ECH77

I booked Proovia Couriers through Shiply to collect a sofa bed from Brighton and deliver it to Scunthorpe.

A collection date was confirmed, and the seller was given a collection window of 12:42–15:42. On the day of collection, the courier called the seller to say the original driver had become unwell and that collection would be delayed by approximately five hours. At around 6pm, Proovia then called me to say that the replacement driver was stuck in traffic and wouldn't be able to collect the sofa that day.

They proposed a new collection date two days later and a delivery date three days after that, but they hadn't even spoken to the seller before arranging this. I asked them to check that the revised collection date was suitable. I also asked whether they had reviewed the seller's availability notes that I'd provided when making the booking through Shiply. They admitted they hadn't and claimed they had no notes on file because their Shiply representative hadn't passed them on. Whether that's a failing on Shiply's side or Proovia's, it certainly wasn't reassuring.

When they eventually collected the sofa, they also failed to provide the seller with the collection code I'd supplied in advance. Fortunately, I'd maintained good communication with the seller and was able to provide the code directly. It made me wonder what the point is of providing information upfront if it isn't going to be used.

Unfortunately, the delivery experience was even worse.

On the day of delivery, the two-man team attempted to get the sofa into the house but quickly said it wouldn't fit. I suggested removing the feet, but they dismissed the idea, saying it wouldn't make any difference. They then proceeded with what I can only describe as a haphazard and unprofessional series of attempts to manoeuvre the sofa through the doorway. At one point, one of the delivery team even slipped on the doorstep. Their approach gave both me and my partner genuine concerns that they would damage either our home or the sofa itself.

They came across as inexperienced, lacked problem-solving skills, and seemed unable to adapt when faced with a fairly common delivery issue. Eventually, one of them told us the sofa would have to be dismantled to get it inside.

At that point, we asked them to leave it outside the front of the house because we no longer had confidence in their ability to complete the job safely. We then contacted a local delivery company and paid an additional £50 for another two-man team to bring the sofa inside. Within a short time, they simply removed the feet and successfully carried the sofa into the house - without dismantling it and without causing any damage. It was clear the difference was experience and competence, not manpower.

Would I use Proovia Couriers again? Absolutely not.

The service was unreliable, communication was poor, booking information wasn't used, and the delivery team lacked the experience and professionalism needed to complete the service I'd paid for. Having to pay another company to finish the job meant Proovia failed to deliver the complete service they were contracted to provide.

If you're happy for your furniture to be left on your driveway while you arrange and pay for someone else to finish the job, then you might be willing to take the risk. Otherwise, I'd recommend looking elsewhere.

A very straightforward and simple process. Ease of use and practicality make this a very preferable service to use to send and receive. I'd definitely use again.

I had a brilliant experience with TPW Trading Limited. Liz and Tom were amazing from start to finish — they helped me find the perfect car for my needs and were genuinely friendly and professional throughout. When a minor issue came up a couple of days after buying, they sorted it quickly and went above and beyond to make sure I was happy. Their customer service is second to none. Highly recommended, and I’ll definitely be back when I’m looking for another car.

I've used Tempcover twice now and both times it's been easy and the price has been competitive.

The Easter discount offer was very helpful as well, and even though it didn't actually get applied on my order, they acknowledged the error and made a refund.

The customer service has always been timely and professional.

I'd have no hesitation in recommending or using Tempcover again.

It was a very straightforward process. Plenty of information provided in advance, plus a call a couple of days prior just checking I knew what to bring with me. Friendly and helpful service. Smooth and efficient experience. A decent price was offered for the car, and the money was available in my account quickly.
I'd recommend and would use again.

From everything we've read on their website, and from the video reviews we've seen, we thought that this US based company could be perfect for aiding our campervan conversion in the UK, but weren't sure they could export to us.

We sent a message via their website in June 2022, and having heard nothing, emailed directly on the 22nd July 2022.

