How FedEx turned a disaster into a PR win
The video of a deliveryman tossing a package over a gate went viral last month, but the company didn’t recoil—it responded.
During the holidays, a video emerged of a FedEx deliveryman throwing a computer monitor over a gate and onto the lawn of the customer’s lawn.
The scary thing is it’s actually in a computer monitor box, not a FedEx box, so he knew it was fragile. He didn’t try to open the gate or ring the bell. He just threw it over the gate. And it broke.
The person who lives in that house must have the same “neighborly” issues we have because he has a security camera on the front gate. And the “delivery” was captured on video.
Here it is for your viewing pleasure.
Clearly this is not a PR or social media crisis. It is a customer service crisis. But, similar to the Papa John’s incident, it became a PR crisis when the customer posted the video on YouTube (which got 5 million views in five days).
What did FedEx do, in return?
It did not ignore the video. It did not ignore the crisis. It did not stick its heads in the sand and pretend the video (that now has 9 million views) doesn’t exist.
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