To wonder where the old John Lewis has gone?

[Deadlylampshades]

Is it just me? I am sitting on the phone waiting on hold for the main John Lewis customer services - it has so far been 28 minutes and counting....
I called twice last week to try to resolve the same issue- they were both wait times of over 15 minutes.....

I am trying to replace an expensive boxed table lamp (bought as gift) which JL online decided they would post in a flimsy grey plastic bag- it arrived completely crushed and split - quelle surprise!

I love JL, l spend probably far too much there, especially in the run-up to Christmas, it's always been a good experience and I have bought with confidence knowing that they have (had) great customer service.

Am I alone in seeing a big drop in their approach to customer service?
If staff post fragile items in plastic bags they will also incur significant costs in unnecessary replcements.

Well I've written this post, drunk a cup of coffee and am STILL on hold after 39 MINUTES.

Please come back old John Lewis- customer service was your USP

Have I just been unlucky?

(finally hangs up after 41 minutes)

Re post-purchase customer service, I suspect t there are too many people taking the piss. E.g I had a friend who took an item to the store for repair, which she had originally bought somewhere else, and JL seemed to accept it without much questioning. It’s their eagerness to maintain a reputation that then has an adverse effect on their genuine customers.

I returned something recently that I’d bought online. I couldn’t find the return slip, but knew I’d bought it at 20% off. I told the cashed this but she still proceeded to hand me a credit note for the full value (which I declined).

I don't go in anywhere near as often as I used to.

Their product range has changed in the household department - I wanted to buy some stuff for a university-bound self catering DC and new filters for the kitchen over-oven extractor unit. They had only one thing on the list!

We ended up in Asda and Robert Dyas, and all the stuff from there has been fine

I think JL store's look very stylised and sterile. I don't mind the one in Bluewater but the Oxford Street one is trying to be too Harvey Nicks or Selfridges. Things change, I get that, but they have jumped from one direction right to the other. My favourite JL store in London is Peter Jones (not sure why they never changed the name) but that is showing signs of getting too stylised too.

The staff in JL and Waitrose used to be exemplar. You assume because they are "partners" rather than staff they are invested and want to provide the best service as profits bump up their bonus. However, you can tell in some of the London stores, that something has happened. A dropping of standards, a bit of demoralisation, not sure. I have had staff barge in front of me rather than wait a second to let me past. That would never have happened in the past.

My local Waitrose is good. The regular staff are great. They seem to rely on a lot of teenagers at off peak, and they are generally good too. However I have noticed that a few of them are not up to the usual standard, talking about their clubbing exploits in loud voices, or talking about girls they got off with in lower tones, but customers can hear. Next time I hear this, and it has been on several occasions, I am going to contact them. It seems indicative of how their once exemplar standards have dropped.

It is really sad what is happening to our retail stores. They are all sliding off the mountain, some in spectacular avalanche style, others like slowly melting ice over a longer period of time. I don't think the Great British Public has fallen out of love with shopping, more like the retail sector is treating us with contempt. There is less money sloshing around. Stores should be doing their utmost to keep the cash flowing in and dumbing down service is not going to help anything or anyone.

I really wonder what will happen to shops like JL when all the boomers are gone and nobody can afford their prices? Perhaps that's why you can't get through then OP, profits dropped so no money for call centre staff?

The in-store experiences they’ve started to offer are lovely e.g. the beauty studio (with free Prosecco), style consultations (free tea, coffee or water) and I have found the customer service in store is still generally good, though far fewer staff seem to be available on the shop floor and their knowledge is patchier than it used to be.

The cakes aspect of the cafe has definitely gone downhill with huge portions but of poorer quality. perhaps because of the free cake and coffee vouchers.

It must be so challenging, how can they compete with internet giant tax avoiders such as Amazon?