We heard absolutely nothing, until we received an email randomly from Troy at vanlifetech.com on the 5th October 2022 who apologised for the delay in getting back to us, stating it was the result of an office move. Great that he apologised - always a good sign when a company acknowledges their errors and holds their hands up. And we totally get that office moves, and general 'life' and it's 'surprises' can cause delays to response times, but just to point out that's over a 2month wait for a response to a sales enquiry, so we were a little concerned at this point about how professional and reliable vanlifetech would actually be, but Troy suggested a Zoom or Skype to connect and discuss the project and we thought it was worth connecting to discuss and hopefully put our concerns to rest.

We replied 6th October 2022 and made some suggestions for days of the week that might work for the Zoom, and also asked for clarification of their location so I that I could work out the time difference to make appropriate time suggestions. Never heard back.

So today, 1st November 2022, having waited for nearly another month and having never heard back, I dropped Troy an email to say that sadly, we won't be using them. We just can't rely on their communications, and that along with the fact that they're based in the US (so we can't just pop along to see them and have a chat about the product in person) and their product is by no means inexpensive, makes them too unreliable and risky to put our rolling home heating system in their hands.

We truly hope that they can sort out whatever issues are causing the communication delays/radio silence with their customers, as they appear to have an amazing product that the campervan/vanlife community could really benefit from.

Gutted we won't be able to put it to the test ourselves.

Stayed at Moxy Glasgow SEC
Everything was very positive until checkout...

The discount for parking wasn't applied by the receptionist, even though she confirmed it had been. As a result we were overcharged, so instead of £8, we had to pay £22 (we had to apply via paper form to the carpark directly to get the difference refunded).

My feedback to Moxy would be that if you are claiming to offer a discount to £8 when validating the car park ticket that you either correctly advertise it to customers as a 'possible' reduction to £8, and advise it's only possible if your validation of their ticket actually works. Or your staff advise customers when validating their tickets that if they find that the machine still shows £22 for any reason that they should press the help button. Clearly your team are very aware that this can happen and failing to advise customers is just very poor customer service.

£10 charge which is applied at checkin was never refunded on checkout and the 'possible' 3-5 working days became...13 WORKING days later, and 4 emails chasing up to the 'Crew Leader' (Laura), and one phone call all direct to the hotel. Not a single response to the emails from Moxy SEC - shameful customer service.

Emailed Marriot directly twice and received a response after a couple of days, and finally the refund of the £10 was made.

It's only £10, but 13 working days and a load of effort and time required on my part to get a refund that should have happened automatically is not the experience I was expecting, and might not be what other customers are expecting either, so worth bearing in mind if you plan to stay.

Great company
Great price
Great customer service
Great signal

Have used for years for both my business mobile and my own.
Would highly recommend

What's not to like?:
Great price
Good signal/connection

Been a customer for over a year
Never had a need to deal with customer services since setting up, which speaks for itself.

Tried to get information regarding a rental property via Rightmove - never had a response.

Landlords - you're missing out on interest on your properties.
Tenants - you'll be wasting your time trying to get a viewing and then one can only imagine how difficult communications would be if they were the managing agent for your rental.

Looking for a rental property.
Messaged twice via Rightmove to arrange a viewing - no response.
Left a voicemail at the office - never heard back
Sent a message via their online chat requesting a call back to arrange a viewing - never heard anything.

After trying to get hold of these agents via numerous methods I have still neither managed to speak to anyone, nor heard anything from them.

If I were a landlord, I'd avoid, because clearly you're missing out on interested parties viewing your properties.
As an interested tenant, I'll avoid going forwards, because clearly they're unprofessional and can't be relied upon to communicate, which is obviously only going to cause problems if they're the managing agent for a property.

We've used MyBuilder on numerous occasions and will not only continue to use in order to find great tradespeople, but would also highly recommend to anyone else.

We were impressed from our very first contact with Esale. Communications and responsivity were fantastic, and very refreshing compared to so many other estate agents. Esale were attentive, and proactive. They were on hand for any questions and made the sales process very straight forward. The fact they were online made things easier and more efficient, and we didn't miss having an 'in-person' estate agent experience at all.
We were very impressed and would highly recommend.

Outstanding service. Professional, reliable, and extremely competent. Incredibly responsive and engaged throughout the process. Couldn't be happier with the experience or the outcome. Highly recommended.

Such a shame, as I've always been such an advocate of this company, but the recent customer service experience (9 emails later) has left me very fed up and unimpressed.

