Why did my milk delivery firm’s service turn sour?

The only thing online firm Milk & More delivered was another complaint

In April you highlighted difficulties with Milk & More. We’ve been using the company for five years, and only since its takeover by Müller have we experienced problems – none a direct fault of our friendly milkman. My regular delivery was every two weeks but, since January, it started to be weekly and I kept being told this would be corrected. By the end of March it wasn’t, so I cancelled regular orders and placed one-off orders. Then we had a surprise breakfast delivery on Saturday – when our regular order used to be. Two phone calls to separate offices resulted in the promise of a call back. Instead, a message was left while I was out asking me to call “Mike” but the number was customer service and nobody knew who “Mike” was. What is worse is that under Müller’s new system, instead of paying via direct debit on receipt of an invoice, you now pay in advance by debit card – and it took the money for this order on 11 May without me even knowing.

PC, Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucs

Milk & More was bought by dairy giant Müller from Dairy Crest in December 2015 and has a national workforce of 1,100 milkmen and women (75% are franchisees) delivering more than 100m pints of milk in glass bottles every year. The company may well have been a victim of its own success, as growing concern about plastic waste has led to a surge in online customers.

Its new website, involving the migration of 150,000 online customers from the old one, has piled on the pressure. The company says: “We are sorry that PC received an additional delivery of breakfast items and for any inconvenience this may have caused. We investigated the issue and subsequently contacted PC to explain what we believe happened and to apologise. We appreciate this took longer to resolve than usual, but have processed a full refund.”

The company is still trying to sort out the website and we understand it is planning to close its Manila call centre soon, to improve customer service.

We welcome letters but cannot answer individually. Email us at consumer.champions@theguardian.com or write to Consumer Champions, Money, the Guardian, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include a daytime phone number. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions: http://gu.com/letters-terms

Contributor

Rebecca Smithers

The GuardianTramp

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