Absolutely Useless

Fed up Submitted this review about Estes Express
Review made Live: 7/1/2015 9:49:00 AM
I work for a company that regularly ships large/heavy steel items via truck. Mostly we ship with whatever truck line is preferred by the customer. I HATE when the customer insists on Estes. The running joke in our warehouse is that if you want something shipped with Estes, you had to call them three days ago to schedule the pickup.

We just had a shipment for them a few days ago that I scheduled for pickup earlier than the other trucking lines because I know how flaky they are with pickups. Come quitting time (5pm) they hadn't showed. I called them the following day to find out what the problem was, and make sure it was still on the board for pickup. I was told that the driver showed up but no one was here - tends to happen when you show up well after a place closes. They transferred me to dispatch to make sure they had the pickup scheduled again for the day and was assured they would have someone there by 4:30. No one showed at 4:30, or even close to 4:30. The shipment sat in our warehouse for another night because the driver never showed.

Instead of rolling the dice with these clowns again we contacted the customer who agreed to use a different carrier. I never called Estes to cancel the open pickup, and they haven't yet arrived to pick it up (thinking it's still here). It's been 6 business days since I entered it for pickup. If that's not bad enough, we have one sitting in their system from 3/23/15 that was never picked up and it still shows as being accepted for pickup.

Bottom line: I deal with a lot of freight carriers any given week. Most have an odd missed pickup here or there, but Estes is the absolute WORST. You have to hound them to actually arrive to pick up the material, and if that happens pray that they don't screw it up somehow because their customer service is completely inept. It took them 4 MONTHS to resolve a billing issue we had last year. Our account rep was less than helpful and completely ignored, or refused to answer, almost all of my emails.