Crown Relocation Sucks

At first, we were pretty happy that Melanie’s new company in Singapore selected, what we thought, was a reputable relocation company with a “Customer-Focused Approach”.  Crown Relocations is a company both of us have heard of, and while we haven’t used them before (my long distance moves in the past were usually handled by Santa Fe), we thought it would be a relatively painful process.  The Beijing side of the relocation generally went without a hitch.  The Beijing-based staff were very helpful and courteous and seemed to genuinely want to accommodate our realistic needs. The folks in Singapore, however, don’t seem to be interested in accommodating our, what we believe are, realistic needs.  First, I quote from their Website (2) (3) some of Crown’s customer-focused goals:

1. Maintaining a professionally attractive organizational culture is one of the core philosophies of the Crown Worldwide Group
2. Crown is committed to delivering high quality service seamlessly and remaining focused on continuous quality improvement
3. …guarantees that relocation professionals will always be informed and their employees will quickly settle-in and become productive in their new working environment

Melanie gets a call yesterday (Wed) from the Crown people in Singapore saying our shipment has already arrived in Singapore.  Wow, only 4 weeks! The guys in Beijing estimated 6 weeks. Since Mel has been busy working since she arrived on the 7th of July and I just arrived 3 days ago on the 27th, we haven’t had a whole lot of time to find an apartment. So, time to kick apartment search into high gear! Any way, Melanie was in Taiwan on a short business trip until last night, but the Crown folks needed her passport to provide a copy of her China visa to Singapore Customs to prevent being charged 3% import tax. When I told the guy who called yesterday Melanie would arrive late Wednesday night and wouldn’t be able to handle this until Thursday (today), he seemed a bit concerned and proceeded to ask me if I could reach her somehow to expedite the visa. I said no (knowing she was busy in Taiwan and didn’t need this to deal with). Mel returns to Singapore and calls Crown today.  They say they need the Chinese visa copy and that the container has essentially cleared customs.  He asked for a delivery address.  Well, we don’t really have one yet. (no apartment!) And it’s not possible to have everything delivered to her aunt’s place where we’re staying now. (that’s about 18 cubic meters of junk, by the way). I started looking for apartment options today while Melanie was juggling work and dealing with Crown. The Crown guy called her several times this morning asking where to deliver the things. Mel asked if Crown could hold onto the things for a while. The Crown guy then proceeded to tell her that past Friday (tomorrow!) they would charge a SGD45 per day charge.  This certainly puts undue pressure on us as we don’t want to be pressured into choosing an apartment just for the sake of it. It seems to me that it would be “Customer-Focused” for Crown to offer a free week or so of storage.  What if the receiver, Melanie in this case, was on a longer term business trip and couldn’t deal with this? This is similar to the Cable company who says the technician will come by your house between 10AM and 4PM.  How the heck are you supposed to accommodate that? It’s their job to service you, not your job to wait for them and work around their schedule. Back to Crown, I think a week of storage is not too much to ask. This provides a little more flexibility to their customer, us, thus enhancing our satisfaction and likelihood of recommending them to our friends for future relocations. Come on guys, them telling us today that our stuff is ready and we need to have it delivered by tomorrow before they start charging us storage fees… that’s just ridiculous. It’s not consumer focused and reflects poorly on them as a company. They have a very clear business objective to make as much money as possible while screwing their customers in the process. Companies can get away with that for some time, but it will come back to haunt them. Hopefully. My favorite line thus far is “sorry for any inconvenience caused”.  No you’re not. Seeing that arguing with them was going nowhere, we decided to look into self-storage options so we can at least receive our goods.  Lucky for us there’s a self-storage company right here in Toa Payoh (where we’re staying). It’s called StorHub and we went there during Melanie’s lunch break and booked a 146 square feet storage space. It’s about less than a third what Crown would charge for a month period of storage, and we have 24-hour access to our stuff. It seems this StorHub company wants our business as they are quite flexible in accommodating our needs.  They had a room for us essentially immediately. Even though we prepaid for 2 months in order to lock in the discount they provided, we can basically cancel any time and they will prorate our refund after the first month. And we can extend past the initial 2 months easily, no need for prior notice. This isn’t over. Trying to negotiate having Crown deliver our stuff on Saturday instead of tomorrow as Melanie needs to work. And we’re going to forward our complaints to the highest level possible. It probably won’t do anything, but it’s best not to just bend over and take it…