Service Business: does the customer come first?

I have long complained that there is a monopoly in this country, for parcel shipping, and the market is divided up between UPS and Fedex, with the Postal Service as a role player, as they
focus mostly on consumers.

I heard a story about these firms today. UPS, or "Brown" as they sometimes call themselves..
tends to be a firm that does not respond to competition, so this story starts out with the Fedex
rep taking the business away from "Brown" because the Fedex Salesperson knows that the
UPS Salesperson is not required to return customer phone calls. So Fedex has the account.

This firm ships out a lot daily, in the hundreds of dollars a day. Their items are heavy and it is
no surprise to me, that they incur a great deal of damage. From what I can tell, damaged shipments are their problem, not timing.

So, as the story goes, for Fedex, the operations manager at this terminal, needs to trim up some of his drivers routes, to avoid overtime, to avoid running late for pick ups, etc. So the operations manager, decides, to change the pick up protocol for this firm, and unilaterally decides to send in
a semi to do the pick ups instead of the local courier. However, since, in this operations person's
mind, he is doing the right thing, he does not tell the salesperson or the customer.

At this point, is it not "for the customer" that the ops person and the salesperson, come to work?
I guess not, as this story unfolds that the customer set up his shipping area to accommodate a courier vehicle, not a semi, and he is not partial to the changes.

The ops person tells the customer, in front of the salesperson, that "lets try this new pickup service for a few weeks, and if it is not good for you, we will switch it back to the way it was."

So a few weeks go by and the customer does not like the freight pick up and his damage claims
go up, so he calls the rep and tells him to get it switched back as promised.

Guess what, the ops persons, even though he promised, does not want to "give in to the customer" and refuses to live up to his promise......what does a customer know........this is a
salesperson's problem, not an ops problem.

STOP. How can this be? To not only think that you are there for any other reason, than the customer, only shows what I said at the beginning. They think they do not have to be there for the customer, just their company rating. This ops person solidified my thought here, as he told
the salesperson, that "I guess we lose this customer since I am not giving in."

Never mind this ops person is a stone cold liar, but that is not even spectacular, what is amazing is that how can someone in charge of ops be this way to a customer? Is the customer the reason
we come to work? Who does this person work for? Answer: one of two monopolistic carriers who do not, top to bottom, work for the customer.

This is exactly what we can't do at Box Brothers. We are here for the customer, and we will do what is necessary to give them customer satisfaction.

What is wrong in America, is this attitude that branding and money will take care of everything.
What about the core service, what about the customer's expectation of service, does it not
matter if it conflicts with what a ops person wants to do? And why can't the largest shipping firm in the world, UPS, make their salespeople more responsive to their customers, as they do not have a voice mail system for their reps. That is not about service, but about being customer
unfriendly.

I do not know if these firms will get their due, but something is wrong and this is not a story either one of those firms should be proud about. Yet, I would be my last dollar nothing will change here, unless there is some competition that results in their loss of business. It is wrong
to have monopolistic practices at play in our business community, but somehow, someway, they are here--except a Box Brothers, where we guarantee our services and your satisfaction.

Just shoot me in the knee if I ever become as insensitive to our customers as these two giants
of the shipping industry. Go figure.