Milk&more - Is This Dairy Crest(Fallen)? (milkandmore.co.uk)

Member Name: anonymili

Product:	milkandmore.co.uk
Date:	16/09/09 (590 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Delivery (almost) to our front door

Disadvantages: expensive, regular errors, customer service levels are poor

We've had our milk delivered to the office for over a year now and have been using milk&more (www.milkandmore.co.uk) for this doubtful privilege. Are you sitting comfortably?


ABOUT MILK&MORE

Milk&more are part of the Dairy Crest group and "claim" to be friendly local milkmen. The service is pretty much an online service but if you have any issues you need to contact them by telephone. You can purchase mainly milk from the site, but you can also have bread, fruit, fruit juices and cereals delivered to your doorstep too. Although the prices they charge are considerably more than if you popped along to your local supermarket or corner shop in most cases.

All milk&more milk is British and sourced from UK farms.


USING THE WEBSITE

The website is not the easiest to work out but it is easy on the eye. With a white background and soothing green headings the web pages are not overly cluttered. You need to register as a customer first before you can use the site and this is pretty easy. But beware they don't deliver everywhere. We have our milk delivered to the office and we're on a main road. We have a company account and they can only deliver to us 3 days a week - Monday, Wednesday and Friday. As an experiment I tried to sign up to have milk delivered to my home address but was advised that they don't delivered to my post code which is not exactly of much use to me. I then tried my parents post code and they live just 2 roads away from me and apparently they do deliver there and can deliver Monday to Saturdays - so all in all, it's quite hit and miss as to whether you can have your milk delivered from this lot.

Once you have set up your account (depending, of course, on whether they can actually deliver to you in the first place) you can set up regular orders. For example, you might want to have 2 pints of milk delivered 3 times a week. This is easy enough to set up and once you've done this you can see from the home page when you're logged into your account a list of your confirmed orders on the right of the screen clearly telling you what you're having delivered and when. You can quite easily change your deliveries as well, e.g. if you're going to be on holiday, but you need to ensure you set the right dates and do this well in advance for it to take effect.

There is a box on the left hand side of the screen for you to leave feedback on the website with several options asking how you feel about the site such as:

* I love it
* It's good
* It's ok
* It's not so good
* Oh dear!

There's also a feedback box for freehand comments which I've completed several times but to be honest, even though I've left an email address for them to respond to, not once has any notice been taken of what I've written in there!

The website claims that you can change your order up to 9pm the night before delivery is due but personally I would feel comfortable doing this as they do not seem to be able to carry out the simple instructions already provided on the site even months after they've been provided so I wouldn't leave it to chance to make a change just the day before it was required.

The "Latest news" page gives you helpful tips for the website and advise you very helpfully that delivery is free which I find amusing as they charge £2.40 for 4 pints of milk (when Iceland down the road sells 4 pints for half that price)! So they charge you double for the actual milk and then claim that delivery is free. Nice!

On the "contact us" page is the phone number for milk&more advising that you can phone them between 8am and 6pm every day except Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Years Day or alternatively you can write to their Freepost address.

Included with most of the basic facilities you'd expect from an online website you have the options of

* My account
* Contact us
* FAQs
* Sign out

as well as tabs for:

* Home
* Shop
* About...

There is also a search box in which you can type specific searches yourself.

Full terms and conditions of the site and holding an account are available here: https://www.milkandmore.co.uk/OA_HTML/XXDCTermsAnd Condition.jsp

One plus point about the website is that it is definitely very fast to change screens, I've never experienced any delays when moving from page to page.

The privacy policy is quite in depth and you are given the option to opt out of marketing emails. Just thought I'd mention that it doesn't actually work. I've opted out of receiving these and every few weeks I get an email from them telling me what wonderful products are available from them.


PAYMENT

Up until recently (approximately April or May 2009) you could make payment by credit or debit card, but this has now changed and you have to set up a direct debit instruction to make payment or a recurring debit or credit card payment. This is all very well if they got the orders right every time and if you could rely on them to charge you the correct amount but if you see below in the ISSUES section, you'll find out why I feel this isn't the best method for payment.

The site generally takes payment on the 20th of each month and let you know via email 3 days in advance of the sum that is to be deducted. I do not feel that 3 days is sufficient notice for direct debit deduction amounts.


ISSUES

One of the main issues I have with using milk&more is that when there are problems and inevitably there are problems with the milk delivery at least once a month you have to call up an 0845 and fiddle around with the automated service and are kept on hold for ages till you get through to a "human". There is no way around this as you can't advise of non-delivery or other problems via the website; it's just not set up for that.

We have 10 x 4 pints of milk delivered per week and at least once a month I've found that our milk is missing on any given day. We're in an office block and 3 separate companies have their milk delivered by milk&more. We have clearly stated on our online account to have the milk delivered to outside our office door (we have a fully operational lift) and have provided the entry code to the building. Not once have they managed to deliver the milk to our floor. The milk is never labelled as to who it's for. So it's inevitable that other companies might pick up our milk by mistake but when ours has been missing, I've gone down and politely asked the other companies and on a couple of occasions they've admitted that they seem to have extra milk and have handed it over but more often than not, it's a case of them not admitting it or milk&more not having delivered their milk either.

Now when we were able to pay by debit or credit card you could ring up and tell them that the milk was missing on such and such a day and they would put a credit on the account and we'd make payment once a month ensuring the credits have been applied. Now we have to pay by direct debit this is actually quite a hassle as they just take the payment from the company bank account and as our finance department is based in a different building I have to notify them that we're due a credit and it's actually more trouble than it's worth often and I have to hope that milk&more are efficient enough to put our credits through in time.

I have spoken with customer services on the 0845 on numerous occasions having had to wait to get put through after pressing all the relevant buttons with the automated call handling service and have explained that the milk is missing and why is it that the specific instruction to deliver the milk to outside our office door is never actually followed and every time I have spoken with someone there at milk&more they have been ever so helpful and ever so apologetic and stressed that it's just not on and they will speak to the depot concerned and get the problem sorted and guess what? They seem to take no notice whatsoever. I even take down the name of the person I spoke with and get them to call me back to confirm that they have spoken with the local depot to stress that we put the delivery instruction there on the website for a reason. I've have various people call me back to confirm that they've spoken with the depot but lo and behold, our milk is still left outside the building at street level so anyone can just pop along and help themselves (if that is what has been happening). They have never given me any problems when I've asked for a credit but really it's not a level of service that I'm happy with.

We have been unable to actually talk to our milkman in person as no one gets in before 7.45 at the earliest and he's long since gone before then. I don't really fancy coming in at 5am and laying in wait for the milkman myself, does any of you fancy doing it for me? *grin*


OVERALL

Why not just cancel the milk delivery you might ask? Well we get through a lot of milk and no one here wants to take the responsibility of buying the milk from the shops nearby on a regular basis, we used to share this responsibility prior to using milk&more. So we will continue to put up with the random failures to deliver and pretty much non-existent customer service levels as well as paying double the price for milk until such time as we can find another more reliable and practical source for our milk. Maybe we just should get a cow in the office and milk her ourselves?!

My overall rating for milk&more is a poor 1 out of 5 with no personal recommendation to use them. If others have had much better experiences with this company, then I quite envy you!


CONTACT DETAILS

Url: www.milkandmore.co.uk
Phone: 0845 606 3606
Address: Freepost, milk&more Customer Services, 47 Aylesbury Road, Thame, OX9 3PG

Summary: Definitely not a service I'd recommend