Ocado smart pass trials, tribulations and tiers

[Milky77]

Background

On March 23, Ocado divided anytime and midweek smartpass members into random groups for access then realised that didn't work so divided us again into most loyal, loyal and near to miscellaneous tiers with having different levels of frequency for order delivery and indeed how many slots you can book in advance.

Certainly the most loyal and probably generally high average spend compared to local populations are the only ones being treated well. They are allowed to still book every seven days, can book 2-3 weeks in advance and are encouraged to book several slots over this time.

The rest of us are being treated with varying levels or service, disappointingly some have not had a single email since March 23 and still don't have access.

Those anytime pass members on the extremely vulnerable list by NHS England should be able to book every 7 days though aren't given the ability to book 2-3 weeks in advance. A few are apparently being called for fortnightly orders.

Ocado has been too greedy. They blame poor service on helping the extremely vulnerable but actually they let too many new and infrequent shoppers place orders putting too much stress on the system.

Complaints on social media are typically met with cut and paste replies. Both the call centre and chat comms have been shut down.

Those with weekly Reserved slots have had their places cancelled. The technology failed, or maybe actually wasn't fit for purpose anyhow

Here was our first thread
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/coronavirus/3862959-Ocado-Anytime-Smart-Pass-holders-have-you-received-priority-access-yet

Let's hope we don't go to a third

Top tip is to try other companies including Morrisons who also deliver from warehouses.

Good luck to all

Lovely that people who are getting to book 3 advance weekly deliveries at a time, are happy with Ocado. Of course you are. Super.

Spare a thought, though, for Ocado's less privileged customers, maybe in their 70s or 80s and with health conditions that make it hard to access the shops but not on the "Covid-19 extremely vulnerable" list, who haven't been accorded any privileged priority access, because of course they spend less with Ocado.

DM and DMIL are appreciative of the "garbage" (sic) which Morrisons is actually delivering o them, when Ocado won't let them near a slot, and I only get 2 a month to divvy up between our 3 households hundreds of miles apart.

Furthermore, Morrisons are still running a normal level of discounts and special offers, which is helpful to those on fixed pension incomes - whereas Ocado have slashed the number of offers (I saved about 60p on my last shop, I usually "save" £20-30) with a commensurate increase in the cost of the weekly shop, and they are sending expensive substitutes to boot.

Morrisons are also donating £10M to food banks - I doubt Ocado's pledge to match customer donations will amount to that sort of sum.

Less "I'm alright Jack" for their most lucrative high spending customers, and more social responsibilty to the vulnerable and elderly outside the shielding list but still reliant on online deliveries, would have endeared Ocado to me a lot more.

Actually Im shopping for 2 of my shielding neighbours and my elderly shielding parents and giving people produce from our chickens, cows and small farm for a reduced price.
Oh and DH and Ds are both frontline NHs .
You know the ones wearing masks with sores on their faces.?
Is that enough or would you like blood as well?

Ah I didn’t mean to sound glib in my last post.

As I’ve said previously I’m shopping for 75 and 88 year old households both of who are on the shielded list

I've stopped buying bulky stuff from Ocado to hopefully free up more space in the van for more deliveries

I think that rant was aimed at me Onthe

I was commenting on how Ocado had sorted this out and it was assumed that Im a selfish witch with no thought to others which is very ironic as the thread was all about annoyed regulars with passes stamping their feet .

The person complaining that Ocado haven't refunded them for a FREE trial has made my day

You couldnt really make it up king
😂😂😂

@Ceara, well said, I could not agree more. Suspect Ocado will not emerge from this looking too good. Morrisons on the other hand, quickly got their box scheme up and running and I have to say I was delighted when I managed to bag one (while Ocado were busy working out their logarithms for the most loyal and best). This week I got a couple of boxes from feedbritian.com (delivery in the M25 area). 3 ready meals from Leon (to feed 4 adults) fruit & veg and cheese box. A lovely treat and great quality food. So I recommend them to anyone who is fed up with cooking 7 nights a week and maybe missing some of their old lunch time haunts.

yes sorry I feel for everyone at the moment it’s a horrible situation. I booked a weekly Ocado slot for my vulnerable parents who worked their whole lives as NHS nurses but I used my account and get it delivered to them.

I doubt Morrisons will come out of this "looking good"
Their food prices have gone up 9.8% against an average of 4% for other retailers.
So NHS workers are still paying more and everyone else nearly 10% more.

