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Everybody has complaints about their employer, no matter how small and on a daily basis I hear many from my co-workers, but for me personally, I love FedEx. Nothing is perfect, things get lost and don't make deadline, but with a goal of 100% all the time, of course you're going to have some failures. At the end of the day we care about our customers. The story below was on our inter-company homepage this morning. It made me smile because I can completely understand the daunting task these Ops Mgrs were tasked with. Seriously, cut me, I bleed Purple.
A Lost Passport is Retrieved in the Nick of Time
If you have ever spent months planning an expensive overseas cruise only to realize at the very last minute it was all about to blow up in your face because your passport was missing, you will relate with this story.
For the last couple of years FedEx Express has handled the luggage pickups and deliveries for elite vacationers who travel on the Carnival family of cruise ships, which include Princess, Holland America and Seabourn. Luggage is picked up via FedEx 2Day® from around the United States and Canada a week before the cruise begins and delivered to the port of departure. After each cruise, the luggage is returned to the vacationers' homes via FedEx Home Delivery.
FedEx started providing this service in 2008, initially with Holland America only. It all began with an incident that took place on Christmas Eve 2007. That was when Holland's previous luggage broker inconceivably lost hundreds of pieces of luggage. FedEx, which was doing a minimal amount of business with Holland at the time, received a frantic call from the cruise liner pleading desperately for help. Without hesitation, FedEx was able to locate all of the luggage in the other provider's network, retrieve it, and get it where it needed to be.
FedEx Services Worldwide account manager Gary Solomon noted that the luggage lost by the previous broker belonged to experienced and demanding vacationers who were about to embark on cruises that could be lost anywhere from two to four months. Solomon also observed that the damage to Holland's reputation would be significant.
Holland was so impressed that they went to their parent company, Carnival, and convinced them to extend the baggage service to Carnival's entire family of cruise lines.
Fast forward to this past December when FedEx pushed the bar to new heights on what it means to exceed a customer's expectations.
During the 2009 Christmas holiday season, the FedEx Express station in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was tasked with receiving luggage for three cruise ships between Dec. 28 and Dec. 30, which was quite rare. The luggage arrived from locations all over the U.S. and Canada and was consolidated and stored on the back of 53-foot trailers.
On the afternoon of Dec. 30, Alan Slakman, senior manager at the FedEx Express HWOA station in Fort Lauderdale, received an e-mail from Holland America stating that one of their guests just phoned and was crying because she "thinks" she left her passport in the pocket of one of the pieces of luggage. Her cruise was due to depart from Fort Lauderdale on Jan. 5. Slakman and his team had just loaded two trailers that same morning with 1,500 pieces of luggage from nearly 1,000 residences. The luggage in question could conceivably be at the very back of one of the trailers, assuming that the missing passport was actually in the luggage at all. With most of the volume for that day completed, Alan's crew had already left for the day.
"My first reaction was to take a big gulp as I paused and thought of those two 53-foot trailers packed solid with luggage from top to bottom, back to front, pressed right up to the rear door," Slakman recalled. "But right after that, I thought how I'd feel if I were in that woman's shoes. And then I thought, 'after all this is what we do here at FedEx.' Then I just got started."
Slakman called Holland America to get the tracking numbers and brief descriptions of the two suitcases. He was then able to narrow the search down to one trailer. With the help of his two operations managers, Chris Christofi and Greg Unks, Slakman began digging through a wall of bags weighing up to 100 pounds each. About 90 minutes later, having gone through 600 bags, they found the two they were looking for. The question was: Are the passports actually inside either of them?
Slakman called the representative from Holland America to come over and personally open the suitcases. Once she got permission from the owners, she arrived late in the afternoon and found the passports right where they were said to be.
"I think the elation that Holland America rep. displayed at that final moment could only have been surpassed by the elation of the lady who owned the passport once she got the good news," Slakman said.
And when you live the Purple Promise, it tends to attract attention. Once word of this rescue got out, not only did Carnival Cruise Lines go into negotiations to mainstream this luggage service by making it available to all its vacationers, another cruise line heard about the yeoman's efforts of FedEx and began knocking on the door to discuss FedEx providing a similar service for them.
Congratulations to the entire sales and operations team in Fort Lauderdale, as well as the FedEx Solutions team headed by Allen Jones.
Edward Guiragos
Senior Communications Specialist
FedEx Services
From left to right: Sr. Manager Alan Slakman and Operations Managers Chris Christofi and Greg Unks of HWOA station in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in the midst of their search for a lost passport.Corporatewide Communications