In an email on April 24, Director of Strategic Procurement John Storti informed the student body that the University had partnered with Xerox Corporation to begin renovating and improving Mail Services, the Copy Center and printing services on campus. Storti promised that the turnover to Xerox would “result in earlier and more accurate and on-time mail delivery service.” Now, over three months after the new provider began business, it appears this promise may have been premature.

While the physical renovations to the mailroom have been completed on time, this board takes issue with the Xerox Corporation’s abysmal customer service and long wait times. 

During one of the busiest times of the year for the mailroom—the start of first semester—students have had to wait in lines reaching out of the mailroom’s doors just to receive their packages, often containing books or supplies without which students cannot even begin their coursework. 

Despite promises of a five minute wait at most from Xerox’s Client Operations Director for New England Chris Walton, students have almost universally reported waiting for at least an hour for service. Mail Services even distributed water and candy to those waiting in line. Still more unacceptable is the inadequacy of Xerox’s email notification system, meant to tell students when their packages are ready for pickup. Delivery services such as Amazon have been known to send students emails saying their packages have shipped, while the mailroom notifications can take days or even weeks to deliver the same notification. While Xerox was brought in to improve efficiency in the mailroom, they have only caused confusion, as the mailroom is still backlogged with several days’ worth of mail which students need immediately. 

In the Facebook group “Overseen at Brandeis,” Senior Vice President for Students and Enrollment Andrew Flagel posted a message he’d received from Chief Operating Officer Steven Manos. Manos said of Xerox’s service, “It is apparent to everyone concerned that our vendor has failed to live up to their commitments.” He added that Vice President for Operation Jim Gray and Director of Budget and University Services Dianne Qualter have been personally overseeing the mailroom staff, and “the situation on the ground has improved radically.” This assistance is welcome, but there is a serious problem if administrators untrained as mailroom employees must leave behind their regular workload in order to organize the mailroom, and are doing a better job at it than the actual employees.  

Few of last year’s mailroom employees were rehired by Xerox, and those that were have suffered heavily reduced wages. Former Copy Center Manager Barry Hayes told the Justice last Spring that he and his colleagues “fully expected” to be hired by Xerox, as had been the practice in previous turnovers. Aside from the concerns of turning out employees with decades of loyalty to the University, we wonder if keeping these hardworking employees, who are experienced in handling the early weeks, might have prevented the current service issues. 

Xerox has stated that they “accept full responsibility for this service breakdown,” and that they were unprepared for the approximately 4,000 packages received during the first week of classes, particularly as they were concurrently redistributing mailbox keys to 3,000 students. 

The company claims to have “not experienced this kind of [package] volume from institutions of similar size” and that they did not have access to “historical package data” from previous vendor Canon. But regardless of data from “institutions of similar size,” the fact that Xerox has been unable to correct basic service issues over multiple weeks indicates a complete lack of research and preparation for their duties. Better communication with Canon, under whom the mailroom has not in recent memory suffered this type of breakdown in service, would have prevented such problems from arising.

This board calls on Xerox to thoroughly re-examine their current service policies at Brandeis University. Beyond fixing the current backlog of mail, we ask Xerox to examine what specifically went wrong and make proactive policies to prevent such a breakdown again.