Virgin Media made me howl and cry down the phone

[AnyoneRememberMooncat]

Last weekend I spent 50 mins on the phone to renegotiate my contract which was coming to an end. I ended up agreeing to a telephone package I didn't really want (which I think the agent would get comission on) as it was the best price to get my broadband.

The next day I phoned up and spent another 50 minutes to cancel the package. The new agent put alot of pressure on me to sign up to something else I didn't want but I said no. I got a cancellation number to ensure the telephone contact was not going through.

I was so stressed out that I went into my virgin media account and was seriously thinking about leaving them because of the awful service. It takes ages to speak to anyone and when you do they are foreign so difficult to understand. Then they put you under huge pressure to sign up to something 'new' so they get commission and say you can't sign up to the same thing you already have.

In my virgin media account - I was offered a deal to stay on my same service at the same price. Great. Signed up to this. Got contract by email. Job done. Honestly felt ill at all the stress to basically keep the same service at the same price.

Today got phone adaptors through post and though WTF.

Went into my virgin media account which last weekend was showing the new contract I took out myself for broadband only at £29 per month.
Now my account is showing the telephone package the first agent 'sold' me.

Tried to call them - wait time horrific.
Tried to webchat them - wait time 57 minutes
In desperation phoned the I am moving house number and got through to someone british. I lied and said I was moving house (to my mums house which I have inherited) so I could get away from Virgin. I figured it was easier to do this and just go with someone else.

The man was nice and helpful (and british) and said all I had to do was give them proof of my new address to show I was moving there. At this point I burst into tears and howled down the phone. I admitted to lying and explained why.

I had a flashback to the movie 'The Firm' where Tom Cruise joins a law firm for a great job at a great package and then realised nobody is allowed to leave the firm alive.

Anyway the helpful moving house dept man has contacted IT to get everything sorted (hopefully) and has given me his ID number so I can refer to the phone call we had.

VIRGIN MEDIA - YOU ARE A FUCKING DISGRACE! (Helpful man James not counted in this)

Thats nothing to do with nationality

I would always recommend plusnet. We had sky for a couple years as my dad relented and let us get sky tv after me begging him for years 😂 sky are terrible too.

plusnet are overall pretty decent. Never had any particular issues, had a lot more issues in the two years we were with sky than in the 15+ years we’ve been with plusnet.

Same here, Talk Talk are the pits. They insisted on talking to my dead colleague and refused to budge.

Virgin Media employs too many people with too few English skills. They aren't on their own there, some of the rail companies' staff have very hard to understand accents at times.

It's not usually hard to understand a British accent - most people have a professional register and speak differently when at work and especially if their job involves being on the phone. But if you aren't a native speaker you may just not be able to pronounce certain things correctly and they may struggle with regional British accents because the customer won't be using their professional register.

I ended up in a virtual Monty Parrot sketch with BT about trying to cancel my late MIL account.
They couldnt understand why a DIL would be calling and insisted on speaking to her to confirm it was OK. I never got it sorted went round in circles - one helpful peson suggested she could text - they sent a cheque for the amount overpaid a year later to a closed account (her name)
Absolute disgrace.
Weirdly SkY were brilliant - 1 call straight through on a dedicated line (they’re still shit for most other things though)
And vodaphone - i haven’t got the energy to switch my mobile contract - they are just dreadful

Was driven to similar on several occasions with Virgin to the point that I would never use them again unless there was literally no other option. No option to speak to anyone other than going through their useless Whatsapp system - you tell the bot your question, go through security, and when you eventually get through to someone, repeat the same security questions and description of your problem, they tell you you've come through to the wrong department and they're going to transfer you to another one. And then the same thing happens again. And again. And when you eventually get through to the right department, the person you're speaking to tells you they have to go for their lunch now and they'l be back in an hour. Of course I don't think they shouldn't take their lunch - but can't the system direct queries to people not just about to go on their break? And then when they eventually come back, if you don't respond within 2 minutes, they consider your query closed and you have to go through the same torturous process again. They also once scheduled some work which knocked out the internet in my area for two weeks, with absolutely no prior warning - they told us for the first day that it would be fixed by that evening, then eventually admitted it wouldn't be up again for another two weeks.

I'm with NowTV for broadband now and they were so much better.

Dh has been thinking about switching to Virgin media, because he is t happy with the BT broadband speeds - I’m going to show him this thread as an Awful Warning.

With the best will in the world when they address me as ma'am my heart sinks. They can only stick to the script - I've hung up saying I don't believe they're not a robot before now!

The simple answer is money. They don't care about delighting their customers- and if they did, they would probably reckon that they were losing profits by providing 'too good' a service.

If they can keep a majority of their customers just above the level of (dis)satisfaction at which they would leave them, they're extremely happy.

Also, I'm not saying they're running some kind of cartel, but they like to make people think that there are only a handful of ISPs to choose from, so they only concentrate on being (or claiming to be) slightly better than those other few whose names people have heard of. As those massive ISPs all offer pretty much the same low levels of customer satisfaction, they hope you'll assume that it's just how things are and can't be avoided.

