Coffee Friend
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Terrible service, do not use
Worst, most infuriating experience. I arranged a standard maintenance to get my Lelit espresso machine serviced. This is usually done yearly. The service costs £170 and £70 for the collection and delivery, so £240 total. The red flags started early: it took them 1 week on average to reply to my emails to simply book the collection. The collection was a disaster: they gave me a date when a driver would come to pick it up, so I ensured that I would be home that day (which required rearranging several work meetings as I do not usually work from home). On the day of the collection, I received a text and noticed they had entered the wrong address (about 20 minutes south of where I live, in London). I called them and they said it was a mistake, and they had no way of getting the driver to make the collection that day anymore, and it would have to be some other day (I never understood why since it's a quick drive from where they expected to do the collection, and their collection window was the entire day, they don't give you a narrow time window). Since I couldn't just reschedule my work meetings to stay at home the next day, they proposed that I leave it at a post office for collection (why not propose this earlier on?!). They sent me a list of 7 post offices, I went to them one by one, and the first 4 of them told me they didn't take large parcels. Eventually, I found one that did accept it, hallelujah. It has been 5 weeks since, and I still have not received my coffee machine back. This is despite the fact that I was told that the servicing takes 1 week. They don't send any updates whatsoever - what sort of company does not give an update on a service that is delayed by at least 500%? I asked two weeks ago and they replied that they are waiting for a few spare parts and they would get back to me whenever they had updates - two weeks later, still no inbound updates. It is clear that I will never again send a machine there. Unfortunately, they are the only company in the UK that officially services Lelit machines. Next time, I will have to use the on-paper much more cumbersome option of sending it to some EU country, but given the experience, that will be much smoother than sending it to Coffee Friend. All in all, expensive, terribly slow, made me waste a ton of time and caused confusion and frustration. I highly recommend anyone to find an alternative...