Your best and worst customer service experiences [rant & praise]

completely agree

i have been buying online for years at this stage and no other site came even close to amazon's customer service.

apparently john lewis is another group known to have excellent customer service although i never bought anything from them

on the other side its a tough competition on who is the worse company to deal with

for me right now its tesco direct, but thehut and pixmania are also on the black list!

Bought a camera of them and didn't dispatch For about 2 days, and in the meantime the cameras price dropped
Via Web chat, not only did they give me the new price but they also gave me a small credit for delaying the order! who else does that
Cannot recommend them enough

Dum_Dum wrote: »

Can't agree.

[1] Whether delivery to Ireland or not is possible is never clear until selection of delivery address - even 'permitted' goods can have delivery restrictions.
[2] They sit on orders. 'In Stock' orders can sit for some time (like weeks) waiting to be dispatched. I've usually cancelled the order before that time - like today for example. Very disappointed.
[3] They are not the cheapest.
[4] Their contrived tax affairs makes me suspicious.

2.. Get them online and ask why it hasn't dispatched within and it was in stock

3..For a UK based online retailer, they normally are to be honest

With you on point 1 though.. About 4..they are exploiting a loophole which all the majors are.. Unfair to single them

Dum_Dum wrote: »

Can't agree.

[1] Whether delivery to Ireland or not is possible is never clear until selection of delivery address - even 'permitted' goods can have delivery restrictions.
[2] They sit on orders. 'In Stock' orders can sit for some time (like weeks) waiting to be dispatched. I've usually cancelled the order before that time - like today for example. Very disappointed.
[3] They are not the cheapest.
[4] Their contrived tax affairs makes me suspicious.

1 - You can use parcelmotel to send to UK address. Amazon dont know what address you are going to send it to until you select at the end. Unlike other retailers they do not require you to ship to billing address which is great if ordering for friends family.
2 - Did you contact them to ask? It's important to distingush between amazon sellers and amazon direct
3 - True but most of the time they are and when they aren't I would go with them because of their better service.
4 - ?? And are you aware of all the tax affairs of other companies online... Amazon is just big so these things are highlighted more than the others.

I do almost all my shopping online and have never had a better experience.

Dum_Dum wrote: »

Can't agree.


[4] Their contrived tax affairs makes me suspicious.

They ship so much to Ireland they have to charge our VAT rates.

Or are you complaining about them not paying UK tax? If you do some digging you'll see a lot of companies don't pay a lot of tax, look at the IFSC loads of companies there with 1 or 2 employees declaring billions in income. Even French companies, with all their posturing over our 12.5% corp tax rate, don't actually pay much tax in France.

Edit

I find Amazon great and now with Parcel Motel you can buy off all their vendors.

just wanted to add another story of utter incompetence from expansys and advise people to avoid them like the plague if you value your money and/or sanity.

I ordered about €800 worth of gear from them for a Christmas present for my wife on wednesday morning, paying by paypal to use up my balance with the rest coming from a credit card attached to my paypal account.

I'm an existing customer, having spent at least €1500 with them over the last few years i've never had any issues until now.

I'm currently in the middle of moving house, so I figured the easiest thing to do would be to arrange to have the item shipped to parcel motel and collect it.

first of all they managed to charge me the wrong amount (about €17 too little), even though this all went through their website and paypal, so should have been a simple and foolproof method of payment.

rather than contact me and explain that the wrong amount had been taken, they just sent me a paypal request for more money, with no explanation whatsoever as to why they were requesting more money from me after I had already paid them.

i had to call their customer service department and wait on hold for almost half an hour before i could get through to someone to find out that they had somehow undercharged me.

once i had found this out, i paid the extra money and assumed that would be the end of it and that i would receive my item in a few days, but when i checked my order online the following morning, it had a note saying "awaiting further information" and I had to call them again (with another almost 30 minutes on hold to the UK) to find out that they were waiting for my "proof of address'' at the parcel motel depot and that they couldn't progress the order until i had provided this information.