I do need to edit the order I placed for the 9th first thing this morning, it’s only got 2 bottles of Jack Daniels in it!

How many bottles do you need?

Ellmau I need to add some actual food to my order or the other 2 shielded households will go hungry. I just added the JD as big ticket items to secure the slot

I suppose the order as is would get me through the week, who needs non essentials like bread and milk when you’ve got 2 bottles of JD 😀

I read your comment as meaning you needed more than two bottles, too...

Concerned people are worrying about my bottles of JD during the lock down. Thank you!

Was tempted to start panic buying JD but will think i'll drop it down to a bottle when I’ve got a proper list for the delivery nearer the time

Had an email today saying I had been upgraded to 7 day slots. Logged in, and I can actually now see slots. But the first slots available are 2nd May 🤷‍♀️

Ocado, ocado, if you under-promised and overdelivered people would love you. You could just have not emailed me, and I would have been perfectly happy just to be able to finally see some slots. But no you had to email me promising me a slot every seven days, didn’t you, and now I am irritated with you all over again.

Ontheboardwalk my brother did that with an order for my mum when all of this happened (five bottles of wine in her case).

Then the website went down and there was the queue, and she couldn’t get in again to edit it... she was so embarrassed when the driver turned up!

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Always save at least 10% on selected brands.

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Out of interest, what do you lot save 10% on? For me it's about 7p off pitta bread, 70p off big tubs of Lurpak, and maybe 5p off plain yoghurt. Not sure there's much else.

ChritmasCarcass that is the risk. The very first thing I thought of whilst still in bed this morning was securing a slot hence the big ticket items.

If I couldn’t edit the order they l'd do what ever I needed to do for the 2 shielded households the come home to drink my JD

Am so frustrated by people randomly getting 7 day upgrades (not for them obviously!) But have been emailing trying to argue nicely my case with ocado as a Smartpass anytime customer who is vulnerable and currently unwell that only getting 1 delivery a month isn't very good (despite being in the 14 day group) and asking please could I just be upgraded to every 7 days and they are just saying solidly no, it's not possible to do that. Ahhh.

Tangledyarn I don’t think there is any rhyme or reason, I was on monthly deliveries up until today (or that was effectively what I was getting, since I wasn’t getting past the landing page).

Then I got that email out of the blue today, but only seem to have access to one delivery every fourteen days in reality 🤷‍♀️

Sorry @Ontheboardwalk, I genuinely thought you needed more, lol.

@ChristmasCarcass Yeah it all seems very random! I really only need a delivery every 2 weeks but it would seem in order to get that I need to theoretically be able to book one every week!

Just updating, because I know there are a few people on this thread in the same situation as me...

I'm a "blue line" and have a delivery booked for a while, but for weeks I've had the grey calendar of doom for any dates beyond that. Was concerned that by the time Ocado let me book something else, the slots would be gone. But my delivery is coming today, and this morning the calendar suddenly opened up for me to book my next slot - plenty of availability.

Yes, PowerslidePanda - that's exactly my experience.

I had been worried that a two week rotation would make it difficult to accommodate ordering for vulnerable relatives as well, but a couple of my non-SmartPass holding vulnerable relatives are finding a manageable number of slots opening up themselves - so I'm no longer needing to intervene.

Tbh it's prompted me to look into so many other sources of food that I doubt I'll be as reliant on Ocado from now on.

I am blue and have three weekly deliveries booked (sorry)

I am posting to say I saw a message last night that the website is especially busy between 4:30 and 6:30 pm as that is when new slots are opened up for general availability. I thought that might be helpful to know.

(The suggestion was that as a special customer I might want to save my special self time by shopping at a different time...)

I'm sorry my post sounded snappy. We are all stressed about elderly parents or other vulnerable relatives and I know we are all using some or all of our slots - whether 7 or 14 or pot luck - for them. But the point is that we shouldn't be saying we're satisfied with Ocado's performance, even if we have enough slots for our own extended family. We need to be aware how they have treated elderly and vulnerable customers and be calling them out on it even if our own family was OK.

Ocado should have done as their initial pious rhetoric indicated they would, and had regard to their elderly and (non-Covid) vulnerable customers rather than ditching them like hot potatoes in favour of the biggest spenders, as soon as they twigged that the government "extremely vulnerable" list gave them cover for doing so. Then this mess wouldn't exist. It might have have meant the "loyal" group only got slots every, say, 10 days but I think everyone would have lived with that, to help out?