering from amazon has been amazing, the only issue is when they decide to use singpost as their local delivery partner.

Disclaimer, this story is my personal experience with singpost and its officers , you may have better luck than me in dealing with them.

Basically my story starts from amazon, i ordered a hard disk at a very cheap price during some holiday season, so i waited for it to arrive . The thing is it didnt, so i went to amazon and they decided to send me another one as a replacement and i thought everything would be fine this time, double checked my address and everything seemed to be in place, except it's not.

So i waited till the quoted arrival date and then i checked my mail box.. nothing was there. so i proceeded to ask amazon again, they asked me to wait for about 10 days because there may have been delays so i said okay  i will since they had been so nice to send me a replacement without much hassle.

So i waited. 10 days later i checked my mail box again, nothing was in it.. this time i was pretty frustrated so i asked amazon again. Do note that before i asked amazon i had used their tracking system to track my item, the problem is the tracking system broke down along the way. what do i mean?

i will provide an concrete example now.

Basically iParcel was amazon's export partner, they bring the parcel from amazon to singapore then iparcel proceeds to hand singpost the parcel and singpost is supposed to send it to me.

The tracking all the way to iParcel was smooth i got regular updates from amazon about where my parcel was and it was amazing

As you can see the tracking works very well until singpost started to handle it. Although it writes that delivery had been attempted, i saw no such notification on my door nor on in my letter box. I had no idea of what time they had intended to deliver and thus i was probably not at home when they delivered, after all they had not even notified me to stay at home and wait or arrange someone to receive it for me, singpost had absolutely no communication at all. 

That was fail #1 

The second fail came when i tried to trace the package .

so amazon told me that i-parcel was the carrier so i headed over to i-parcel's website to track my item using the code given to me 

try it out yourself , tracking number is AEIRIC20001268711 on this website https://tracking.i-parcel.com/Home/Index?trackingnumber=INVALID

See the link in orange where they generated the sing post tracking number? 

clicking on it links to SPEEDPOST's website

as you can see in the picture above.

So i did what any normal person would do, i clicked on the bright orange link and tried to use the code given to me to track

Guess what? the code didnt work.

So i then decided to contact i-Parcel to ask them as i figured that they  had given me a wrong code, 

after an email i finally figured out that the code actually only works on SINGPOST's website.. 

so i thought, okay fine ill track my code using the singpost website .. keep in mind this was 10 days AFTER the advised delivery date..

So yesterday 11/2/2015 i finally found out that my parcel was with WOODLANDS POST OFFICE

so i tried to ask for a redelivery but alas the form asked me for some strange beat number that i had no way of knowing 

So i though okay nevermind, since the item is nearby at the post office , i could just go down and collect it tomorrow. 

So i decided to go down to the post office and collect it today 12/2/2015.

Then after queueing for a very long time i spoke to one of the staff at the counter who then proceeded to track my item using their system and informed me that my item was no longer at the woodlands post office as of today and it had been processed to be sent back to the sender as of yesterday 11/2/2015

I checked the website myself to be sure .. and to my horror it really was processing to be sent back.. 

The counter staff then told me about singpost's policy of sending items back if they have not been collected in 12 days.. I had not been informed of this AT ALL. they had not sent me any emails or any reminders to collect my item and my tracking code had not worked until i did alot of digging around and asking different companies to realise how to make it work.

In my humble opinion singpost had screwed up, they did not send out any reminders at all, and had decided without my consent to return the item although they clearly had my contact details from amazon , they had my address and could probably have left a letter or two , they're a mail company too!.

So  i proceeded to ask about my options , the counter staff told me there was nothing she could do and she asked me to call their hotline 1605... so singpost just told me their their counter staff at their post office could do NOTHING for a customer who had went all the way to the post office to collect his parcel and received such news. 

Fine. i decided to leave the queue and went outside the post office to make the call..

i called 1605 followed through the phone menu .. inputted my information and then .. nothing. the phone menu was not functional it broke down into gibberish, press 1 for 28913 press for 237238 press 3 for 42423 

out of desperation i pressed 1 then they said sorry that service is not available please call again, so i called again, and again, the result was not any different.

At this juncture i was really really frustrated and almost ready to throw in the towel..

i decided to queue once again and asked the counter staff for help, luckily they helped me get through to a customer service rep using a short cut

Here's the short cut incase any one of you need to contact them urgently,

dial 1605, then press 1 and 0, ignore any other options, this is the only way i have found to be functional enough to lead to a customer service officer, the other options led me to some broken phone menu that cuts itself off for no reason.

So i talked to the rep and she once again told me that my item was being returned...

BUT i could try to get them to retrieve my item BEFORE they sent it .. at a cost of $21.40

i balked at the price and tried to negotiate, i told her about this entire story but she refused to budge and thus i told her to email me the details so i could consider it after some time.

below is the email she sent me

At my wits end i decided to ask amazon for help.

Amazon was amazing in this regard, i told them about the situation and they advised me to ask singpost to retrieve the item and they would refund me the fees that singpost had demanded.

Amazon had not been responsible for situation but they had been so kind to offer their assistance so freely, for that i thank them.

So i said sure, okay and then i tried to called singpost to arrange for them to retrieve the item.

i tried to ask them to redirect me to the previous customer service rep that had attended to me an hour before but they refused , so i once again had to repeat my story  again, at this juncture i had repeated my story to singpost employees about 3 times already, it is really annoying that the rep did not read the email that her colleague had sent me although i told her to read it.

She then proceeded to tell me that once again that i would need to pay and i said okay,

then she dropped a bombshell on me.

Ontop of paying, i would have to go the the singpost post centre post office located at eunos road personally to pay and obtain my item..

So let me get this straight, i need to head down all the way to eunos road , pay them $21.40 , then bring the parcel home myself?

What exactly am i paying such a high price for? although amazon had promised to refund me, if they had not , it would have been my own $21.40 just for them to find my item and leave it at the far off eunos road post centre for me to self-collect!? 

I tried to negotiate with the customer service rep and asked for my item to be delivered at least to my nearby postal office but she firmly declined, citing company policy saying 'every one who retrieves items must go to the postal office to collect'...

This was ridiculous, but because amazon had already promised to refund me i couldnt exactly cancel retrieval process, so here i am writing this complaint.. 

will be heading down to singapore postal office soon to pay singpost their $21.40 just to self collect because they failed to deliver properly or notify me properly before sending the item back without any notifications or communication at all..

Singpost has been horrible i will avoid it at all costs in the future if i am able to... 

i-parcel please fix the orange link on your website so that other customers may properly track their item.. 

and to amazon, thank you for being amaz-ing in your customer support .

Singpost, your're a national postal service please brush up on your customer support, you bring shame to the singapore brand...

update, tried calling them again and this time they seem more professional and willing to help , we'd see where this goes..