Cielo Gelateria - Mill Park — Restaurant in Melbourne

I would love it if the business took accountability of their wrongs however, in every response to the reviews they seem to be blaming the customer or other factors. The quality of the products has gone downhill, and the prices have been raised quite a bit. The service is also very bad, with confused staff who do not know how to work the register and have appalling customer service. Do not recommend; there are many other dessert places around the area, and I do not think I will be coming back.

I used to come here very often; however, after tonight, I do not think I will be coming back. I asked for one waffle with Nutella and strawberries, one Kit Kat bubble waffle, and a kids' acai, which totaled to $33.60. While ordering the waffle, the staff member looked confused as if I was speaking another language. She did not understand that I wanted a regular waffle with Nutella and strawberries and kept insisting for a waffle pop or bubble waffle. She called over another member of staff, and they both looked confused. The original lady serving me finally found the waffle button on her iPad. After she put it through, I then asked if I could get bananas put on top of the waffle and that I was happy to pay extra for them. This further confused the lady and left her staring at the iPad for a few moments. Once she had put through the waffle, she then said she put through the bubble waffle and my acai bowl.

The two waffles came out in around 15-20 minutes. The inside of the waffle pop felt cold to the touch, but the original waffle was fine. I was left sitting for around 30 minutes for my acai. Granted, the shop was busy; I assumed they were making orders before mine, as the staff kept coming out with different acai bowls. After the rush had cleared, the staff began cleaning while I was sitting, staring at them, waiting for my order. After about 35 minutes, I politely asked the staff if they had my acai bowl coming. The member of staff on the register looked very confused and asked for my order. When she found it, she said I had not ordered it and I wouldn't be getting it. I assured her that the lady who originally took my order read it back to me, and she said I had the acai bowl on the order. I also mentioned that I had been waiting over 30 minutes for this, and granted we had table service, the employees knew we were still waiting for more desserts as they had not taken away the table number. The staff member told me I would have to pay full price and have to reorder the bowl. I was worried I would have to wait another 30 minutes, but I was not leaving with an empty stomach. I asked the lady if I could pay the original amount I was supposed to pay for a baby acai bowl but receive a regular-size bowl for the hassle and inconvenience. The member of staff stared at me, looked around the store for a little, and slightly shook her head. After a lot of convincing on my end the employee finally gave in as she knew I would not be leaving without my acai and I had to pay a further $13.50.

As a service employee myself, I understand it can be difficult to get every order correct when it's busy. However, the employee taking my order read it back to me and assured me that my acai bowl was on the order. I was not given a receipt upon payment, so I was unable to verify this, and I thought the expensive nature of the order would have included it.

This place has introduced the 'new' acai bowl and has forgotten how to put through anything else on the register and is unsure how to deal with customers. More training is required, and employees should understand what good customer service is.

At the end of the day I'm just a girl who loves acai and some good customer service. The acai was quite scrumptious however the fruits were a little icey as if the employees had just purchased a bulk pack of frozen strawberries from the coles in the shopping centre. If this was the case and the business was saving money on their ingredients I would expect a greater standard of customer service to make up for these cheap...

The service here was really disappointing. My partner and I came around here around 8:30pm on a Wednesday night. Our order was taken by a worker who claimed they were new and therefore were having troubles inputting a name onto the order. We told her all good, and let her know exactly where we will be sitting to make it easier for her. We were not informed of any wait time.

After 40 minutes of patience, we couldn’t wait any longer as we both have work in the morning and don’t have time/energy to wait over 40 minutes for one crepe. We went up to the counter and spoke to a different worker to ask for a refund. She apologised and let us know she would check what’s going with the order. I appreciate this, but I would have preferred the refund at this point which Cielo didn’t seem open to providing.

After checking the back, the worker let us know it would be a 5 minute wait. I would have liked the worker to provide us the option to either wait, or get a refund like we asked... Still, we did not wish to create the scene or make the worker feel bad since this is most likely the fault of bad management. We suspect that the new worker who took our order had not put it into the system correctly.

We went back to our table and the waiting game started again. As we sat, it was infuriating to see other customers who were seated much later than we were get their orders fulfilled in a more timely manner. After waiting another 10 minutes we finally received our order. The worker did briefly apologise, but I still didn’t feel enough accountability was taken.

It was hard to enjoy the crepe after the terrible service we received. Although it was nice, definitely not worth a 50 minute wait and definitely was not a good end to our night out.

My tips for management are to ensure you are providing your staff enough training so they can provide good and confident service and take accountability for your mistakes, which I find lacking in most of your replies to...

EDIT* Love the lack of accountability with your responses to all reviews. In hospitality you need to learn to drop your ego and take feedback and criticism on board rather than deflecting all negative reviews as fake. You are in deep denial and it's costing you seeing as so many reviews here have similar service experiences/wait times as mine. I didn't receive my crepe until 9.30pm. I sure as heck am not going to jump online to write a review on the same night. This was on the night of Wednesday 4th August. You can check your roster, you know you only had three young girls rostered on alone that night. One of them even claimed to be brand new, so really you had two staff members on and one in training who was completely lost and shadowing the other girls.

Really bad service and poor experience here. We purchased a crepe at 8.30pm for dine-in and didn't receive it until 9.30pm. The 3 young girls working in the store were so badly organised, flustered and overwhelmed.

We also watched as another customer purchased 2 bubble waffles with ice-cream. The girls only gave him one and left it sitting on the counter to melt while they prepared the second one which took a further 30 minutes. Once the second one was ready, they let him walk away without offering to remake the first one or replace the melted ice-cream. Felt really sad for the poor guy.

You can really see that the owner doesn't care about his staff and is desperate to save money by short-staffing juniors to run the store with no senior staff or manager on the floor. If he doesn't want to spend the money, the owner should be there at all times if he wants to operate and trade at night. Training is not up to scratch and there needs to be a better system in place for how orders are managed because the wait times are appalling and customer care is...