In reality, there are dozens of providers - many of which pride themselves on high quality service and customer satisfaction - but the big ones would never compare themselves to them in their advertising, as they don't want people to know what hugely better options they have open to them. It's almost like a kind of commercial Stockholm syndrome.

And which other countries where English is the predominant native language do you believe are home to the outsourced call centres for UK companies?

I got transferred to Talk Talk when my internet provider went out of business. The service was shit and I just tried to transfer. Got a message from TT saying I owed them 159 cancellation fee because I was breaking my contract with them. Said I did not have a contract, had never volitionally joined them and I was moving because since they took over the service had been shit - I have been unable to watch a movie without it freezing since they took over. And my contract with my other provider was month to month since they announced they would be withdrawing from the market. TT just kept telling me I had a contract. I explained I did not. The call handler just disappeared = did not hang up, the line just went completely silent. I got on the chat bot, was first told the same thing, then that they would waive half the cost 'as a good will gesture'. Told them I did not owe them anything. Finally got someone who stated the whole fee would be cancelled. It took ages - its just mindblowing.

It doesn’t matter where the call is answered. No one minds BUT you have to understand what you are doing. Where I used to work if someone offshore was struggling they would disconnect the call and you could never find them again. They didn’t want to get into trouble.

These contracts are very complex. If you cannot understand them or don’t have proper training then it’s going to result in complaints and issues.

Offshore people cannot go off script. They cannot make a decision so round and round the call goes. I find parts of Sky are like this bar a brilliant lady who sorted out my late Mum’s account. She didn’t mess around and just said she would cancel the whole contract. It didn’t matter where she was based (Scotland) you just wanted someone who could do their job.

That's one of the things that I love about our ISP. They have to rely on OpenReach, of course, but OR hate them, as they refuse to be fobbed off - and if OR claim there are problems that they need to investigate or can't resolve, our ISP keep them on the phone and explain to them exactly what they need to do to fix it... NOW!!

Please tell me you've missed a word out there somewhere

I used to work in the virgin call centre back when it was teletext broadband.
It was awful, we were made to speak from a script and had a timer on the screen (and your manager's screen) with a target call time of 3 minutes. The staff turnover was huge and the call centre was full of temps, so basically no one cared/they were under a lot of pressure to meet their AHT/up-sell/retention targets. I can only imagine how much worse it is now!

@TheHangingGardensOfBasildon sounds great, who are they? I hate the dominance of OpenReach and the shitty communication between them and ISPs (not entirely sure whose fault this is, as one side will always blame the other). I feel sorry for older people who don't understand how the internet works (not trying to be patronising, there are plenty of things I don't understand, just thinking of my mum here who is definitely paying over the odds) because to have a hope in hell of navigating it you really need to know what happens where, contra ISP assuraces like "We'll take care of everything!" (Narrator: they will not). I do understand how the internet works, and its still almost impossible.

Can’t you just forward them?

I had to renogiate Sky the other day, he was trying to convince me to take out a new more expensive package, offering me sport (which i don't have), Skyglass(I have a brilliant tv already and watch UHD via iPlayer so don't need another tv) then Stream with Netflix (which I cancelled as there was nothing I wanted to watch). It was coming out more expensive than what I'm paying.

I took just the Broadband in the end. Said I'm trying to get my package down not up if you can't do that then I'll cancel the tv package.

They emailed me on Friday with a cheap tv offer minus HD, I can add that for £9 a month. That's a no too. I'll just get the aerial connected and watch freeview and use iPlayer for UHD.

@RoseJam

Forward the email. Or take a screenshot of the email, once it's saved in your gallery you can attach / send it wherever you like.

We don't bother with a tv package anymore. We pay £24 a month for broadband then have freeview plus Netflix and Disney. For the two tv packages it's around £20 a month so total of less than £50 if i want all the sky channels I'd take out now tv. Would still be cheaper.

I've found the only way to get anything done with Sky is to speak to the Scottish call centre as they don't need a bloody script! I just need to find a way of getting put through to them now as it seems to be chance!

This is one of the benefits for Welsh speakers when contacting one of the very few companies who offer a Welsh language customer support line - at least you're virtually guaranteed to get to speak to somebody in the UK!

They're called Andrews & Arnold - search for 'AAISP'. I promise I don't own/work for or have any connection with them at all, except as a very happy customer for the last 13 years.

They also have a system that monitors your phone line's internet connection every second (only the connection, not the traffic content - they're extremely hot on customer privacy), and will message you to let you know if your line has dropped out, then again a few minutes later when it's back up - usually only happens during a power cut or if you're re-arranging your tangled wires/plugs! Can you imagine the big companies doing that in a million years?!

Their tech support people are super knowledgeable, but they'll talk to you at whatever level you're comfortable with - be you head of IT for your large company or a complete novice at home.

They may cost a little bit more than the cheapest deals out there, but the hidden costs and outworkings of those potentially slightly cheaper deals are why OP started this thread in the first place.