I no longer buy anything from Amazon for that reason (cancelled prime a few months ago) meaning that I have had to be more organised this Christmas. I’ve spent a lot at JL and the small independent stores in my local town but feels much more satisfying. I would pay a little extra if necessary to keep real shops on the high street and people in decent jobs at decent profit-sharing companies like JL.
I hope their customer service is good this week, I’m waiting for a furniture delivery!

I had a miserable buying experience with them-ended up with an assistant buying the item on-line for me while I was stood in the store.

When I went to collect it a couple of days later at Waitrose at 7 in the evening, the assistant-two of them just chatting- couldn't be bothered to key in the order number for me, even though it meant I had to faff about looking for my glasses. There was no queue, no-one else even in the vicinity, so it just looked like sheer laziness to me.

Next time, I'll go to Argos!

Do you think anybody from these chains every read these threads? They probably spend a lot on research but this is a free resource for them, so you would hope so. I would like to think that today somebody in their marketing department has to check the mentions in the media on a daily basis and send them around to the senior management board.

👋 if that is the case! Please confirm to them we are long time users of JL, normally a benchmark of exemplar customer services, who want to see the brand thrive, evolve and develop but whose standard and focus seems to have waned somewhat away from the customer service and values that were once synonymous with the brand.

Friend of a friend did a lot of warehouse work and JL were the worst for pushing things of shelves and dropping white goods, he would never order from them having seen what they do. Have a disabled relative who now can't get his wheelchair around the newly returned store. I used to love the kitchen and bathroom departments but halve the stock seems to have gone.

JL went through a bad time in the 90's with their in-store 'Partners' increasingly arrogant and quite frankly turgid as they stood around the store chatting away to each other and looking up from time to time to notice strange people walking round ... ahhh yes, customers!

Then Andy Street got the CEO role in the mid-2000's and the whole dynamic changed. He injected a sense of realism that if JL doesn't work hard to keep its customers happy with pleasant attentive service then they're out of business. Unfortunately the last couple of years has seen a downturn, because Andy Street left for pastures new, and this is a similar "rot has set in" that M&S have suffered from for a lot longer.

The Cambridge one is lovely though.

The JL stores I use mostly frequently are Bluewater, Cambridge and Peter Jones in Sloane Square. I've not had any problems with service and I shop regularly for adult clothes, children's clothes, make-up, kitchen equipment and knitting / crochet products.

My local Waitrose also has a high percentage of young people working there. They seem to mainly be stocking shelves, they work hard and know where all the stock is if I need help.

High Wycombe is my number 1 JL with a massive Waitrose nearby.

Cribbs Causeway is number 2. Nice restaurant, v v nice lemon drizzle cake and cappuccino.

Previous Waitrose/JL worker here...

• The whole “we’re different to everyone else” thing at John Lewis is nonsense. The basic hourly pay is much less than other retailers and the bonus is meant to make up for that.

• Speaking of pay, management would regularly play “silly buggers” and just not pay anyone properly one month so everyone had to chase their pay up (and you’d always have have some tired single mum or nervous sixteen year old not doing this properly)

• Ditto with things like holidays - communication would intentionally be fudged so entire departments would miss part of their holiday.

• The atmosphere generally isn’t one of solidarity - there’s often a feeling that the more “intelligent mature” people (who’d suggest sensible stuff like not asking 18 years who’d just passed their driving test to work on deliveries and suggest colleagues not be bullied into unpaid overtime) were pushed out.

• A lot of the Waitrose managers are incredibly controlling and chippy (don’t get me wrong they do work hard and their pay isn’t bad, but it’s one of those weird jobs socially where it’s not quite “at the level” of a normal middle class or graduate job) and resented the students or people with better educations than them.

So you’d get little games being played where management would be “strongly encouraging” students to up their hours ( “everyone else is doing overtime stop letting the TEAM down”) close to final exams to get them to screw up their educational futures.

• Quite a few of the male managers would “target” the female students and “have favourites” who they’d protect from bullying in return for “favours”. There’s something called “Pay for Performance” which meant that managers could play little social games and randomly up the pay of their favourites.