i called paypal and had my parcel motel address added to my official paypal addresses as it wouldn't let me add it on the paypal website for some reason (another 20 minutes on the phone), but this does not appear to have made any difference as they still wouldn't progress the order.

i then spoke to expansys customer support again and explained in detail what parcel motel was (both on the phone and in later emails) and provided screenshots of my parcel motel ID and the page with the delivery address on it confirming that it was my account etc. and that given what parcel motel is, there was no more information that i could provide to them than this.

that took me up to COB yesterday, so again this morning i checked my order status only to find that it was still "awaiting further information" and had not progressed any further, so I called again and took the head off someone in order to get a manager on the phone, to be repeatedly told that no managers were available until after 5pm as they were all in a meeting, but after repeatedly pressuring the girl on the phone she eventually managed to pull a manager out of thin air to talk to me although she was pretty much on the verge of tears by this point.

after i explained what was going on, the manager offered a refund which i declined as i knew it would take days to get the refund and this close to christmas it would be no good to me anyway as without the refund my credit card is maxxed out and i'm unable to make the purchase anywhere else until the money is back onto the card, which would be monday 24th dec. at the earliest and would mean no christmas present for my wife.

the manager (by the name of <SNIP>) promised to get the issue sorted out for me and said she would call me back when she had sorted it to let me know.

she then called me back a couple of hours later to say she'd gone through everything and would be contacting the finance department directly to sort out the issue and would call me back when she had it resolved.

no further word back from anyone at expansys this afternoon, but then out of nowhere I get an automated email from paypal and then expansys confirming that I had cancelled the order even though I had not cancelled it and had specifically (and repeatedly) asked that the order wasn't cancelled for the reasons stated above.

i've repeatedly emailed the manager who had mailed me her details after i requested them so i could contact her but she has not responded.

her number in her email isn't a full number (no international code or legit area code as fa as i can see) and she seems to be from a team in italy, but with ties to the UK, so i have no idea if it's an italian number or a UK one and adding the international dialling code for either country doesn't work.

so, i'm now in the situation whereby i have no no explanation from expansys and no present for my wife and no money until the refund goes back on my card, by which time it will be too late to order the present from anywhere else and have it in time for xmas.

Expansys, the company that ruined christmas. :mad::mad::mad:

I'm a bit hindered at the moment having my shoulder and arm all strapped up and in a sling. I wondered into Tesco's in Navan earlier for just a couple of bits as you do :rolleyes:. Having got a trolley to make life easier i went a bit over the top and the trolley started to get a bit heavy and awkward, one of the staff took the trolley off me and wheeled it around the isles whilst i carried on shopping and when i got to the till the assistant called somebody else over to help me pack. Then the assistant manager got somebody to push the trolley through the shopping centre and outside to the taxi rank, the lad even helped load it into the taxi. I have to say i know they can get a bit of stick but it wasn't just 1 person but a number of them were very helpful and polite on what was a very busy day. Credit where credit is due.

Best ; Photobox for pics and canvas prints. very good quality and prompt delivery - times were as advertised.

Worst; Vodafone service .
I had a USB dongle with crap signal , numerous calls to support eventually told me to go into store . That I did to be told u are entitled to an upgrade great I say . I was told to sign a form to acknowledge I received a new dongle . I was NOT told I had signed up to a new contract , this was found out when I got a lovely welcome to Vodafone docs in the mail with my new contract over 2 weeks later . Back on phone again to complain , they told me then I could cancel but there was I think a 100 euro cancellation charge .. I was fuming then guy said I could reduce my package to 4.99 a month . They had my dd details already . Fair enough .. Meanwhile still poor signal and little dongle ended up bottom of laptop bag not been used . Months later I get this nasty letter from Vodafone saying I owed them 78 euros and they were cancelling / disrupting my service . An utter joke .. The saga continues ...Z

Social Welfare.