So, whilst they are great for green energy, their customer service department is absolutely useless. Getting an answer which actually answers the question you ask is trickier than getting a straight answer off a politician.

In summary, I'd suggest you look elsewhere, they used to be refreshingly different, now they're just as money focused and as uninterested in their customers as the rest.


Interested in more specific detail, read on...
I was emailed early in August to say that my smart meter (which I'd had before I joined them, but as such wasn't of a generation they could use, so I always did manual readings - no problem, it's easy to do!) was finally going to be up and running. Awesome I thought, one less thing for me to do each month!

In September, whilst querying why my monthly fees were 'automatically' being increased in , even though I've never been in debit since we came on board back in May 2019 and we like to keep our monthly DD low and just top up in block over payments to keep us running ship-shape (that's another story and incredibly annoying when they just treat you with a one size fits all approach!) it became apparent that Bulb weren't actually taking our Smart Meter readings every 30mins as it's set up via my account to do (as they said it was from August!).

In fact, they were getting no meter readings at all. I then made the mistake of asking for support from the customer services department, and over 9 emails (and accompanying screenshots) I asked for information as to why I was being incorrectly advised about my smart meter now being set up, whether I should go back to inputting manual readings and if they knew how long it was likely to not be working for and I just kept getting 'template' responses. It's actually amazing how many times someone can reply to a query whilst completely avoiding answering your query. If you want to be equally unhelpful to your customers, give Bulb a call, they have a range of responses that completely ignore the query and are sure to wind up your customers.

It was such a simple query, and I don't mind doing manual meter readings - I have since we joined them in early 2019 - but it's the fact that they can't be bothered to actually respond to your query. They just send template/scripted emails with vague statements, which don't actually answer anything you've asked.

Absolutely no empathy/understanding towards their customers and the fact that knowing what's happening with their account isn't an unreasonable thing to ask.

If I have to give manual readings forever, then fine, but I'd just like to know that. Not knowing if anyone is even looking into the fact that my smart meter isn't submitting readings, or when I might hear back about it isn't all that helpful to be honest. Plus, my account is still showing as being a 'smart' account - it tells me it's giving 30min smart meter readings to Bulb, but obviously it's not, so I don't know how I'll actually know when it's finally working.

My latest email, asking again for more information about the smart meter issue, was responded to with the suggestion that I call Bulb instead and ask them to investigate it.

Absolutely useless.

I decided, I'd give up and just share my experience here - they've had 9 emails to prevent this negative review, I'd rather write this than bother with a 10th pointless email correspondence.

Amazing customer service.
Great website, great products, and a really outstanding level of customer service.
I ordered from the website on the evening and before 12noon the next day I had a personal email from the proprietor thanking me for my custom. Not a confirmation of order email, or an invoice...nope, a separate, personal email to me thanking me for my business.
Something so simple, but so massive to the customer experience. It made the difference to me feeling valued as a customer and deciding to take the time to write a review on here.
Couldn't recommend more highly - and I haven't even received the items yet!

Fantastic product. Not expensive. Speedy delivery, excellent level and quality of packaging.
Will definitely be using again and highly recommend.

Absolutely horrendous.

Only been with them 3 months and during that time we have nothing but issues with the internet.

Their customer service is non existent. You can call, but you'll never actually get through to anyone.

Their 'live' chat is a joke. I messaged the technical team on the 31st January regarding lack of internet and I'm still waiting for someone to respond!

Today, having found we don't have internet AGAIN, I first went on my phone to see if I could find any 'down' alerts for our area - there were none. I rebooted the modem - no change. I looked on their twitter page for any information about issues - nothing. So I called them, went on the live chat a few minutes later and tweeted them.

I was on hold for over an hour, it took 50minutes for someone to respond on Live Chat and when they did they said they apologised (which is something!) and they'd look into it - I asked for more info as to how long they expected the problem etc etc...still waiting on a response.
So for now, I just have to wait and see if it comes back.

The Origin Twitter team were quicker to respond to my publicly visible complaint (funny that!) and suggested I DM them to get it looked into. I DM'd and then no one responded! I guess it looks good to respond to the publicly visible complaints, but responding to the private ones isn't quite so important! - Maybe that's just how it looks to unhappy customers?

