Which organisations have you decided never to use again after poor customer service?

[tortoisefairy]

Right I will start. The idea is name and shame and maybe these huge organisations will realise to stop using ridiculous automated telephone services and to stop ripping us off!!!!

Currys - very low level of customer service after our HP printer stopped working as it was 2 months past the warrantee date.
Handy that.
AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

That's better, especially now when I phone to complain and tell them I've written all about it on here.

anglian home improvements - kept cancelling installations dates then accused me of lying when I complained

Green Flag. NEVER AGAIN.
Customer service: shite
Retentions: rude beyond belief and ignorant

ELC. The manager refused to refund me for a faulty toy. Admitedly I didn't have the receipt, but I always thought you didn't need a receipt if it was faulty. Anyway I did get vouchers, I could have lived with that but it was her sneery attitude and hte way she looked down at me and spoke to me like shit. Was 9 years ago, DD was 18 months at the time and we never went back. So they lost out on more sales than the £10 refund would have been.

TALK TALK. They were due to activate my phoneline on 17th Sept, No one showed up, called them on my mobile and i was informed that i had not confirmed properly! I was then put through to somebody else who informed me that it was the sales department that had not put the order through properly!

I re booked the appointment for the 6th Oct, I called back on the 27th Sept to confirm that it had been put through, everything was confirmed and they said 'not to worry everything had gone through properly'

I have just called this morning to make sure and i have been informed that the order did not go through properly so I would have to be put through to the sales department to put my order through again!!!!

Rant Over!

My favourite customer care is from Atlantic, everytime I call they are quick to answer concerns and they are always cheerful!

Currys by stealth, via the Tech Guys. Never was a service so ill- named. I have never heard anything good about them and their services are utterly useless. They kept returning my faulty phone, still faulty, until it was outside the warranty. I pointed out to them that it was Repair or REPLACE and as the phone did not work, at all, I wanted a replacement.
They returned the faulty phone, in exactly the same condition, no explanation, nothing. I was elbow deep in nappies at this point and simply gave up. I think that's their main tactic. I still want to find the dank hole where these Tech Guys live and napalm the lot, then laugh as they scurry about with their Mr Twit beards on fire.

The RAF welfare system.

NightLark Toys R Us are just atrocious. Every time I go in, I wonder how they are still operating stores that are straight from the 1980's - when you buy a game someone has to put a little slip in a stone age machine, print a special receipt. Then the phone someone and you have to queue again and wait for someone to turn up. And THEN they have to find your game.

It is the bizarrest system EVER>

BT: They called me once and offered me a fantastic deal to come back to them so I did. When I got my bill the deal wasn't there, so I rang them (a lot) and they denied that there ever was a deal. So why did I go back to them then?

Play.com: They sell things they haven't got, then tell you ages later after you have waited and waited.

Choice: See Play.com.

I am getting fed up with crappy customer service and talk with my purse nowadays- they don't deliver the service/products properly, they don't get my custom.

Vertbaudet do my head in - seems to completely random whether they actually send your order out at all and if so whether it takes 5 days or 20 to get to you. Think they are still in the 'allow 28 days for delivery' world. Also their CS team apparently can't see any details of an order once it's placed. Never ever again.

M&S online - apart from flowers (which arrive when they say they will) they have screwed up every single order I have placed with them for clothes etc. Always arrives late, if one thing ends up being out of stock it apparently means your whole order gets stuck. I don't understand why it's so crap as they use the Amazon back-end on their system so why doesn't it work as well as theirs?

Enough of the rants though, I love:

• Boden (fab service but I think the quality control and consistency of fit isn't as good as it used to be)
• Amazon (brilliant range, prices, delivery, service. Esp as I have Amazon prime)
• John Lewis (not so much in store these days but online now the site has been revamped am vv impressed)
• Waitrose (lovely service esp our local store, great range, don't think the prices are bad)

Oh I agree about Toys'r'us - I was in last week, and needed something taken off the till as it had been put on the wrong place on the shelf (not just that one, there was a shelf full of them in front of the wrong price label) and I didn't want to buy it at the 'correct' price (they wouldn't honour the price on the shelf as it only said 'In the Night Garden' toy, and I should have known this couldn't possibly apply to the Ninky-Nonk toy I picked up). Having waited with a huge queue of parents and young children behind me to get someone to sort that out, we then all had to wait again for someone else to get called out and process taking it off the till, which also involved a sheet of paper being filled in.

I hadn't paid yet, it wasn't like a return, why so difficult?!

Hate...
Bambino Direct (Can't believe no-one else mentionned them before!)
British gas
BT
M+S
Tesco

Love...
JLP
Waitrose
Costco
Ikea

(and to be honest I rarely shop anywhere else!)

Another one for Currys (which is the same company as Dixons and PC World). Had new tumble-dryer, dishwasher, fridge and freezer delivered. Delivery men refused to take empty boxes away with them and dumped them on our front lawn whilst shouting and swearing in the house, in front of (at the time 18 month old ds1). Delivered the wrong tumble-dryer (a cheaper one than ordered)- took them 4 "attempts" to replace it (by which I mean I had to sit in and wait for 4 mornings, whilst the delivery men said "well we turned up, but no-one was in"). In the end we cancelled the order and reordered from John Lewis with no problems.

