Virgin Media

[Roseformeplease]

TURN MY BROADBAND BACK ON VIRGIN MEDIA

Are a disgrace. Can anyone help

Call themselves a media (communications) company yet cancel my full paid up account without contacting me. So, when I call I am told they have the address wrong, so someone else now has my account in a different flat in the building.

When I call, in spite of paying monthly for 6.5 years, they seem to have been unable to contact me when someone wanted to take over my account.

And Virgin let them. They closed it down and re-opened it in someone else's name. No password protection seems to have been used. They didn't give the billing address. They just got broadband while my account was cut off.

Angel (not her real name, but the one she gave me) in Customer Services has spent an hour trying to make out that the faulty address is my fault - despite engineers finding number 2 for 6.5 years; despite the signal going to number 2 for 6.5 years; despite me paying regularly for 6.5 years for number 2 - you think I live in number 4. Apparently they can't just switch it on again, although switching it off seems to be easy enough.

£51.76 per month. Every month. For 6.5 years and then someone moves in nearby, fancies a bit of broadband (although why they chose Virgin I will never know, now I know how Virgin treat existing customers) and Virgin just switch it on for them, and off for me.

Fraud? Robbery? Or just incompetence? Or all of these.

Eagerly awaiting a call from Bernie who was too shy to talk just now but is winding himself up to calling by 1.25pm.

And why can't they sort it immediately you ask?

Well, because they have "existing customers" (i.e. The bastards who stole my broadband) who need to be contacted. As a "new customer" I must understand that they have to "perform checks".

If anyone wants to share this, I would be very grateful.

Anyone with any idea how to get this sorted?

NB. The fragrant Bernie still hasn't called. Now 8 minutes later than promised.

YANBU OP.

And don't give any of your hard earned money to the tax dodging cheshire cat Richard Branson anyway.

If you want to cancel, phone up and pretend to be someone else and get the broadband moved to another address.

Worked like a charm for my new neighbours!

They are shockingly bad, as are sky. No more contracts for me.

I think your continual slagging off of peoples names on here makes you sound like a piece of work

those folk will probably be getting minimum wage and lets face it, they wont be enjoying their job anymore than you are enjoying phoning them

why dont you ask to speak to a manager instead

Email the CX as a pp said. Worked for me when the robbing bastards stole over £250 from me last August when I moved. I cannot wait to be out of contract to cancel on them. Everything about them is dire.

They are utterly useless and their whole customer services team might as well rebrand themselves as the anti-customer services team.

It took 4 phone calls and me being borderline rude before they would accept that my relative couldn't phone them and ask them to either cancel her account or switch it to her husband because she was dead.

Repeatedly they were like "yes, that's fine, all X needs to do is give us a call and we can do that."

In the end I had to rudely point out that if Y (her husband) could "just have a quick word with her" then asking her to phone virgin media would probably be fucking low on his list of things he, as a 37-year-old new widow, would say to his late wife.

Had to take to twitter in the end.

@UsernameEnvy

I told Virgin I was moving to America. I shit U not.

They can't argue the point then.

My neighbour did the same with Sky.

Ssd, when I tried that I was told they didnt have managers, or a complaints department, or indeed anyone who could refund the money they had taken from my account by mistake.

I was working for one of the companies they took over some years ago in their IT department. I came across some very weird addresses marked on the call log:

"This is really Number xx Whatever road"

Some investigation revealed that the customer's address hadn't actually been released to sales - the landlord hadn't given permission. Therefore, thinking of their lost sales revenue, the so-and-so's had gone ahead with the installation anyway and used someone else's (released) address to run the account from .

Of course, when the person at that address later decided they, too, wanted an account, it caused all kinds of problems!

I wonder if it's something like that?

When Dave calls back ask for matter to be escalated too.

But, the sad thing is, they are not their actual names. They are all names they use in their call centre. Speaking to them, hearing them on the phone they are overseas somewhere - possibly India - and the "names" are more like code words. So Bernie (who didn't call back) is probably code for "she is getting angry now, tell her Bernie will call and when she complains we will all know she was given that name to shut her up".

