This year has been unprecedented in more ways than one.

The shipping industry is no exception. While eCommerce sales have skyrocketed, so have shipping volumes - not only during the holiday season but also throughout the duration of the pandemic. This has meant that the industry is now working at full capacity to handle this extraordinary volume.

In all of this, Freightcom’s customer-centric ethos has remained the same. We have your back, now and always.

To give you the best support possible, we have ramped up our support team by almost double and strengthened our technical infrastructure (can you hear those servers humming away?). In fact, we are continuing to make upgrades round the clock. 

To ensure sure that we all get through this peak season together and as smoothly as possible, we are asking you to implement some best practices and make note of certain changes. 

We chatted with Graham Coats, Freightcom's Customer Care Team Leader, who enlightened us on ways to avoid shipping heartache this holiday season.

You can listen to the conversation by clicking on the thumbnail below: 

We also distilled the conversation into the following 5 nuggets of wisdom for you. Read on!

1. Please note that carriers have suspended certain service levels,  including options such as Express shipping. This year, carriers implemented this at the beginning of the pandemic. This means that credit or concession requests, as well as carrier guarantees, are unavailable to customers. 

2. If a courier pickup is missed, re-schedule it on the Freightcom portal. Navigate to the portal, find the missed shipment on the track tab, and reschedule it. Make sure you do this as soon as you find out that the pickup has been missed, so that the carrier can schedule a pickup as soon as possible.

3. In case of a missed pickup, you can also drop off the parcel to a carrier location, especially it if you don't wait for the carrier to pick it up the next day or perhaps even later. If you need to get out the parcel the same day, most of our carriers have partnered with alternative drop-off centers (smart centers, convenience stores, business centers) where you can drop off parcels.                         Bonus Secret Code: ELF 

4. Cross-border shipments: Ensure that you include hard copies of documentation. These documents -- such as the customs invoice and additional documents (e.g., USMCA and FDA forms) -- should be in a separate shipping document pouch and not behind your shipping label, so that customs officials can easily access them.  

5. Our partner carriers ask customers to be patient during the peak shipping season and a long delay usually means just that - a delay and not a lost shipment. So please wait another 5-7 days before taking action (such as filing a claim). This takes the stress off of you and gives a little extra time to carriers to process the shipment through their network. 

If you have questions and concerns, reach out to our team at sales@freightcom.com