Tiscalli, who slammed our phone line.

gardeningexpress.co.uk, took money and then did not deliver plants. Had to file a claim with the small claims courts before plants miraculously appeared. Wish I'd have googled them before using, then I would have found that this is standard practice for them .

Virgin trains cos I made a mistake when booking on line and ended up having to pay an extra £40 because had to buy another ticket for the train journey. Rang a number of times to try to get help but noone could help. I emailed to complain about 4 weeks ago and not had a response.

Clarks because I went to get my toddler's feet measured and found out they were a size smaller than I had been told 2 months before and so DS had been walking about in big shoes. I had actually taken him to the doctors and he had reeceived an xray as a result of him constantly falling over. I have since been to 4 different Clarks over a couple of days and been told he is 3 different sizes. Have also been told in one shop that babies have to wear socks to be measured (for my dd) but not been told the same in other shops. Was told in one shop that cruising shoes are not required and in another was told they are really good for helping your little one to walk.

'not so' Happyshopper now

Found Center parcs to be very helpful and the starbucks on site were really nice and went to another shop to get the food for me that they had run out of. Really nice

I know its some kind of MN offence, but John Lewis.

We had to return a PC monitor because it didn't work properly. Ironically, we'd chosen to buy it from John Lewis because everyone always raves about their customer service/returns policy.

DH had to argue with them for hours and quote the law at them in order to get them to accept that it was their responsibility to give us our money back (we'd probably have accepted a replacement if they hadn't been such utter bastards) and not something we should take up with the manufacturer. We'd only bought it the weekend before too so this went against both their own returns policy and the law.

From the experiences of the other people hanging around in the customer services/returns bit, refusing to comply with the law seemed to be standard practice in the branch too. Most customers don't actually seem to know their rights under the sale of goods act, so they were getting away with it too.

DH now mutters under his breath whenever he sees a John Lewis.

Bad - Comet, Currys, Dixons.

Good - First Direct, John Lewis

Also, I loathe BT due to the dreadful customer service we got trying to install broadband in our previous house after we just moved in. Unfortunately it was very rural so we had no alternative (we did check to see if we could get anyone else). You should not have to email to managing director of a company in order to get them to do what you're paying them to do.

And, since I'm now on a roll... The Allen Ford group of car dealerships are absolute cunts. Do not, under any circumstances, buy a car from them (new or used). Their salespeople will lie to you and they will purposefully try to screw you over. I'd give more details but I don't want MN to get into trouble.

Also, Ford themselves have been completely unhelpful in sorting the above out, and Ford Credit have also tried to shirk out of their legal responsibilities to help us. It's a sorry mess, and does mean that we will not ever consider buying a Ford car again.

I know MN is in with Ford these days, but they really don't seem to give a monkeys about how the dealerships that use their name behave.

Curry's
Mothercare
Barclays
PayPal
BT
Most Councils (though we don't have a choice about them)
Clarks
Marisota - vile horrible company

I seem to remember Allen Ford used to have a garage outside Fords UK head office in Warley (Brentwood). I was there on contract for 18 months and I was warned about them by other people in the office!

CarPhone Warehouse, for selling me a phone which supposedly would act as a modem, and turned out to have no such ability.

They said I had no proof that this had been a requirement, and the member of staff who had served me had left.

Their customer service hung up on me.

I will never shop there again, so in the end they've lost out as since then I have already bought several hundred pounds worth of mobile phones, TomToms etc, ALL FROM OTHER PLACES (have three teenagers).

Pipex...
We tried to leave the buggers cos their service was so poor. They provided the code we needed to change ISP, confirming use of the code meant that our contract was ended. We used code, joined a new ISP, cancelled the direct debit paying Pipex - alls well that ends well...

Nope - the next thing we heard was a letter from a debt collection agency demanding hundreds of pounds in payments we supposedly owed Pipex. The debt collectors wouldn't take our word that nothing was owed, Pipex wouldn't call them off. We ended up with a summons, and threats of bailiffs.

Luckily DH is a persistent old sod, who keeps everything. In the end, he complained to Pipex's boss with a copy of the letter they sent to us about the contract ending. Pipex called off the collection agency and DH insisted that they pay us the £16 that was in fact owing to us at the end of the contract.

I found it a frightening experience, not knowing if there was going to be a knock at the door from someone wanting to take my belongings, especially as DS was newborn at the time.

Looking at the forums we aren't the only people they send the bailiffs after - just glad it was us and not my elderly MIL.

I'm not surprised you were warned about them. They're completely unbelievable.

The thing is, if Ford know that they're so bad, surely the sensible thing would be to withdraw their franchise agreement thingy. Surely they have a clause about maintaining the integrity of the brand etc.

I hope the people we had to deal with in the branch we used get the full extent of what karma has in store for them!

I have just had the biggist run in with very.co.uk - just don't go there.

I adore Lakeland suce good customer service!