And, yes, when you are the public face of accompany, the person on the phone, your name is what I will use. They may not personally be to blame but they are to blame for it not being sorted out.

@Tanith that sounds very likely. Lots of tenanted flats turning over regularly (student area) so quick sales are vital.

I told Virgin I was moving to America. I shit U not.

The face is disbelief at having to go to such extremes to cancel a frigging contract

Sounds pretty fail safe though. On the virgin media community pages there's loads of people saying they just didn't accept people's request to cancel despite several phone calls! Wondered if I'd be better putting it in writing and sending signed for. Maybe go with the Shetland isles, they can't possibly have virgin up there?! Good news is I don't pay by DD and they don't have my bank account details.

Still no reply or call back from Christine. Have given up on Bernie. John on their Facebook page delivers lots of pr platitudes but no action.

Definitely email the ceo address you were given up thread. I did that after weeks of issues and calls and I got an email back from the "executive directors' customer service team" and a follow up phone call to get an engineer out asap. Then a follow up phone call to check all was now OK.

Have e-mailed (and tweeted) him. And used Facebook. And now done just under 4 hours on the phone plus several hours waiting in for calls.

Maybe Monday will bring some action.

The Executive Team rang me at 8am on the Monday morning. Couldnt have been more helpful....

No need to move to the Shetlands @UsernameEnvy.

My pal lives in a village 7 miles from the edges of my town, and VM aren't out there. So there is a chance that a village just 7 miles from where you live may not have VM! So that would be an easy escape route! (Not that you should have to move of course!)

They said they never will move to my friend's village either, as it's 'too far out.'

( 7 miles! is 'too far out' !!!)

More like it's not profitable for them, because only 300 people live there, and unless at least a third of them sign up, it won't be worth their while. All they care about is £££.

I was able to cancel our Virgin package last year even though it was in DH's name. They are bloody useless. I lost count of the amount of arguments I had with them when our broadband wasn't working Andy how many times I had to tell them what to do (I used to work for them when they were Telewest). Virgin putting the prices up was the best thing that could happen to us as it meant we could leave the contract early.

ssd, do you really think asking to speak to a manager will help? In my experience no manager will take the call. In fact, when I worked there we were not allowed to put calls through to managers.

@Ysolla

Get rid. I binned them off years ago & have never regretted it. Our Internet would go off every night between 7pm & 11 pm. Every night I would ring them and, even after we knew the fault was at their end, they insisted EVERY night that I switch everything off reboot the router...I had to go through the whole rigmarole every time. If I refused they just said they couldn't do anything more to help me even though it was a recurring fault that we already knew wasn't at our end. It drove me mad. Now I just laugh when I see the repair van parked at their box over the road. I will never go back to them.

This in spades. ^

I think reasons like this are why many people leave VM.

For us, it wasn't every evening for 4 hours, but it was just as bad! With us, it was once or twice a week, for 10 to 15 hours. Sometimes the tv would go off for that amount of time too.

Sometimes the tv would go off at the same time as the internet, and sometimes it was one or the other.

But I was never sure why.

I don't think they knew either.

Still no reply from the Tom Mockridge who a PP gave me - nor any replies from either Bernie, or Christine. Nothing at all. I have tried Twitter (although am at work now so not able to do it during working hours again) and their Facebook page.

What next? Anyone else got any ideas? Is Richard Branson worth a shot or is he no longer involved?

Whatever you do, don't let them increase your broadband speed. According to another poster, they tie you into another year's contract.

Making any change to your bundle triggers a new contract.

We're out of contract now, and staying that way.

You have to ring again.
And eventually you might get through to Doris or Euphemia.

Lynne, lovely Lynne is going to try to sort it. She was soothing and reassuring far away from the start of the alphabet. Due to call back before 8.30pm tonight.

We shall see.....

Nothing from Tom Mockridge, CEO of Virgin Media - no reply to e-mails or tweets. Facebook useless.