Poor quality product / Very poor customer service

Ordered a "Freya" bouquet of flowers for a very special family 75th birthday celebration.

Flower bouquet arrived in a small cardboard transit box. The flowers were mostly unopened buds with an excess of green foliage / only five roses were open. (The presentation of the bouquet was also poor as it looked like it had just been thrown together). The product obviously did not match the description photograph as shown on the Serenata Flowers website (which was important as they had been bought as a gift for a family 75th birthday celebration which was to take place the next day). Because the bouquet could not be used for its intended purpose a replacement had to be bought at short notice from a local florist.
There was also no telephone contact number for the florists who made them up so that I could get a replacement as they were supposed to be given to the recipient the following day.

I opened up a complaint on the Serenata website where I stated that the flowers were unsatisfactory and provided a photograph of the bouquet I had received as requested. I said I did not want another bouquet as it would not be delivered in time (and I had since bought my own replacements). I requested them to come and pick the original flowers up and for a refund.

I later received a reply from a "Customer Delight" (?) service operator called “Ana” stating

"After reviewing the image, our floral team has confirmed that the bouquet has been made to the correct quality and size as expected.

If you are unhappy with the flowers after following the care instructions, please contact us again with an additional photograph, within 5 days of the delivery date, showing the specific issue and we will look into this further."

Unfortunately I hadn't got 5 days to wait so I had to go to Tesco and bought £40 worth of flowers and made my own display.

However I did as instructed and 5 days later the bouquet was still not fit to be used with many of the flowers still unopened. So again I sent a message to their customer services attaching a photograph of the bouquet which was still, in my opinion, not as described and thus unable to be used.

Then followed several emails back and forth with “Skye” and despite more photographs their customer service rep insisted that there was nothing wrong with the bouquet and even at one point insisted that I did a stem count (to my mind wilfully misunderstanding the nature of the problem and deliberately stalling / trying to deflect the complaint). They then stated that they were unwilling to progress the complaint any further and as a consequence of that I have had to initiate a chargeback complaint with my credit card provider for a refund.

This used to be a good company but it is not the first time I have had issues with poor service in the last year and now I will never use them again. I would seriously recommend that anyone reading this review look elsewhere.