What are the worst big businesses? Name and shame!

[Memba]

40 minutes on hold to Virgin Media while they try to book an engineer to replace a TiVo box that went up in smoke (literally!) 2 weeks ago. Multiple calls to unhlepful staff in the meantime. Honestly, it would be easier to get a GP appointment...

Also GiffGaff. Tried to swap from EE. Nightmare. Massive buyers regret. You defintely get what you pay for.

But in the interest of fairness... First Direct and Octopus Energy are very much on my good list 😀

Agree with Octopus, they are fab and no complaints.

Three Mobile are the biggest shower of shit going, I was with them from the beginning but everything changed when they merged. They are beyond incompetent - it took SIX weeks to send me a new SIM card when my phone was stolen. SIX weeks and (not joking) 12 phone calls and three visits to the store in Cardiff. It was only through one solitary member of staff who was genuinely amazing that it ever got sorted. I'm now with Talk Mobile and it's a third of the price and a breath of fresh air.

Yep, it's definitely the companies that provide the worst service that make it hardest for you to leave!

Purely Pets for pet insurance - they advertise claims settled within 8 weeks and we were on almost 5 months and over £10k worth of claims. It only got settled because I was very public on social media and leaving public reviews.
We are not the only ones, there's a Facebook group dedicated to them and they were on watchdog recently.
Losing your pet is bad enough, waiting months upon months for partial payment of claims it's absolutely out of order.
I would beg anyone not to give this company money

Companies that implement every possible ruse to minimise taxes on their UK profits by being domiciled abroad - Starbucks, Amazon, Boots.

CEOs that move their manufacturing to Asia but happily accept knighthoods. James Dyson springs to mind, but there are others.

Puma for manufacturing their stuff in illegal West Bank settlements.

So true! I'm still cross just over a year later!

Octopus Energy are definitely not on my good list. I have to ask every single month for a bill because otherwise they won’t bill me for months, and when they eventually do they do about 50 adjustments so I can’t even work out if they’ve charged me correctly.

Coventry Building Society have been nothing but super lovely and helpful to deal with. I would highly recommend them!

AO are totally useless I bought a washing machine that was installed incorrectly by them and ended up shorting out and flooding my kitchen. They refuse to accept the machine isn't working. And they have no care to the fact that my daughter is disabled so I need a machine to keep up with her washing.

They were also incredibly patronising on their help line especially the men who claimed I just didn't understand how washing machines worked

Vodafone - total bastards who can’t do anything right and are expensive. And their inline and phone help is useless.

HMRC are in a league of their own for total incompetence. If I ran my business as badly as they run theirs I’d have gone out of business years ago.

John Lewis, the customer service is terrible I had an ongoing issue with them that lasted for over 6 months and basically involved them resending out a broke item over and over again and just a total faff to get a refund from and unbelievably rude customer service agents.

I’m a huge fan of giffgaff though, been with them for years.

@Utsy Nooooo! Surely not JOHN LEWIS?!

First Direct when I've had a need to call them have always been brilliant.

Sky was the absolute opposite. Absolutely hated having to call them about anything. On hold for ages, can't/wouldn't help, patronising staff. Had to dump them in the end and go with a different provider.

HMRC (I know not a business, but they are truly woeful)
Post Office
Royal Mail
Argos
British Telecom/OpenReach
Asda
Northern Trains

@MalewhoisLaffinalltheway Yes, First Direct are brilliant. Straight through to a real, super-helpful person with no loop of misery being redirected to text or asked to answer loads of irrelevant questions on your keypad. And their voice recognition biometric security tech thingy is amazing!

Talk Talk were horrific with me. The woman on the call was so awful and nasty that I asked her to transfer me to the cancellation team instead and she starting shouting that I was getting her into trouble.
I was only calling to arrange my internet to be connected to my new house after a move. It took days to resolve as I kept getting cut off, I was finally connected to someone in the UK and it was cancelled with a full apology and they reported themselves. I left and went with Virgin.

I’ve had a few rude encounters with staff in Lidl recently but I just take my money elsewhere.

Boots
Website is shit.
No interest from the employees to actually help the customers in store
I used to get repeat prescriptions there, but have switched to Superdrug.
Much cheaper, frequent offers and customer service is excellent.

Try getting any sense out of OVO Energy. They are a total nightmare, and if you email them they just return the mail saying you don't have authorised access to their email address. Phoning them is absolutely unbelievably awful and you get nowhere after wasting hours on the phone. Their incompetence and poor organisation is so incredible, that you end up thinking it must be a deliberate tactic to make the customer give up and go away.

I used to have my own personal complaint handler for BT as I'd had so many issues. I didn't even have to deal with India anymore, I had a lovely young woman in Newcastle that I could go to direct. I have to say though that I'm still with them and I don't really have any issues.

During one of my bt issues they sent round an engineering after I told them I wasn't going to be in. My under 16 DC were at home and the front door was unlocked so the guy basically just let himself into my house to attempt to fix the issue while DC were upstairs with headphones on.

Never had to use their 'security tech thingy', so can't comment. I just like the fact you get to talk to a human being straight away and it's someone you can understand.

Another one that is unbelievably bad is DHL. Part of my job involves customs clearing shipments, and I have to call DHL on a regular basis to complain, but it's pointless as their call centre in the Phillipines just doesn't understand UK customs regulations.

UPS are just as bad!

Evri are actually useless 🤬 why companies use them is a mystery to me. I've been waiting on deliveries for over three weeks now. Also will add Next in, closed my account with them as there delivery and returns are shockingly bad.

I gave up with Boots quite a while ago when I checked online to find which store had a particular item in stock as none of our local ones had it. A store 30 miles away was shown to have several in store, so I phoned up, and whoever I spoke to said, yes, they have them in store (don't know if she actually checked the shelves or just checked the computer). So I took a day off work and drove down. Got there and there were none on the shelves. So I asked one of the staff, who just shrugged and said "we've not if there's none on the shelf" - completely disinterested, even when I showed her the website on my phone showing they had in stock. I went and asked a different member of staff, who basically said the same - not remotely interested. I went to a different department and asked someone else - finally, he was actually helpful even though it wasn't his department - he went back with me to the shelf, could see none were there, checked a computer himself at one of the counters, and could see they were in stock, so he disappeared off into the back, and after what seemed like a long time - I genuinely thought he'd just buggered off, he came back with a box of them, gave me one and put the others on the shelf. Not hard is it to actually be helpful! Shame about the other lazy sods who couldn't be bothered.

Amazed no one has mentioned how awful DPD are yet …. Our driver goes straight past our property at full speed, doesn’t stop, certainly doesn’t knock on and then we get a “sorry we missed you” message. Repeated calls to customer service to say we witnessed driver waving past and tried to wave truck down to STOP and deliver our item. They never ever resolve it.

Evri are perfect in my area but Yodel are being a nightmare atm for me. They’ve had my parcel for 3 weeks and keep telling me to wait or tell me it will be delivered.

OVO energy Alamo had to take them to the energy ombudsman. Genuinely the worst company I’ve ever had to deal with.

vinted😡

Amazon, Shien and Klarna etc. All get rich from encouraging people to spend money on crap they don't need and often can't afford. All ends up in landfill and polluting us.