to hate virgin media with the burning passion of a 1000 suns?

[microserf]

IAprobablyBU, but here's the precis (I'll skip the hours I've wasted on line to various phone companies sorting this out).

We were with Virgin at our old place. We bought a house, so we tried to move to Sky. Signed up all the contracts, but wanted to keep our home number. Sky said no problem. Actually becomes a big problem. After hours on ph to Sky and to Virgin, we finally discover Virgin is refusing to transfer the number. They say it's Sky's fault, Sky says it's Virgin's. Whatever, I have no idea who is at fault.

By this point, I give up, and cancel Sky, so we'll stick with Virgin and keep the number. I have hospital treatment ongoing, and didn't fancy trying to change the home number as it's the one my consultant uses.

Should all be fine right? We move house. Virgin come to install - all fine. Except Virgin has NOW decided can't give me the old number. At first they said I could have the number in 7 days, but then some arse decided I couldn't have it at all. Spent hours on the phone to Virgin yesterday. I was so angry, I was nearly in tears. I was then assured it was all fine, only to ring to check up on progress and find out the number isn't even allocated to our account and there's a note on the account saying we can't have it!

I hate them, I hate them, I hate them!!!!

OK, I feel better. On the bright side, I'm still in the cancellation period .

Yes they are loathsome, I completely agree. Their customer service is some sort of joke I think, someone who can't speak or understand English at all well continually reassuring you that they want to help you by fixing their problem but then not actually fixing it.

But their high speed broadband is very good.

Email the chief executive, google will probably give you his email address.

Okay. BUT why do sky keep pestering us! We get phone calls from them about once a week, trying to get us to upgrade our package with them. They even sent a doorstep salesman yesterday. We are with Virgin, and if I ever thought of going to sky this behaviour has put us off. (The previous owners were with Sky but that was 9 years ago.)

A friend also ended up having to change her phone number as although BT had "supposedly" agreed to release it, they messed up and ended up giving it to someone else.

So all media companies are rubbish!

I will say, it's Virgins fault. Because they operate on their own lines and not on BT lines like Sky does, they technically own that telephone number and it's at their discretion to pass it on or to retain it when you switch providers.

Used to work for Sky and it used to drive me mad when Virgin claimed that they weren't at fault for it. I got abuse daily because of it

Virgin have never been in my good books, have always been with Sky to be honest. I know too many people who have slagged Virgin to high heaven. And the reaction I used to get telling previous Virgin customers the Sky prices were always hysterical - they'd be happy as hell.

Virgin couldn't give us our same number when we moved as it was under a different exchange. My only complaint now is the indian call centres who want to call dh by his first name as they can't pronounce our last name which is the same as an english town!!!!

Virgin media are awful when you move. The amount of complete rubbish we had over trying to give the bloody tv box back...

I'm so glad I didn't try to keep my number reading this!

the reason i wanted to leave them was the call centres. they're just unbelievably bad, like being trapped in the 7th circle of hell. i don't think i have ever had a good result from their call centre... my favourite was the virgin fault chap who categorically denied there was a local fault and said it had to be our computer. i then went out to the shop, and passed a virgin technician at the top of our road working on the network...

i forgot to add - on a sunday, so bloody unlikely to be routine maintenance.

I've had no issues with them :o

I've moved house with them, no problem, had faults solved by them, no problem...

[smug]

I've been with them for ever.

that's the weird thing Dragonalley, we moved with them once already and it all went swimmingly!

Virgin, for example...

I went to sign up with them paid a deposit waited in all day for my install and the bastards never showed up, finally called them the next day to find out it had been cancelled because they wanted proof of I.D but no-one had even thought to tell me. I cancelled the install and still never got anything about why they cancelled my installation date!

YANBU. They're the biggest bunch of poofaces going!