I've taken screen shots of all calls and communications and emailed them to the complaints team. I've decided that as a result of today we're leaving Origin by the way. 3months of poor service and shocking ability to get hold of anyone when there is a problem unless maybe you just need to stay on hold for longer than 1hour 5minutes?

Maybe most people have the time and effort to sit on hold for hours every time they lose their internet, but either an internet provider needs to provide you with internet (because that's what you're paying them for!), and then you never need to contact them, or if they know they're incapable of providing a consistent internet service, then they need to provide a customer service team who can actually deal with the issues.

Sadly Origin is incapable of either.

So, we're off to try somewhere else, and depending on how long it takes to get internet back on this occasion and how Origin communicate regarding our leaving them, we may be contacting the ombudsman as well.

My advice - avoid like the plague.

I've been an ovo customer for over three years and until March this year was very happy. Since then I've experienced a downward shift in the quality of their customer service. I wrote a review in March saying just that, but after a positive conversation with Martin at OVO I was convinced to stay with them and give them another chance.

Now it's May and I've just signed up with another supplier. My most recent customer service experience has been another disappointing automated one (no 'real' people to be seen!) and I've had enough of being treated like a number and not a valued customer.

The final straw related to direct debits. OVO contacted me via automated email to let me know that my direct debit was probably lower than needed and they recommended it be increased. No problem with that, perfectly acceptable email, but the key here is the word recommended...

It turns out that it's not a recommendation at all, in fact they will follow the recommendation email with one saying that as you haven't increased it as per their recommendation, they're doing it for you. How super kind of them! I should stress that I've even gone back over the recommendation emails to check I didn't miss any small print saying 'if you don't follow our recommendation we're doing it for you'... There was nothing of the sort.

Well after three years of having over £300in credit with OVO, I don't want my money sitting in their account. I'm happy to just pay off any debit/excess thank you very much.

Unfortunately OVO don't actually communicate with you now though (they used to), so they don't know what you want to do, they don't ask if you want to pay the excess or increase the direct debit. It's a one size fits all automated email type of affair.

I don't mind paying my bills, I don't mind paying any excess off, I don't even mind increasing my direct debit payments if necessary, but I do mind my energy company 'recommending' I do something only to reveal that what they actually meant was 'require'. Say what you mean OVO and certainly don't make a recommendation under the guise of saving me from debt later in the year to then force the increased direct debit anyway. That's not a recommendation, it's a requirement. Asking customers to increase a direct debit is not unreasonable, but using automated misleading communications will get their back up.

I'm going to take the exit fee hit and try elsewhere... It's the only way I can think OVO might learn that they've got to treat customers as people and not numbers you can just shuffle around as you feel like.

Such a shame, they were such a great communicating company only a short while ago.

I've used Sainsburys as our main family supermarket for over 10years,but I'm now looking to change.

We get home delivery because we live rurally and accessing the city isn't always possible.

Time and time again Sainsburys fail to deliver the products we order and then fail to offer a suitable alternative.

Until recently they didn't even offer an alternative if you ordered a free from item and they didn't have it in stock. Now they do, but they feel that its acceptable to offer vegetarian substitutes for vegan items and wheat containing products for gluten free ones. It's disgusting that they care so little about their customers that they'll not only fail to deliver what you want, but then give you an alternative you can't accept.

It's all down to training, and Sainsburys just aren't interested in training their staff to know the difference between vegan and vegetarian, or gluten or gluten free. They clearly don't see it as important, which considering how many people have dietary requirements and how many people are now making healthier choices about their diets, it's rather worrying.

I raised this issue at the beginning of the year with Sainsburys customer services and have been waiting for a reply since the 14th March... It's now the 7th May! Appalling customer service.

I've a prepaid delivery pass, but if I can't rely on Sainsburys to deliver what I've ordered or provide me with alternatives my family can eat, then we'll cut our losses and go elsewhere.

My advice? If you want to buy from a company that's interested in getting things right for you, or that places any value on its customers other than pound signs, Sainsburys is not it. Go elsewhere.