Talking about companies made simple (made simple group, please find a list of their websites at the bottom) and saying they provide bad customer experience is an understatement.


Not only they advertise what they don't deliver. But really I have never been in touch with such bad client service, not even with the worst outsourced call centre you may think of, with an extremely bad attitude from the staff, untrained and simply rude towards paying customers. To put it in plain words, you should expect from them the same attitude that made queueing in London obsolete.


Your company will be created quickly, but so does any other company formation service in the UK, but with Companies Made Simple everything (a part from the Accountancy TBC, Westbury Chartered Accountants is apparently the head of the group, and has won Internet awards nobody has ever heard of) is outsourced, any query you may have about anything, you will be told that they are not trained to answer that questions, hanging up on you if you insist in speaking to a manager and leaving you wondering in disbelief if the line cut off . You then start thinking how you will go ahead with your business on a day to day trading with that kind of administrative backup, and realise you have just made one of the worst mistakes one can do with his daily bread.




To be more precise: I created a company with them, and paid £192 for a for a top of the range package, including some fancy extras like filing system and a stamp. I believed what they say on their cobweb of websites and phony forums posts. I know that for a fact now, because no client can be satisfied with this kind of take-the-money-and-run service. I was hoping to benefit from the wide range of services they advertise, I though, at the time that it would be a good idea to have everything centralised to an only company and was planning to get their services across the board, including accountancy, insurances, virtual offices and more, silly me!


You can create a company in the UK for as much as £ 25, or even cheaper, but I thought that making false economies on such important an matter wasn't what I wanted to do, so I went for the full package.


I am now kicking myself for not aborting the all thing at the first signals that occurred while registering online. Indeed, while registering my company though their on-line service, I called as they offer Free Advice for your online registration, but if you read the small prints it will cost £ 25, however their staff admitted not being trained for this, not even for their online registration service so what kind of advice can one finally expect?


They also claim to offer mail forwarding on their website for £ 30 pounds a year (in their Golden Package's Small prints, that's how it reads anyway, probably willfully misleading), in fact this service cost £15 pounds a month (that's a huge difference), they will however send you a £ 50 a year promotion for this service, not while creating your company as stated on their website, but after a series of advertisements that triggered my spam filter, so I mist the window to apply for it. The only option I have now is to get the £ 15 a month service, or get another registered address for my company. Alternatively, my post, I was told first, would be destroyed, later they confirmed it would go back to the sender, which is almost worst.


If you look for them on Google you will end up on one of the many websites and forum posts that mushroomed on the net, so you will get biased reviews which only purpose is to make you part with your money, once this is done you will only get the bare bone of a service you can get anywhere else for a a fraction of the price, and a lot of grief and attitude if you think about complaining.


If you have experienced the same thing, please get in touch with me at bewaver at googlemail, they are not in Vunatu or the Caiman Islands they are a UK registered company, at least Westbury Chartered Accountants, so I am planning to go to court, this is the first time I consider this course of action, in spite of many other bad experiences with sales oriented companies, but they really crossed the line, and I feel the compelling duty, as a British Resident, a Company Owner and a Consumer to share my experience and make sure they do no hurt other businesses when they are the most fragile. It is not for claiming any money but to make sure no other Startup is treated like mine. Small businesses are too important for our country to have this kind of jokers killing them in the egg because of their greed and incompetence.


Furthermore, the image of our Country abroad as a service supplier (and former model of good manner) is badly damaged by all this sales-oriented good-good-how'you-doing-just-a-quick-(cold)-call-(with a-lot-of-attitude)-no-delivery-bite-the-bullet-once-you-have-paid companies. Now in real life is hard to react, for Internet based crooks, this is my answer. This sales oriented pandemic is something we might all regret all the more now that the Pound is low towards the Euro and we could benefit from it by expanding our businesses abroad.


It seems they have broken down their services into smaller websites, probably to follow an Internet cross referral strategy but also, I suspect ,because they want to spread the risk of a reaction to their misrepresentation. I believe our best weapon against their Internet ubiquitous presence is spreading the word on independent websites.


Here is a list of the websites they run, I haven't listed the biased forums(I have spent enough of my precious time with them a for today), but that will be the second part of my action, in the meanwhile take good note and stay away as much as you can from:




Chartered Accoutants
westbury


Company Formations
companiesmadesimple


Insurance solutions
insurancemadesimpledotnet


Virtual Offices
londonpresencedotcom


Business Advice Portal
businessmadesimpledotcodotuk


Mail Forwarding
thisisyourofficedotcom


Credit Reports
companysearchesmadesimpledotcom


Business documents
formsmadesimpledotcodotuk


Events and training
eventsmadesimpledotcodotuk


Websites made simple
websitesmadesimpledotnet


This posting is purposefully anonymous not because I have something to hide, but because I don't want my company to be linked to them in any shape or form, even if my registered offices are at their address. They believe this will keep people from reacting, I believe instead this will only make my case stronger should they take any willing detrimental administrative action against my company using their position as recipients of my official mail.


And yes they will also spam you with publicity drowning the relevant mails in a swamp of advertisement, but that is the least of the problems. All their offers are time bound, and with the amount of mail you receive, you have to waste your time reading all the small prints because anything they claim to offer comes with a clause they then use to deny you the service you are entitled to!