John Lewis - Refusing to honour order after written assurances

Okell

Coff33Break said:

"Order acceptance and the completion of the contract between you and us will take place on the despatch to you of the Products ordered unless we have notified you that we do not accept your order, or you have cancelled it in accordance with the instructions in --

So even if you had an email confirmation, there's no contract until they despatch the item.

... I'm guessing then verbal promises from their staff in writing do not mean anything then too? ...

I'm unclear what actually happened.

Did the failure in JL's system simply mean that your payment wasn't processed or that they never received your order?

If the former then depending on exactly what you and JL staff said to each other subsequently I'd have thought you might be able to argue that you had made an offer (your online order) and that JL accepted that offer when their staff promised to do whatever it is that you say they promised to do.  Those promises post-dated your agreement to their T&Cs and thus superseded the term about acceptance only taking place on despatch.

If you want to take it further that's the approach I'd take in arguing that a contract was formed when they made their promises to you and they are in breach of it.

Up to you if you want to pursue it.  No guarantee of success though...

Coff33Break

Okell said:

Coff33Break said:

"Order acceptance and the completion of the contract between you and us will take place on the despatch to you of the Products ordered unless we have notified you that we do not accept your order, or you have cancelled it in accordance with the instructions in --

So even if you had an email confirmation, there's no contract until they despatch the item.

... I'm guessing then verbal promises from their staff in writing do not mean anything then too? ...

I'm unclear what actually happened.

Did the failure in JL's system simply mean that your payment wasn't processed or that they never received your order?

If the former then depending on exactly what you and JL staff said to each other subsequently I'd have thought you might be able to argue that you had made an offer (your online order) and that JL accepted that offer when their staff promised to do whatever it is that you say they promised to do.  Those promises post-dated your agreement to their T&Cs and thus superseded the term about acceptance only taking place on despatch.

If you want to take it further that's the approach I'd take in arguing that a contract was formed when they made their promises to you and they are in breach of it.

Up to you if you want to pursue it.  No guarantee of success though...

In their words, there was a system wide payment error that caused a false confirmation of my order. They and I assume there was an order ID when I got the confirmation page but I never noted it down as I didnt think I would need to.

Then for a week the staff responded with things like "We completely understand this error led you to sell your old TV and purchase a wall mount… We are absolutely committed to resolving this quickly and honouring your original order intent."

And one person even told me to rebuy the TV and they'd refund me the difference in evouchers. 

Then suddenly that all changed, I was told to disregard all of those promises as miscomunication, however even after that the case was never fully closed and I was led on for a few more weeks, believing it would still be honoured.

It was only today that I was finally able to speak to someone in person, someone who didnt know the case or read the messages, and it was shut down and closed, citing it should never have gone past my first message so anything after that is irrelevant and that a misprice was the reasoning even though I had proof of other buyers being honoured, including one that had the almost same situation as mine.

I'm pretty fed up of messaging them to be honest but it's been so long and I was given so many promises it just feels wrong to let it go.

screech_78

I’m not aware of a system wide payment issue. It may have happened, but not something that came our way or complaints raised that I’m aware of. 

When you place an order on the website, you’ll receive an order acknowledgement. Both this email and the terms on the website advise this isn’t confirmation of your order and your order is only confirmed when you receive the order confirmation (which is sent after internal security checks). Order can still be cancelled prior to despatch though. 

I’m sorry for what happened OP, but i can’t understand why you would sell your TV based solely on an end screen at the checkout. Surely if you hadn’t received a confirmation email, you would have at least checked to make sure it had went through? 

screech_78

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head said:

Nothing to do with consumer rights but I don’t understand how big companies fail so spectacularly with these kinds of issues.

Either they tell the customer no as a contract wasn’t formed or they tell the customer they will do xyz and do it. 

Time spent dealing with OP’s communications not only wastes OP’s time but is costing JL money to pay the staff. 

Crazy stuff. 

Saving money by outsourcing customer service abroad is usually the answer. 

MyRealNameToo

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head said:

Nothing to do with consumer rights but I don’t understand how big companies fail so spectacularly with these kinds of issues.

Either they tell the customer no as a contract wasn’t formed or they tell the customer they will do xyz and do it. 

Time spent dealing with OP’s communications not only wastes OP’s time but is costing JL money to pay the staff. 

Crazy stuff. 

It's easy... call centres are the sweat shops of the western world. Did a decade in them before finally escaping. 

Training in the majority of them is the bare minimum, you are trained how to do the 5 basic bits of your job which will cover 98% of calls fine. The remaining 2% is a hundreds of different things and even if you did increase the training 10 fold in duration its likely a given agent won't be asked most of them in a year and so will forget how to deal with them. 

The second problem is you have SLAs and your continued employment requires you to hit them constantly. Normally how long each call lasts (AHT), how long after a call ends are you read to take your next call (WT) etc. In the worst call centre my ex worked in the AHT was under 10 seconds. There were 20 agents to each team leader and the team leader isnt there just to answer queries. So customer asks you something you dont know about your options are to either 1) answer to the best of your ability or 2) queue up to try to speak to your team leader and destroy your AHT for the day. In practice the team leader may also not have any more idea than you and tell you to go ask someone else. 

When working for a supermarket call centre most calls were asking opening times, complaints about something being out of date or gone moldy before its use by date etc. Those we were trained for. One call was a transfer from in store, customer had gone in to collect some photos we'd printed and in store had told him the prints and negatives had been destroyed as they contained obscene material of young kids... I mean what do I do with that one? No one trained me on that one. Similarly the police called saying they'd recovered a stolen car with a receipt for petrol from after when the car was stolen with a loyalty card number on it which wasnt the car owners could I give them the details of the card owner? That one is easier as I can't but they asked can I say if its registered or not? Didnt feel like breach of the DPA to say that but should I check? Again police requests weren't in our training.

