Citymove is a nationwide furniture removalist we booked to move us from Kensington to East Victoria Park (Perth) during March.
To summarize our experience, Citymove breached the new Consumer Legislation at every point possible by failing in their legislative obligations to uphold the customer guarantees given at the point of booking their services. We were provided false, misleading and insufficient information regarding their provision of service. The fact that Citymove does little more than procure bookings and contract out the services was never mentioned, instead by referring to the removalists as 'our staff' it gives the impression that Citymove is the service provider and can be relied on and trusted.
At the time of booking our 'move coordinator' misrepresented their knowledge of Citymove, failed to disclose there were in fact no 'professionally trained staff', no employees and no oversight or management of the contractors. I only discovered this when I informed the removalist that I would not be making payment that night and I would be taking my dispute up with their employer, being Citymove. I reasonably believed they would be held accountable for their total failure to provide the service we had been guaranteed. This was not the case, instead there was a heated discussion where I was told in no uncertain terms that he had been engaged as a contractor, it was his truck, and his mates worked for him, not for Citymove. He used coercive threats to take my furniture ‘hostage’ to demand payment be put through, I made the payment under threat. Citymove management had failed to return or respond when I called to complain during the move and following day, I left numerous messages with 'secretaries' all of which were ignored. I found this blatant disregard for the appalling service we had received and the extreme stress caused to me personally by the removalists leaving both properties in total dissaray to be utterly infuriating.
Clearly the service had not been suitable for the purpose for which it was aquired, the staff were not professionally trained, they couldnt even manage getting furniture inside the house on delivery! Even the packing service failed to complete the tasks assigned to them! Of course the most detrimental of all the failures by Citymove and its staff was that ultimately our possessions were not relocated, our goods were damaged and major items such as the fridge, washing machine and lounge suite were abandoned in the garage of the new property because they either couldnt be bothered or didn't know how to remove a standard panel in a sliding door in order to get the furniture into the house!! Both the removal and delivery had been handled so incompetantly that I had been forced to work constantly alongside the removalists, who failed to follow even the most basic instructions such as; all boxes with bedroom 3 written on them are to be unloaded and placed in the room with the number 3 taped on the door. Boxes were literally dumped throughout the house,
The final demise began at 6pm one of the removalists went to footy training, despite my booking being until 10pm that night. At 6.30 the other 2 decided to knock off leaving without moving the remaining furniture out of the old house, and refusing to move the furniture, dumped in the garage of the new property, into the house. The list is endless!!
The official response to our complaint is so outrageous it has to be seen to be believed.
Having supposedly conducted a serious and very thorough review of our compliant(minus speaking to us or other tradespeople who witnessed the lack of due care and skill shown by the Citymove staff) A customer service member calling himself James ( with no surname) lists supposed statistical evidence taken from 'job records' (not provided) and quotes from 'signed staff statements' (not provided either) claiming that in fact not only was my pack & move completed, but it was completed ahead of schedule! The fact that these statements are complete fiction and Citymove has no way to quantify the assertions, was apparently not considered relevant when refusing our request to remedy the problem with a full refund and payment for damages.
(More to follow tomorrow)
