John Lewis: never mind your Christmas advert, I’d just be pleased with some customer service

[Thosesummernights]

First world issues I know but what on earth has happened to JL customer service?

Went in store to order a new bed, couldn’t find anyone on the shop floor to assist. Eventually tracked a member of the team down to help but she really didn’t want to and kept directing us to the website. We were looking for mattresses that could be delivered within a certain timeframe.

We’ve since had on going issues with the order and accessing their customer service team is impossible. They just don’t care anymore. There’s no desire to help or assist which is what JL was known for.

Still waiting for a call back. Chased and chased. Now receiving emails asking for more details of the issue when all I want to do is actually speak to someone. If they are reducing face to face or even phone service then I’d rather go elsewhere and not pay the price tickets.

I don't buy anything from them ( I only go to Waitrose now and again a few times a year for food ) but this thread has shocked me as I know that their customer service used to be brilliant. It's sad that it's gone the way of everyone else and now it's all bots and AI and the people shrugging it all off. Yet it seems there isn't anything that can be done. It's just so depressing.

It’s become normal to try and talk above the din of what sounds like family parties and BBQs. No apology for the noise. It’s just dreadful.

It feels very much as though customers are doing the heavy lifting and JL are working towards a minimum experience, minimum effort, minimum staff approach. It’s now not even possible to speak to someone over the phone in branch, and branch staff have no autonomy whatsoever. Almost like a high end Argos.

Like I said, first World issues but we need a new bed and the last time we purchased from them was great. I really don’t want to spend ££££ on a new mattress without trying it first so would rather not buy online but seems that’s not an option now?

Totally agree with pp comments on JL, they are just shocking right now.

Re beds - do you have a Bensons? Had a surprisingly good experience replacing a high end mattress there. They sometimes have managers offers ( Bank holiday / Black Friday etc)

I think retail companies haven’t got the message that if they provide good customer service, we’ll be all over them like a rash!

John Lewis used to be my go-to place to buy all sorts of stuff.

So sad.

Oh no, I hate to read this thread. Just makes me worry we’ll be reading about the closure of all JL stores soon.

I bought a mattress online. I wasn't offered the option to tick for having the old mattress recycled so thought I would give them a quick call to remedy the situation. One of the call handlers in the Phillipines insisted I called the finance people as they would help - that was embarrassing for all of us. It took me 20 minutes and a lot of hanging on the phone until the second call handler told me it was arranged but I wasn't confident.

The chaps turned up as expected. All fine. They knew nothing about taking the old mattress away but kudos to them, they did.

Then came the palaver of trying to pay for this. Redirected from one number to another, having to listen to the blurb about 'why not look at our website for home trends...' each time. I lost patience and sat back.

In the end, someone from Scotland called me. They seemed much more focused when collecting a payment!

Lovely mattress but a bit of a disappointment on the service front.

Does anyone remember the heady days when John Lewis outsourced its 'customer services' to Capita? Oh my days, I spoke to the rudest woman in the history of rudeness on the phone during that golden age.

I too ended up emailing the CEO's office and they sorted it. But I wouldn't buy jack shit now from JL after that experience.

I'm sad to read this but not surprised. I know someone who has worked for them for over 25 years and he says they are not a great employer and haven't been for some time. They've been cost cutting for years.

Very sad to see their decline. Ordered something online, delivery repeatedly delayed with countless emails, "your item will be in the system tomorrow" followed by "your item has been delayed". Disappointing experience and won't bother ordering from them again. Too much reliable competition.

JL is in a cycle of decline. In the good old days, JL partners worked for their annual profit sharing bonus. Earning that bonus was the driving force behind the excellent customer service the business was known for.

Now, JL no longer profitable, so the business is cost cutting massively, the staff are no longer treated well and the customer service culture has collapsed. Staff get no bonus so they no longer care and working at JL becomes just another crappy retail job.

There are also major problems at the top of the organisation. Appointing a career bureaucrat to lead a struggling retail organisation through a major turnaround was always questionable, and Sharon White’s tenure has been a disaster. In any normal retail business, she would have been fired by now. The fact that she hasn’t is another indication of the scale of JL’s problems.

So sad - I used to love swanning round JL and buying lovely things.
They seem to be the last of the big department stores but I wonder if they will survive?
I hate online shopping and the a cres of wrapping and queuing to post things back when they turned out to be nothing like the picture.
I will continue to shop there because despite everything in the thread being true I would be really sorry to see it go.