You get urban myths start taking root too, before I escaped contact centres fully I started working in technical claims, our training was 2 months compared to the 5 days of the guys on the standard claims line. You'd often hear those on the standard line trying to answer a question that should have been referred to us, probably 70% of the time it was about right but the rest of the time it was wrong. When challenging on agent on it they said they'd heard a senior saying it so assumed it was right and repeated it, these things then take root and are difficult to stamp out. Ideally they should transfer the call but company policy was for a handover so it meant the agents A

With this sort of system outage you'd ultimately expect something to come down on what to tell people but firstly there needs to be various meetings with IT, Ops, Marketing/PR, Commercial to come up with a document with a script, FAQ etc. It then needs to be cascaded out as the COO won't be emailing every call centre agent but instead will send it to centre managers, who will distribute to the relevant department managers that send it to the team leaders and the team leaders need to have a huddle to train their team, answer Qs etc. Obviously you can't close the call centre for 20 minutes for everyone to do the training at the same time and you have staff on shifts so have to make sure they are all covered. 

When I did outbound sales for a warranty company at times we'd get 1-2 changes to the terms a week but the memos came round without a time/date and couldn't tell which is the new version and which is the superseded version. 

Added complexity with JL is that their call centre is outsourced; no idea if the staff are ring fenced for JL or answer for multiple different firms. Have done the later which makes cascading information more complex as M&S won't be happy with their call waiting times going up because staff are off the phones being briefed on a JL issue and the staff work across both brands. 

screech_78 said:

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head said:

Nothing to do with consumer rights but I don’t understand how big companies fail so spectacularly with these kinds of issues.

Either they tell the customer no as a contract wasn’t formed or they tell the customer they will do xyz and do it. 

Time spent dealing with OP’s communications not only wastes OP’s time but is costing JL money to pay the staff. 

Crazy stuff. 

Saving money by outsourcing customer service abroad is usually the answer. 

Outsourcing adds another layer of complexity but most the problems existed in non-outsourced call centres I worked in too

Coff33Break

screech_78 said:

I’m not aware of a system wide payment issue. It may have happened, but not something that came our way or complaints raised that I’m aware of. 

When you place an order on the website, you’ll receive an order acknowledgement. Both this email and the terms on the website advise this isn’t confirmation of your order and your order is only confirmed when you receive the order confirmation (which is sent after internal security checks). Order can still be cancelled prior to despatch though. 

I’m sorry for what happened OP, but i can’t understand why you would sell your TV based solely on an end screen at the checkout. Surely if you hadn’t received a confirmation email, you would have at least checked to make sure it had went through? 

Yeah selling the TV was definitely a mistake on my behalf. I think I saw the confirmation page and had no reason to question othewise and was excited I had gotten a good deal so acted fast. The TV came with free fitting so I needed a wall mount and didnt have space for both TVs. Excitement got the better of me.

I'm not sure on the exact issue but it was initially just termed a system error then someone higher up confirmed it was a payment thing on their end. It's interesting that someone else on the HotUkDeals site had a similar issue, confirmation but no order in their order history, theirs was honoured though.

Thanks for taking a look though.

screech_78

Coff33Break said:

screech_78 said:

I’m not aware of a system wide payment issue. It may have happened, but not something that came our way or complaints raised that I’m aware of. 

When you place an order on the website, you’ll receive an order acknowledgement. Both this email and the terms on the website advise this isn’t confirmation of your order and your order is only confirmed when you receive the order confirmation (which is sent after internal security checks). Order can still be cancelled prior to despatch though. 

I’m sorry for what happened OP, but i can’t understand why you would sell your TV based solely on an end screen at the checkout. Surely if you hadn’t received a confirmation email, you would have at least checked to make sure it had went through? 

Yeah selling the TV was definitely a mistake on my behalf. I think I saw the confirmation page and had no reason to question othewise and was excited I had gotten a good deal so acted fast. The TV came with free fitting so I needed a wall mount and didnt have space for both TVs. Excitement got the better of me.

I'm not sure on the exact issue but it was initially just termed a system error then someone higher up confirmed it was a payment thing on their end. It's interesting that someone else on the HotUkDeals site had a similar issue, confirmation but no order in their order history, theirs was honoured though.

Thanks for taking a look though.

If you have it in writing that they would honour the price for you, I think you have a good chance of getting a result if you escalate. Even if you dont, my advice would be to email the Chairman (google for email address) with a polite email and the team there would have a look. I’d certainly be sympathetic, not everyone works the same unfortunately but won’t do any harm to try. It’ll probably also come down to how much money we’re talking about. 

Grumpy_chap

MyRealNameToo said:

One call was a transfer from in store, customer had gone in to collect some photos we'd printed and in store had told him the prints and negatives had been destroyed as they contained obscene material of young kids... 

I am somewhat perplexed that photos of that nature were destroyed rather than passed to the Police.

Given the high numbers of prints processed, these can't all be manually reviewed so I assume there must be a software assessment.

Aylesbury_Duck

I'd just buy from elsewhere.  Do you really want to force a reluctant sale from a company with that level of customer service?  Would you have any confidence they'd sort out any problems that might occur with the TV?

I believe Richer Sounds has a good reputation for long warranties and good service.

visidigi

This isn't the price-error Samsung  77" OLED is it?