After almost two months of preparing documents I finally am ready to send the parckage to my attorney in Hanoi.
While they did not need the documents labeled. I had spent so much time on putting the package together I decided I wanted to come up with a table of contents and document type cover sheet. With this I can keep a copy of the of the form of the application. It also helped me to discuss the contents of the application. I created a video where I talk through each of the pages in order to document many of the steps, thoughts and reasons I did things.
After the video I went to ship it to vietnam. I talked to the Hanoi professor /expert in my MBA class about what the best method of sending mail to vietnam was. She said FedEx but then said she had never done it, and she referred me to the class assistant who said FedEx was how she had sent a bunch of gifts and customs in vietnam had opened and basically held it for ransom (a bribe). With no help I looked up DHL and called them. They said they handled the packages all the way to hanoi, but then she said that she was not actually certain because sometimes logistics will be offloaded to a third party. Anyway I decided that the 80$ fee was worth it. So I shipped it from the UPS Store.
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Update: 8/24 - Over the weekend I could not track the shipment and saturday I called and left a message and I called again to day to the UPS Store, and left a Voicemail about the fact that I could still not track the DHL shipment.
After I left the Voicemail I called DHL, they said they had no record of the package by number but then they asked details of where it was coming from and going to, from this they found a package which had been entered into their system but they said it was not entered until 5:45PM, 4 hours after their cutoff time (and almost 6 hours after I dropped it off). The lady on the phone apologized but she said they didn't even have record of the package so they did not know to pick it up at the UPS Store. She recmmended that I call the UPS store to figure out what happened.
Since the UPS Store had called me on the other line while I was talking with DHL, I called them back and Elizabeth (the lady that helped me ship on Friday) picked up. She apologized and she said she felt she must have jinxed the shipping since she said she had never had any problems, however it seemed that the lady she called on the phone (while I was standing right there) never entered the transaction as she should have.
Regardless: the lesson here is that perhaps the UPS Store was not a better method than actually sending it my self. I could have more reliably called DHL, and scheduled a pickup from my office and I would have been able to asure that the pickup happened, personally.
While I felt like the transaction would have been MORE reliable on the US side if done at a DHL Distributor, it looks like that third party actually introduces an additional possible failure point. I will be scheduling direct with DHL in the future if the rest of the shipping / transit works out.
The issue ended up costing me two days, now, instead of arriving on Tuesday, the package is scheduled to arrive on Thursday the 27th.
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On Monday August 31st I received a notice by email from the local upsstore saying that there seems to be a problem with the shipping package.
It turns out that in stead of contacting me they contacted the local upsstore to let them know that they were in need of a local phone number and or email for the receiver. I provided them with that information by first emailing back to my contact at the UPS store and then including the Internation Tracking Specialist that was on her email chain.
Next I looked up the contact information for DHL Vietnam and called them (using Google Hangouts). I talked to them and they told me the number and email they had on file and I confirmed it, by morning, I received an email from the reciever saying that there seemed to be a problem where the documents were stuck in customs waiting on a duty (a fee).
So I called DHL in the US and they looked it up, they immediately saw the note saying they need a number for the local receiver, when I told them that they had already contacted the reciever they said (oh) it turns out that the documents had a value of $300 on them so it does need to go through customs. She went on to say that it is standard to put a value on documents in order to show the cost that it might take to reproduce the documents. (It would actually have cost more like $500 dollars to reproduce the documents since I had so many legalized documents in there) But anyway, DHL says it is normal for this to go through customs. However with the date they expected arrival (only 3 days after shipping) it seems as though they did not expect a delay.
The next step is for me to call vietnam DHL to see what I can do to help the document to clear customs.
When i called the vietnam number using hangouts when it forwarded to my phone first and then called them the phone connection was so bad they were not able to help me out. So I called the international tracking specialist that was on the email that I received
Esteban Monge
Certified International Specialist,
Advisor, Network Tracking and Tracing
DHL Express
1910 W Rio Salado Pkwy
Tempe, AZ 85281
When I called the first couple of times the automated message said that the department was closed, But then after 6AM MST I called and it went through, but it went to the 'general' number that took me through a phone tree, I started speaking with a representative and the phone cut me off. But then when I called back, someone picked up immediately! I gave them the tracking number and asked if I knew who I was attempting to speak with. I told her 'Esteban Monge' and she said 'he doesn't get in till 7AM would you like to leave a voicemail or send him an email?' I said, can you request that he give me a call back (since I had already left a voicemail and email for him ).
