Virgin Media are a disgrace
This evening I have wasted around 3 hours dealing with my intermittent (and that’s being nice about it) 50M Broadband service.
I had my 10M connection upgraded to Virgins 50M service last Tuesday. The engineer who installed it said that the Modem took much longer than normal to connect and once he’d left I found that I had to call up and activate it again, despite him having already done this once.
Since then I’ve restarted the modem, so called Super Hub, on an almost daily basisto try and resolve slow speed issues. Testing on speedtest.net gave me readings between 1M and 50M only minutes apart and various times of day but, probably more importantly test on pingtest.net showed me between 60% and 90% packet loss. Those tests were only valid when they completed, which they only managed to do around half of the time.
At 7pm this evening after an hour of on/off connectivity I restarted the ‘Super’ hub again and from the logs on he hub itself it took around 30 minutes before it got a successful connection. (I was later told by one of the customer service representatives that this was impossible).
When testing showed that my speed and connection quality were still poor I phoned customer services. Over the next hour and a quarter I spoke to 3 representatives and one supervisor.
The first representative I spoke was actually worse than I’ve come to expect from Virgins first line support. He continued to, presumably, read from his script, ignoring my answers to his questions, insisting that I restart my laptop, reset my wifi and reload Internet Explorer despite me using a wired desktop Mac. When he was, unsurprisingly, unable to solve the problem and was unable to answer my question as to wether or not he knew what a ping test was he escalated me (allegedly!)
The second representative I spoke to asked me to unplug my modem so that he could run some tests. 15 minutes later having not heard from him again despite asking, and being able to hear people in the background, I was forced to ring off and call back.
It’s possible that steam was beginning to leak out of my ears at this point.
Having been on hold for around 10 minutes when calling back I gave my details to the next representative and asked him to transfer me through to a supervisor. He asked me what the problem was so I told him what I’d been through so far that evening. He apologised (about the only thing the customer services team seem to be any good at is apologising) and told me the last few things I’d tried.
It would appear that the customer services team actually lie on their call notes as I’d not been asked or told about several of the items that were read back to me. Once he’d asked me to try a few more tests (and I have to say this guy did sound like he had a bit of a clue) he put me on hold for 2 minutes and when he came back told me that there was actually a fault on my line.
Somewhat flabbergasted I asked when this was reported and was told the 4th of January! Yes, I’d been through all this with a know fault that was causing my problem. He was unable to tell me when the fault could be resolved and I then asked once more to be put through to his Supervisor. At this point he told me that he would put a note on my account for a reimbursement (although was unable to tell me how much) and transferred me. This transfer only put me on hold for about 5 minutes.
I explained, again, what my problem was to the supervisor who apologised, again, promised to reimburse me (again without being able to tell me how much) and reconfirmed that there was a fault on the line. Having asked how long it would take to resolve the fault I was once more put on hold (nearly 5 minutes again) and when he returned he told me that the engineering team had told him that the fault should be resolved by the 8th of March!
As the modem had only been installed within the last 7 days I asked for them to come and remove it (there is a 7 day no quibble refund) and reinstall my old 10M line that is apparently on a circuit that doesn’t have a fault until they could actually provide the service for which I was paying. I was then told that he couldn’t book an engineer to come out because of the fault in the local area.
So, in summary I had ‘upgraded’ from a working 10M line to a superior 50M line that was connected to an end point with a known fault and they are refusing to do anything about it….
Upon telling him that despite what his system was telling him he should find a way to make this situation right he apologised (yes, again) and offered to put me through to the complaints department. I said yes and he transferred me through to a recorded message telling me that the Complaints department had closed an hour ago.
At the point I put the phone down and walked away from my computer. Any more dealing with this level of incompetence was likely to lead me to start swearing at some and/or start throwing things through windows.
Should Virgin somehow make good and/or try and resolve this situation I will add the details here…until then I would urge people to use a Pigeon delivery service rather than Virgins broadband service.
This evening I was supposed to be watching a bit of TV, eating a Haggis and drinking a couple of nice whiskeys…instead I’m pissed off to the point of no longer being hungry so dinner is wasted. I would like to apologise for the grammar/tone/spelling and anything else that may be wrong with this post but I am barely able to type (and who knows, I may not even be able to post the fucking thing)
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4 Responses to “Virgin Media are a disgrace”
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Hi
I’m sorry for the problems you’ve experienced. I see you’re in touch with the Twitter ‘tweam’ who are updating you on your broadband issue – and the customer service problems you’ve had are not what we’d expect to see, and we’ll pick these up accordingly.
Thanks for taking the time to share your experience.
Alex
Customer Experience
Virgin Media
yes, the ‘tweam’ have been in touch with me several times to day and seem to be doing a much better job of dealing with the issues than your representatives did last night.
I have already had an email response to my complaint, presumably via the tweam, and will be replying shortly.
just had an excellent 10 minutes call with a representative called Billy who is investigating some options as to how the situation can be improved much faster than March the 8th.
Thanks you Billy, nice to know some of you guys know what you’re doing 😉
Haha, maybe it’s not such a bad thing that Virgin have yet to dig up my road.
Was the first line support team in India by chance? Did they try n talk to u about the last episode of eastenders? That’s my personal favourite. One of the key difficulties with tech support in general; is that for every technical minded person that calls their support line, a much larger number of less clued up people call. Many callers only use internet explorer, and would think a mac is only useful when it’s raining 🙂 This probably explains the use of a script by their 1st line support team. Although most reps should really be able to identify when someone actually knows what they r talking about!
Anyhow good to hear they got to the root of the problem… in the end 🙂