Ok, I’ve gotten the disks all shipped out and the RMA status finally was updated to show processing complete.

I’ve got a Seagate tracking number. Excellent. I know where my disks are. I’ve no idea what WD is doing with my disks.

We had a studio assignment outside so off we went and during the three hours, UPS arrived and was not able to deliver. They had the disks from Seagate. Whoops. No biggie. It was Thursday. UPS promised to deliver the next day. Awesome. We had lots to complete on Friday so we’d be mostly in.

The weakest link

Friday morning came. UPS’ website showed an exception. No further updates were forthcoming from UPS.

At 11am, Citylink Courier (a local Malaysian courier company) rang the bell. Unexpectedly, I got the WD disks back. Wow. They website wasn’t updated, I had no notification of shipping or status. But they delivered. Awesome.

Buoyed by this positive development, I held up hopes that UPS would show up as well and it will really make our day as I could put the disks to tests over the weekend before committing them into one of our test or work-in-progress servers. We don’t use re-certified disks in any mission critical systems.

Unfortunately, it was not to be.

UPS never showed up.

I called them and they promised Saturday delivery.

Nope. Nada. Zip. Nothing.

Website kept showing delivery exception, re-deliver the next day which was Friday. Called them Saturday and they promised to call me back. Sunday came without a call from UPS.

Called UPS Monday morning. Said they’ll redeliver and call me back to confirm. No call. Nothing. Called them a couple of times and the call center didn’t seem to be authorized to change the delivery address. That week was bad for the studio so I need to have the delivery shifted to the design studio instead. Escalated via Twitter and social media channels.no go. Status now went back to Exception.

Tuesday came. Called again and finally managed to get the address changed. UPS said that the change requires one working day. Fine.

Wednesday still no changes to the tracking website.

Thursday finally saw the UPS guy at 4pm. One full week later from the original delivery date.

What a waste of effort and time on my part.

Score: Western Digital. No matter how good your entire process, the final link to the customer can break that experience.

Yeah, UPS screwed up. But Seagate chose them so, unfortunately, to a customer, it’s Seagate that screwed up. I will have to add here that I’ve never had good experience with UPS in Malaysia. They were decent in the US but over here, they were horrible. In fact, I’m more impressed with the local postage services’ courier options (Poslaju) than UPS. If I need something fast and reliable, I’ll go with FedEx. On a smaller budget, I’ll get DHL. UPS? Never on my own money.