While I am waiting for his call back, it appears that I might as well describe a few thoughts that I have.
- Right now it appears that customs is a concern when shipping to vietnam, there is likely a best way to get documents to Vietnam and I did not know about it or follow it
- DO NOT use a UPS STORE for shipping DHL. Contact them directly and include ALL of your contact information including email, mobile and work phone numbers, also include ALL of your receving parties contact information (phone, mobile and email).
- DHL seems to be pretty good at emailing so make sure you get the email immediately. If you make sure to use a gmail enabled email address you can use the awesome translation feature to be able to 'sort of' read the text of emails they may send and get forwarded.
- Perhaps a good way to go about the shipping would be to attempt to send a document with a declared value of 0. In the case (like mine) where it would cost money to reproduce the documents, perhaps you can do that if you simply get two copies of all of the documents, even two legalized copies of everything and only send one without value.
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Update 9 /15/2015
It has been more than 2 weeks and we have made very little progress. It appears that the 12 hour time gap makes it almost impossible to get anything done. Basically there is never a time when a person from both Hemispheres is working so only a single email is passed in an entire day. and Most of the time the email is in broken, incomprehensible english. Another problem is that there is no single point of contact to resolve or address the issues (esteban? sarah?) and once I connected with them, they can only send an email. While I request that they ask their Vietnam counter parts to address things in a way that allows them to make a choice, no one is able to communicate and the document ends up sitting while DHL takes two weeks to figure out that the document package needs to have a declared value of 0$. The complexity is that I sent a document saying it was $300 and they need to figure out HOW we change that value from $300 to $0.
My attorney dnas writes something up which says I made a mistake (someone said they need something official) I email that to a new contact I have in DHL Vietnam, she says that now she is waiting on Vietnam Customs to describe whether that letter is enough or whether the need a new "invoice".
It sounds like an invoice is an offical Customs / export / improt document, however I have never filled one out or seen one, so while it sounds like they may be waiting on it from me, when I ask, they can not describe whether they need something at all.
so, it all comes down to communications. At this point, I have only 2 weeks before I arrive in Hanoi so if the application is not approved, I will have to reapply for the Representative Office using a person OTHER than my current Chief RO, who will only be heading to Vietnam once in his life he says. Hopefully they have figured it all out and are ready to deliver the documents tonight.
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Several rounds of communication with dhl, them searching, closing files, not responding, not following up and I finally decide to email the CEO or a VP (recommended by Varun). A little searching and I find that distort partment as a page that says send an email to the top. And then it has the CEO's email address. So I send email begging for help describing the fact that I have not been treated very well and I get a email back the next morning from a guy he said he would be taking care of it. So I email him in a little bit more information and I don't hear from him until the afternoon so I call him and a lady named Tara answers and when I hey I'm looking for John she says oh this is Michael Blood with I'm familiar with the issue and she will be taking it on so we talked a little bit she lets me vent and ultimately she said she will be working with the management here in the US and in Vietnam to resolve the issue. She said that the CEO is aware of the situation and they keep him updated on it. She said she would be doing investigation into it however I encouraged her to accept a letter saying we want the shipment returned immediately and she forwarded it to Vietnam and then didn't follow-up unfortunately until we had lost another weekend however it was still moving much quicker and now after a couple more days Vietnam customs supposedly has released the package to be returned to the US the tracking website has not been updated and I did confirm with her it will be updated as a package moves through the us back to The UPS Store where I dropped it off. One thing that I did find out when speaking with them was that the UPS Store is not a good idea for shipping internationally basically the people at the UPS Store have their own account with DHL so I have to go through the UPS Store for any formal request did you have any updates with the package. Also the package will be brought back to the UPS Store not to me to go and pick it up. And finally for the night identified earlier in the process they simply don't know what they're doing at the UPS Store come it turns out that this entire issue is related to the fact that the invoice which was filled out by Elizabeth at the UPS Store was not filled out correctly. While DHL should have caught the invisible out incorrectly do you have to shouldn't have filled out incorrectly. At this point I'm not sure if I will be working with DHL and UPS store to help them identify the flaw in their system or I'll just say I don't care I'm going to make sure it's filled out correctly myself in the future
