Package delivery

Regarding “Ring the bell” letter (Page A40, Sunday), the writer voices her puzzlement that deliveries are being made without the drivers ringing her bell to notify her of a package. “It would only take a second,” she writes.

That “second “is exactly why her drivers don’t ring. They are trying to meet internal production standards and compromise service to make those goals.

From my 39 years at a package delivery company, now retired, I can tell you that their industrial engineers have studied every motion and assigned a time allowance for that motion. The writer’s “only take a second” might be too generous an allowance for that action of ringing the bell. Let me provide some insight into why this happens.

Drivers are initially trained to make themselves known at a delivery by tapping their horn to try and create customer contact. For residential delivery they are told to announce the company name ring and rap to further make themselves known. These actions take time that employees feel they don’t have or makes them feel foolish doing them. Regardless of whether it’s FedEx or UPS, the goal that gets forgotten is to get the shipment to the customer to the customers’ satisfaction. They look at themselves as delivery drivers and not as service providers, and in many cases justify meeting their internal metrics rather than customer expectations.

In these times all frontline employees are trying to serve many masters, and sometimes any customer can feel they are the least important of those masters.