Had ntl years ago because I couldn't have sky in the flat, they buggered me about so much when I wanted to move, claimed it would cost me £75 so told them to poke it, swore I'd never get ntl again. Went to Sky in new house, fab, moved house, SKy came out same day to install there, fab. Split up with ex couldn'f afford Sky . Moved to new house just stuck with the bt line that was in but it was crap, getting stupid slow braodband if it worked at all. Moved to Virgin, thought must be better than ntl was and it was fab. Then I found out it was cheaper to have phone, internet & tv than it was to just have phone & internet so decided to get tv in, that was fine until I got DH an HD subscription for Christmas.

We've had nothing but trouble since, loads of different boxes, me complaining almost constantly that this doens't work, that doesn't work. Turns out their v+ isn't even vaguely like sky+ and you can't do half the things that you can with sky so I put in a huge complain with the CEO ([email protected] in case you want the address). One of the women who works in his office sorted us out with a new tivo box, 6 months xl pack, tivo subscription and multiroom at no extra cost to what we were paying on the m+ pack. Anyway I was really unhappy with the service, she was miserable, never actually apologised for the crap service that I'd been receiving and the tivo box is a pile of junk. SO put another complaint in, it was just passed straight back to her who just phoned me up again being just as miserable and abrupt as before.

If we could afford it right now I'd just get out of my contract because it was missold to me and get Sky in and just use the mobiles for tethering as they're faster than the bt line into the house, but we can't afford sky so we're hanging on for the next 11 months until our contract runs out then the boxes will be left in the front garden for them to come and collect.

Bunch of useless idiots and by all accounts even worse to work for them. DH had an interview with them last year, did some research adn there is page after page after page on the internet about how bad they are to work for, so I suppose we should be thankful that we don't have to work for one of their contractors.

So hate away, I'm right there with you!

OH yes, I had 3 days in a row waiting in for them Queenie, each time they claimed they knew nothing about it.

And another thing, I phoned them up last month after I got married to inform them of change of name, so they send me a whole leaflet and lots of forms to fill in to change the account to a different person. Letter saying they were going to credit check the new account holder, charge an admin fee for changing to new account holder and start an entirely new account for the new account holder.

I work for them - have done for a very long time.

I'm on mat leave at the moment otherwise I would suggest trying to help directly - but in any case my role isn't in customer services or anything customer facing where I might be able to directly sort a problem out. However, if you have a look at the link below it's to a forum which was set up outside the company and moderated by the staff, in their own personal time, for people who were peed off with bad service and wanted to help the genuinely fed up customers. It worked for years "unoffically" then the company got wind of it and have direct links with it themselves now I believe because it was such a success. Problems brought to light on there DO get solved, by helpful, local staff who want to make a difference.

So if you are struggling, or just want to take your complaint further, my best advice would be to post on there and one of the 'good guys' will be along to help.

www.cableforum.co.uk/board/

We actually had more problems with Sky than we've had with Virgin. Virgin aren't great either but we stick with them, mainly for the broadband speed. We did move house with Virgin and it was fine.

They are all the same (except Talk Talk, who are worse because they are made from pure evil).

Some customer service people are better and more helpful than others. You sound like you've had a run of bad ones.

We moved house and wanted to take our Talk Talk account with us. They tried to charge us £50 to transfer our account to a new address and restart our contract (which we were halfway through) so we were tied to them for a further 18 months rather than the remaining 9 months.

We said they can't do that. They can't transfer a contract and start it again from scratch. They said they could. We all shouted a lot.

Then we moved and they said that because of high demand in our area they couldn't connect anything for four months. No landline, no internet, nothing!

We told them to go to hell. They told us to pay them £205 to buy ourselves out of the contract. We told them to take us to court. They finally agreed that they were being shit and let us go.

Virgin Media were the company we chose to replace them. So far, they haven't annoyed us

So if you do leave Virgin Media do not touch Talk Talk with a barge pole. Not even one covered in poo with a note on the end saying "this is what your service smells like."

We are in the middle of a dispute with Virgin Media that is going on for EVER and one of the worst things is that you can Never Ever speak to anyone who can do anything. Yesterday, for about the 6th time, I spent about one and a half hours on the phone being bounced around from person to person. The man I ended up with just appeared to give up on the call when I asked him his name. I could hear all the sounds from around him but my Hello, Hello went unanswered. Similarly when I tried to get an e-mail address for the complaints department no-one was able to give me one and the online complaints procedure is non existent. If anyone can give me the e-mail address for the Chief Exec. I would be more than delighted. I won't bore you with the details but can I advise anyone with a son or daughter starting uni in September. DO NOT TAKE UP A STUDENT CONTRACT WITH VIRGIN MEDIA WHATEVER YOU DO!!

