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A woman pretended that an Evri driver had set fire to her home to get a response from the delivery company. Well, I guess that’s one way of doing it.
Small business owner Sania Shah contracted Evri after two customers demanded refunds for items that hadn't arrived. You can see how the plan went down here:
Sania said she was £200 out of pocket due to the refunds so chased up the delivery company to try and track down the missing parcels.
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The 27-year-old claims she contacted Evri daily for a month in an attempt to find the missing items, before eventually entering a live chat where she decided to turn to some crafty tactics to get a response.
Sania, from Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, said: "I was at a loss because I sent the items and was being chased for a refund, I just wanted to know where the parcels were.
"I tried to call but it's so hard to get hold of them, it's a robot and at the end it says 'thank you, goodbye, go to our website'. I was emailing and that got me no reply.
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"Live Chat finally got me in touch with someone. I started a conversation, they gave me a reference number and said 'someone will be in touch' so I replied saying 'help, your courier has set my house on fire'.
"They asked for two photos to start an investigation so I went on Google and found a house on fire.
"It's bad and people have messaged me saying that it's someone's actual house but I'm not trying to use that to my advantage. I just needed someone to ring me, I didn't want to message.
"The next day I got a call. It was a lady who sounded like she was from head office, like she was the real deal. They obviously saw the fire and thought 'oh, this is serious'.
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"She said she understood that a courier had set my house on fire and I said they hadn't but this is the extent I'd had to go to to get hold of someone.
"Then I asked her now that I had her on the phone if she could help me and she did. She probably knew I'd done a lot to get her to help me."
Fortunately, the woman who got in touch with Sania was able to process the refund.
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"She told me what I needed to do to get the refund,” Sania added. “I was able to send another product without having to make a loss because I was reimbursed.
"I'm not trying to encourage lying and giving Evri stress, but this is the extent people have to go to to get in touch and money doesn't grow on trees.”
An Evri spokesperson said: "We are sorry to hear about Sania's experience.
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"As Sania had arranged delivery via a third party logistics agency we are limited in the information we can access and have previously advised her to be in contact directly with her contracted logistics partner.
"As the UK's biggest dedicated parcels company in the UK, we deliver 700 million parcels each year and are proud that 99 percent of our parcels are delivered on time.
"We have invested significantly in our onshore customer service operations in the UK, with dedicated teams in each depot.
"If a customer has a problem with a delivery that cannot be solved through our chatbot our dedicated teams will call the customer once they have carried out a detailed investigation, which involves reviewing all the available tracking data, delivery photos and spoken to the courier involved so they can advise the customer on the best course of action."
Claire Reid