Norfolkleisurelifestyle Avis 

Absolutely amazing service from a fabulous team! Cannot thank Norfolk leisure enough for all their help! Stunning garden furniture looks great in my garden and their Christmas trees you’d believe are real! Please support this local business!

Based on a glowing recommendation we visited Norfolk Leisure Lifestyle's excellent showrooms, and having found some great products we placed an order for almost £2k of garden furniture on the understanding it would be delivered to us within 4-6 weeks. We paid in full and went away very happy.

After 4 weeks we'd heard nothing from the company so called them to enquire about the status of our order and were told various things: 1. The order was in a container currently stuck in Rotterdam. 2. The delivery could be another 8 weeks. 3. After being pressed for more clarity and some further checking we were told delivery would be around a further 2 weeks. (Still within the 4-6 week timescale we were originally given). So far so good.

After 6 weeks we had heard nothing from the company so we called again and were told, after some initial vague responses, that in actual fact they had no idea when the stock would arrive with them and so they could not give us a delivery timescale. It felt very much as though we were causing them so much trouble having to look things up for us. All we wanted was a clearer idea of when the furniture would be delivered - not unreasonable given that they had taken our payment 6 weeks earlier.

After this rather unhelpful and disappointing phone call we found that the company had a Facebook page that was able to accept posts from the public. We decided to post a comment on the page urging them, politely, to take a more honest approach with their customers in the interests of good business practice. We noticed that the post had been deleted almost immediately after posting.

Shortly after this, we had a telephone call from their operations manager, whose attention to detail didn't extend to getting my name right. It was abundantly clear that he was either going to bend over backwards to give us an accurate indication of delivery timescales (as his glowing LinkedIn profile suggested he might) or he was going to berate us for posting such an 'unhelpful', in his eyes, suggestion on the company's Facebook page.

Sadly it was the latter, the guy was aggressive, direct and we felt rather rude as he proceeded to lay into us for posting a 'rude' (it was not!) post on their Facebook page. As a result of our post, which the company had allowed with their Facebook page configuration at the time, the directors of his company had instructed that our order be cancelled. He also told us that Norfolk Leisure Lifestyle was a trade only company. (This seemed rather odd as they were more than happy to show us, and other members of the public, around their showrooms and take our order in full knowledge that we were just retail customers!)

His subsequent e-mail to confirm our refund was written in very poor English, further highlighting a lack of any attention to detail.

All in all this was a masterclass by the company in how not to deal with customers.

The really sad thing is, they have a great showrooms, a great range of products and great pricing, but it appears, zero ability to interface professionally with their customers. This whole situation (and this review) is 100% down to them. We are happy relaxed people that would have been happy to wait a few more weeks for delivery, if only these unnecessarily rude people had been a little less vague and unhelpful and a little more engaging.

They still have an option to rectify the situation, if the owner would like to contact us...