I think I must have had one of them the time I bought an expensive item from them and paid extra for a delivery at a specific time and day. It didn’t arrive at all and I ended up speaking to a shockingly offhand and rude person in 'Customer Service'. Who simply wouldn’t help and just got ruder and ruder.

It was sorted but not for several days and I vowed then not to buy big items from them again. This was well before Covid, mind you.

I also work fairly near the flagship Oxford St store and go into it quite often. The obsession with turning it into a luxury shopping destination means you just cannot buy any of the normal, handy items that used to prompt a 'ooh, I’ll just pop into John Lewis for that' moment. I wanted a decent hairbrush the other day but could I find one? No. The space where they used to be was devoted to various high-end hair-dryers at hundreds of pounds.
And Sharon White is now stepping down at the end of her contract so who knows what will become of this once-great family firm that began in Oxford St in 1864.

I went into the Horsham branch a while ago to buy towels and sheets - JL staples you would assume. I just wanted plain white queen sized sheet sets, duvets and bath towels.
The store looked like it was on the verge of closing down, stock all over the place. The woman that served me was apologetic about their total lack of stock and in the end I went to M and S and bought it all there, spending nearly £500 because the stock just wasn’t available in JL. Sheets and towels fgs.

I used to go to JL when I first started work and imagined kitting out a house as it seemed really high end, but now it doesn’t have that feel at all.

My friend works in jl. The things she tells me are unreal. They dint do staff training anymore, staff pick up things as they go along. Thats why a lot of staff are clueless. And they expect staff to be flexible, meaning that person serving you on beds might have been working in the shoe dept yesterday. There's not any continuity so if you find staff who actually know about the department they are working in youve struck gold. My friend gets £10.50 an hour, thats less than almost every other retailer. It seems all the staff get that. And she has to buy her own uniform and they get into trouble if it doesn't fit the jl standards. It actually sounds a shit place to work. Im trying to get her into the shop im in which pays 10.90 an hour and gives staff a uniform and training from the start. I think jl used to be great back in the day but its lost all the benefits staff had.

That’s shocking @ssd! I had no idea staff had to buy their own uniforms.

It is sad to see their decline because there will be many staff who actually do care but can’t do anything other than follow the the rigid guidelines and processes that have been put in place.

It’s the same as hospitality. If you treat staff as though they are expendable then they be just that. Retail and hospitality should/could be a career choice, not simply a stepping stone industry.

I don’t know, maybe buyer behaviour has changed so much that those with money to spend don’t have the same service requirements.

If you go into jl the staff are hard to find as they all wear different clothes as they have to supply their own things including shoes or sweaters in winter. My friend thinks they used to get clothes but she said they were such poor quality no one wore them, they weren't from jl or their suppliers she said they were really cheap and nasty. Tbh shes been looking for another job for ages but theres hardly any retail left in our town.

I work in retail and its shocking everywhere atm. They are cutting staff to the bone. Quite literally . Our store has a home delivery department with vans aswell as instore, paid online and a stockroom and honestly staff are meant to be octopuses atm . Customers would be shocked if they saw the backstage to shops atm . They say to us , well get someone from the back 🤣 like it's that easy, there is NO ONE . It's demoralising to the staff working in retail. We are Dreading Xmas at work coz it's going to be a massive shit show and head office don't care. They just see the figures not the overworked under paid staff at the bottom... but it's ok they are giving us 15% discount on pay day and putting on a weekly shop in the canteen !!

The high street has changed. Colleagues of mine daily go on about how you used to walk in to staff lined up in the corridor and the staff room would be buzzing . We have a massive store and one morning the fire alarms went off in the shopping mall and we had to line up on the car park and some of the little kiosks had more staff than us 🤔 a little coke van on the car park giving out free cans of coke had more staff than us and we are running a multi million pound store with a massive stockroom and shopfloor !! We now have more van drivers than the rest of the store put together Inc delivery staff !

I'm trying to make the point it's NOT the staffs fault in stores this Xmas, it's the leaders at the top cutting staff numbers .
Our company actually spent a lot of money doing an audit a couple of years ago to see how many staff numbers they could get away with doing the jobs we do . But these people don't have to work instores when its really busy. We are constantly firefighting customers. It's really tough working in retail right now especially. Customers want the moon on a stick coz they are paying hard earned money for it. But we are human too !

