Waitrose online really poor customer service after losing half my order, are they normally this bad?

[R0seberry]

Not been using Waitrose long. Had an early evening delivery both of us work full time, hospital procedure today, feel crap, people
to feed etc. Unpack the delivery only to realise 19 items are missing. Go online and realise it’s not that easy to put right. Online form with each exact item needing to be inputed separately and who knows when we’d get our delivery. So managed to track down a customer service number and told we might hear something in the morning and to list all the items then on the phone as there is so many.I point out we can’t( back in hospital) hence a Friday order and we’re hungry so she says ring the store. Spoke to somebody there who said they’d speak to the driver and get back to me.An hour later it’s getting late and we’re hungry, nobody has contacted us. Ring the store again only to speak to somebody quite snippy who put me though to the lady in question abruptly half way through the conversation as if were pitas. No apology up to this point or explanation. She then says there is no trace of the items and they don’t know what has happened so she’ll pick them and send them later- who knows when. I’m shattered and need food and sleep. She grudgingly agreed to refund the delivery charge after I pointed out that I’d paid for half an order to be delivered that hadn’t been. 🤔

Are they always this shit and where is the JL/ Waitrose customer service they brag about?

I find them to be exceptionally reliable. Used when for years.

That’s good to know, will give them the benefit of the doubt and try them again.Said lost crate turned up eventually and v late after some pushing -with a bunch of flowers! Delivery drivers themselves always seem to be great. I know mistakes can happen but it was just the dire communication, really poor system of alerting to a problem and the way they lost an entire crate with no clue as to why that was more than a little shite.

They don’t apologise, even when your story shocks everyone else, I found.

Much as I’m generally a huge Waitrose fan, I didn’t have the best experience with their online click and collect service. I decided to order all the food for the wake after my Mums funeral three years ago, for collection from the Waitrose local shop just up the road from the church. I ordered collection for midday and we allowed for an hour to collect the food, and put it out in the church hall before we went back to the undertakers to travel with the coffin to the funeral.

I got a phone call when we were five minutes away from the supermarket to say that most of the food hadn’t arrived yet, so could we go back after 3pm to collect it. I explained why that would be a bit tricky, but that we would be at the store in a few minutes. When we got to the shop, the manager came to see us, and despite me telling him that it was for a wake at 2pm, he again suggested that we could collect all the missing sandwiches, sushi, satays, and juice at 3pm and offered us the cakes and mini quiches that had arrived to take away with us. To say we were forceful in telling him that we needed food for the wake was an understatement and the assistant manager was summoned who was actually great. She took me and a trolley to the sandwich section, and stripped every sandwich and sushi pack from the shelves, as well as several big pots of fruit, mini sausage rolls, and juice. We ended up with quite a bit of what I’d ordered in terms of quantity, but instead of just dropping off 20 or so ready prepared platters at the church hall and calming myself down before my mums funeral, we ended up frantically searching for plates, opening up dozens of takeaway packs of sandwiches, cutting them up, and trying to get everything ready before the funeral started. Needless to say the store didn’t charge me for the food that they gave us, and I did end up getting a very full apology from online Customer Services mad a refund for the entire order, but it hardly made up for the stress on what was one of the most difficult days of my life.

I use Waitrose quite a bit for deliveries but it aeems the store that delivers to me is both further away and smaller than the nearest one.
This means quite often items turn out to be out of stock after i’ve ordered then which is a real nuisance. Weird but when I’ve asked why i’m told it’s because the delivery comes from smaller X Store.
I just use them for particular items that only they stock. Otherwise I use Ocado.