Virgin sent me an email saying 'There is a problem with setting up your account. Please call us on 0845 - 50p - a - minute so we can resolve it'.
So I called them on their stupid expensive number and spent 45 mins going round in circles with someone who really didn't know much English and kept asking why I was calling.. repeatedly saying 'Because YOU asked me to call you' had no effect and I had to practically beg to get him to finally hand me over to a supervisor who just said 'Problem? No, there's no problem. Just ignore the letter'.
Thanks, Virgin. Can I send you a bill for 45 minutes of my life and the ££ you've just added to my phone bill?

26minutes I had exactly the same thing.

And then it turned out you don't have to wait in at all, they send you a BOX. GAAAARRRRRR.

I could have killed them all that day.

Just want to stick up for Virgin, we have switched to them from Sky and have had no problem at all with them and they are cheaper than Sky for what we are getting.

Sky were fine until we moved into an area where they don't own the network. Our broadband suddenly halved in quality and doubled in price!

Before we got all the basic TV channels (no movies and sports) broadband of around 1-2mg at best and evening and wkend calls for £40 (it was £26 before we moved). On top of that we had to pay BT for line rental.

Now with Virgin we pay £40 a month and we get what we did with Sky, but we get more like 8-9mg broadband, the line rental is included in that and we have the virgin plus HD box whereas our Sky box was just bog standard one.

We had terrible problems with Virgin. We're a couple of miles from the exchange (meaning that standard broadband would be about 1 meg) in a very studenty area so even though we were paying for 20 meg broadband, at certain times of the day it was worse than dial up. We called them loads of times about it and they kept saying that they were going to upgrade the network in our area and that would take about 6 weeks. Then our phone line went down so I had to spend a day waiting in for their engineer to call out, then another day waiting for their contractor to come out who tells me he'll have to come back the next day which he never did. So then we had to call Virgin again who sent out the same engineer as the first time who was shocked that it hadn't been sorted and who set up another appointment with the contractor who didn't show up again.

We stopped bothering to ring them after that because we found out the BT infinity was being rolled out to our area. They've been the opposite of Virgin for customer service. Their engineers phone an hour or two before they plan to turn up so if you've got errands to run you can actually do them without being afraid that you'll miss the engineer and have to wait in another day. We had some problems with our internet dropping out which turned out to be a problem with the router, the woman on the phone talked me through how to fix the problem then called me back two hours later to check that the internet was still ok and then called me back again the next day to confirm that everything was still fine.

i distinctly got the impression yday that i was the "problem" call being passed round the call centre like a hot potato. today, people were more helpful, but baffled as to why there is a problem - which is in my experience, a bad sign.

takethisonehereforastart oh my goodness!

motheroftwoboys, see my earlier post for ceo email address

We are with Sky and I have to say that their customer service has always been abysmal too. Seems to me that both companies rely on the desirability of the product to sell itself and neither is actually very motivated to give good customer service. They know you'll be tearing your hair out but will not want to do without kids' channels, sport etc. And for every customer who does switch from one to the other, there is probably someone moving in the opposite direction...

Not sure what the answer is - but there is definitely an opening in the market, especially now that nice Uncle Rupert's corporation is in trouble, for a company who could provide good product AND decent service.

A tip: whenever I call virgin I always go through retentions as i refuse to deal with people in India or the Phillipines who cant deviate from the script or tend to make things worse! Therefore I only ever speak to retentions who generally can sort the problem.

I have had days, even weeks, when I have wanted to do dreaful things to Virgin! They can be complete tossers. I spoke to someone once in winter who was being a useless twat and when I said isn't it a lovely sunny day here is my town, he said he was nearby and agreed it was warm - it was pissing down, cloudy, and snowing in parts of the country!