Totally agree about terrible customer service. Took me 25 minutes at the JL flagship store on Oxford Street to get served. Lots of customers milling about looking for staff on the shop floor - there were only two and one of those was engaged with a woman who wanted to know about every radio on sale in the shop - at least he knew his stuff and she got excellent customer service. There were three people at the counter where the tills were - I asked if they could come out and assist - they said no. When I eventually got served, the assistant needed keys to access what I wanted to buy (earphones) but he couldn't find the man who had them. 10 minutes later he got them but then found that despite what I wanted being on display, it wasn't in stock. 40 mins of my life that I'll never get back. Left the shop, went to Argos and had them in my hand in five minutes.

Prior to all that, my Apple airpods stopped working. I took them to the Apple store who confirmed they could not be repaired. Returned them to JL with the paperwork from Apple saying the above. Was led to the customer service area which was like going back in time i.e. 'Are you being served'. Eventually saw a customer service assistant who said the JL meant that they would have to be sent off for repair. I pointed out that Apple had already said that wasn't possible and showed her the paperwork but she said it was JL policy. I asked her how long that would take and she said 'weeks'. Absolutely crap. Weeks later JL confirmed they couldn't be repaired and offered to replacement. In the meantime, I looked closely at their T&Cs, and to my astonishment found that replacement items will be reconditioned ones, not brand new. Never, ever by an electrical item there. If it goes wrong they'll insist on repairing it even though that could take weeks - even with things like a laptop which, for most people, is an essential daily item. In contrast, companies like Dell will do a 24-48 hour turn around and will also send someone to your home to collect it and deliver it back. John Lewis - avoid, avoid, avoid.

If you treat staff as though they are expendable then they be just that.

Well exactly, there's a belief that these jobs don't matter, that they're not important, that the people doing them are not important, are not even really people but a necessary evil and they're treated as such. And it's wider spread than just in the companies that are employing them, it's societal.

Everyone wants fantastic service, a great experience, but they also want the lowest price going and one of the easiest things to cut is staff numbers, training, presentation (uniforms) for the company and so that's what they're going to do, to keep upping the profit and keeping prices at a level that keeps people buying. That reduces service and experience.

And then the people that are left doing more work for less and less are the ones bearing the brunt of the customer dissatisfaction, there's only so many times you can be shouted at, ridiculed, belittled and humiliated before you have to switch off and not actually care any more - because you can't do anything about it just take the shit from unhappy customers, and it's absolutely galling when you aren't even earning a wage that means you can have luxuries like your heating on in winter or new shoes that haven't got holes in.

I think there's a hangover from the class system where service jobs are concerned that you should be grateful to serve your 'betters' and that should be enough, never mind about decent wages or just being treated like a human being.

The JL customer service started going down hill when they centralised their customer service team around 13/14 years ago. Prior to that, customer service was based in each store.

I’ve spent lots with JL over the years and used to buy most things from there. I rarely use them now. The stores are like a jumble sale, stock levels are atrocious and the majority of staff don’t care. The staff often look disinterested and stand there chatting about their social lives rather than serving customers. I feel sorry for the minority of staff who do still try.

Their guarantees used to be good, with the stores sorting any problems. They now seem to palm any problems off onto the manufacturer and wash their hands of it. I get better service from Amazon.

I’m surprised they’re still in business to be honest. I really hope they manage to turn things around though. I’d happily pay a bit more for a nice shopping experience with good customer service.

It’s a vicious cycle really - customer service is bad so you think, well I may as well look online, and then Amazon comes at you with a well priced alternative with free delivery and you think, well I’m not paying for service anyway so I may as well go for the cheaper option. Then the stores have to cut the service to compete with online retailers and so it goes on.

I’ve moved here from Aus where Amazon isn’t quite as well established and I’m amazed that any shops survive really. The combination of driving to a town, paying nearly £4.00 to park for one hour (Guildford), going to the shop only to find that they don’t have what you need anyway. In comparison to order it on Amazon and it’ll be there, for free (basically), the next day? I really do feel for retailers but equally when money is tight, of course we’ll go for the cheaper option, especially when customer service isn’t there anyway.

They are cutting staff to the bone. Quite literally .

I do hope not!

I ordered something from amazon and refused it when it was delivered as I tried to cancel and was too late. Still waiting for a refund a month later despite numerous calls to chase it. So their customer service is awful too. I was told on four occasions the refund had been issued. It hadn't.