Complaint about Wickes

[gills77]

I wonder if any one can help me.

 

I have a serious complaint again DIY store, Wickes. I won't bore you with the entire story, but in summary (and the spiel below is not even the half of it)... We made an order from Wickes in May for about £500 worth of sand, ballast and other building products, as we were laying a patio. We made the booking online with Wickes on the Wednesday for the following Saturday. As we had had problems with Wickes deliveries previously - a driver getting stuck on our driveway (we have a long driveway) due to his error - and we were hiring two friends, who worked as labourers for the weekend at a cost of about £500 to lay the patio, we wanted to make sure that the products would turn up. We phoned Wickes on the Wednesday who assured us that delivery would be made in a 3 hour slot on the Saturday.

 

Come the Saturday, we received a call midway through when delivery was due from the driver, saying that he was refusing to deliver, due to him previously getting stuck - he hadn't even attempted to make delivery. To cut a long story short, he and his manager were adamant that he wouldn't deliver on health and safety grounds, despite the fact we had been assured that delivery would be made. They could not answer why we were not told this before (the order was made 4 days previously), why we were assured verbally the delivery would be made, why a more competent driver or different vehicle could have been used, or why other Wickes drivers had made identicial deliveries previousaly without problem. We even said that the driver could drop the items at the end of our driveway (i.e. next to the road) and we could transport them ourselves using the excavator we had hired, but they wouldn't even entertain this. So, the delivery was cancelled by Wickes, our patio wasn't laid and we still had to shell out for the excavator and labour hire.

 

Our complaint was compounded by the fact that it took two further calls for Wickes to actually cancel the order and refund our monies. We were informed that Wickes had a dedicated complaints team and we should make a complaint to them, which we did. The result was after various communications, Wickes' method of dealing with complaints is that the dedicated complaints team just gets the store responsible for the delivery to deal with the complaint (which is hardly indpendant). Unsurprsinsingly, they did not uphold our complaint, and as well as ignoring many of the questions and complaints I raised, they also lied to me in their response by stating facts that simply weren't true. Despite my efforts, any response from Wickes' complaints' team was a regurgitation of the same party line that was provided to them by the store (i.e. those complained of) - this was all to apparent as the fonts in the emailed response from the complaints team differed, so it is quite clear that they topped and tailed their response and just copy and pasted the crux of the response, presumably from the manager of the store responsible for the delivery. I emailed Wickes two weeks ago to raise further points, and they have simply just decided to ignore my compaint now and not respond at all.

 

Has any one got any ideas how I can take this further? Are there any Trade or Consumer Bodies that I could contact? By the way, I sent a letter to the CEO's office too, and that was also completely ignored, despite being recorded as delivered. I would like some sort of compensation for what has happened, but more than anything, I want to expose Wickes' terrible customer service, and sham of a complaints scheme, that culminates in those complained of simply responsding to complaints and lying and ignoring questions in the process.

 

Thanks in advance.

[ericsbrother]

read their delivery T&C's very carefully and see if there is anyhting in them that says that they wont deliver on a public road for H&S reasons and then go after them for that rather than any argument about whetehr your drive was suitable or not.

If their lorries are not fit to be on the public highway then VOSA should be informed so anything they admit to will damage them. try and get something in writing on those lines and then send a LBA to the CEO and see what he does. You should be prepared to follow the matter up but claim for your losses that are a direct result of them breaking the contract at the time of delivery, not the bits beforehand so a logged call on the saturday will be the key here.

[Conniff]

They are on Twitter @Wickes and Facebook, so be sure to go there and make some noise.

[ma-cho]

Absolute nightmare! AVOID!

 

They have made my bathroom refurbishment a nightmare.

Firstly, I have paid extra for Saturday delivery - only 70% of the items ordered arrived on Saturday, of which Bathtub front panel came broken and bath tub was missed off. That is not the end, as the builder started tiling one pack of the wall tiles were discovered broken - luckily he could utilize them.

John - Twickenham Hub manager - tried to rectify some of the above issues - he brought a bath tub in his own car on Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately, bath tub had a hole on the side. He promised a Monday delivery, which took place.

I have spent about 2 days chasing up a front panel for the bath tub - been to 3 different stores after checking the stock - Hanworth, Twickenham and as far as Slough. None of these stores had a P-shape bath tub front panel which was clean, not scratched nor broken!

This is ridiculous - why are you stocking a bath tub and have no front panels for it? Or why these panels are such a poor design that break so easily? Every single member of the staff at your stores has complained about these panels.

Finally, I needed 2 single floor tiles to finish off the bathroom floor, so I went to Hanworth store to find out that single tile price was £5.99, while the whole pack of 7 tiles was £12.80. Joke!

Quality of the wall tiles is another issue - scratched, pattern washed out.

In addition to the above.

I have spent about 3 hours in total on the phone to your customer services regarding the issues.

I could not get heater - tower rail delivered nor even a rough estimate on its availability, so had to cancel and source it elsewhere. Same with the soft close toilet seat. Both refunded and bought elsewhere.

Problems, problems...

 

Has all of the above "Got your name on it"?

 

And now a cherry on top of it:

After contacting Wickes customer services with all of the above - I had to ask for an update, as nobody was keen to reply. After that I got an apology and an offer of £20 worth of voucher!!!

After about £1700 spent.

This an insult.

 

AVOID !!!