• New sick leave policy means that even three days sickness = disciplinary. Oh, some of the male managers would let you off if you agreed to be their “favourite”.

Overall I think it’s ok for a silly little part-time job if the hours suit and you keep your head down. And I had some amusing memories.

But the whole John Lewis “legend” of happy staff and happy workplace and therefore great customer service really is just that.

Interesting @KedsAndLaces

I went into the electrical shop dept as I wanted to buy a new TV and didn’t have a clue what I wanted. I waited around for one of the men working there to help me for about half an hour but was completely ignored. They were only interested, it seemed, in banter speaking with the male customers. I’ve never felt more middle aged and ignored in fact. So I went off, did some research online and bought a TV off Amazon.

"Do you think anybody from these chains every read these threads?"

Doubt it. Because some of the recent changes in M&S (like good ranges of the basics, in good fabrics but no more expensive than Uniqlo) would have happened years ago

Gosh Keds that sounds awful. I imagine it will only be a matter of time before they go the same way as House of Fraser. Sounds rotten to the core.

Back in 2003 I worked in a call centre doing JL customer services, so it had been outsourced even then. We weren’t employed by JL, we were employed by an external company, but we were instructed that if anyone asked we should say we were JL partners, which wasn’t true.

This was in a city that didn’t even have a JL, and at the time I had never been inside a JL store. The people who phoned up definitely believed they were phoning a store, and we weren’t allowed to tell them otherwise.

At the time it was about 50% taking orders over the phone (they had started web sales by then but in those days a lot of people didn’t trust it), and 50% handling complaints about late deliveries, wrong orders, etc. As a call centre person the maximum power I had was to give a £10 voucher, which I was allowed to do only very sparingly. Anything that needed more serious compensation I had to escalate to a “manager”, but the “managers” were just other 20-yr-olds who had a few more weeks’ experience on the phone lines than we did and were therefore considered better at fobbing people off.

I didn’t stick it for very long - I hated being timed going to the loo and being fined if I was more than 4 minutes! - and I also hated misleading sweet little old ladies on the phone.

I think give it 5 years (Max) and J Lew will be no more

"I really wonder what will happen to shops like JL when all the boomers are gone and nobody can afford their prices? Perhaps that's why you can't get through then OP, profits dropped so no money for call centre staff?"

Everyone will be shopping online. It's only the (rather anomalous) large number of over 55s currently in the population, who learned their shopping habits in RL stores, who are keeping actual shops going. Once they go, so will many shops.

Your high street will then consist of coffee shops, dog grooming parlours, yoga studios, charity shops and one convenience store

The level of customer service in pretty bad in-store too. I never forget the time I was looking at their wallpaper selection in the Oxford Street store and was pretty much ignored. A middle-aged woman chewing relentlessly on gum, wearing rouge red lipstick. Regardless of her demeanour, I approached her she advice and she didn't give me any eye contact. Other customers picked up on her sheer level of rudeness. Needless to say, I reported her to the floor manager and have her a piece of my mind.

There’s a new JL local to me in Oxford, it’s gorgeous, I bought towels in there which are lovely. But everything else is out of my price range pretty much. Customer service there is great - but I did order a top online and returned it and had to chase for the forgotten refund.

I ordered a set of v expensive champagne flutes (for someone retiring from work with a big whip round) and when they arrived there was a shower rack in there as well? I took a look on their website and it was worth over a hundred quid! Being honest I went into the shop, found a manager and explained what happened, giving it back; she literally said ta and walked off!

Must admit the devil on my shoulder though, fuck it, I should have bloody kept it!

Both they and Waitrose are living off of their old reputation for great customer service imo. They figured it would be enough to protect them as new managers were brought in to introduce 'new ways of working' that were supposed to be more efficient (but in reality were to see how few staff on low hour contracts a store could be run on).