Well after this thread, I went ahead and got Virgin media installed.

Y’know, they actually have an ok product – but it’s let down by extraordinarily bad customer service.

Alarm bells should have gone off when they happily took my order for phone line, TV and internet but failed to tell me that there weren’t enough connections in the box on my street (whatever that means) to install a telephone line, meaning that when the first bill arrived, instead of paying something in the region of £50 a month, I was looking at around £180. Apparently, because I wasn’t taking a telephone line, I didn’t qualify for the bundle discount.

Then I get a call telling me that they can install the telephone now and that I’ll get the discount – Hooray. We wait in all Saturday morning…noone turns up. I ring customer service and – I shit you not – spent over 20 minutes on the phone and spoke with six, yes, six different people – each time I had to go through the whole rigmarole of giving an account number, address and password. I gave up on the sixth and politely ended the conversation.

At this stage I was beginning to heat up a bit so mrs deadly took over. Eventually (after speaking with three more people and spending a fair amount of time on hold) we found out that they still couldn’t install the telephone. Nothing had been done with the “number of connections” issue so the install had been rescheduled – noone thought to tell us this though. I had no faith that they would be able to factor in the discount for the first bill meaning that we would get whacked for £180 and never get it back so we (figuratively) told them where we could stick their service.

I’d heard nightmare stories about how their customer service had failed badly for some people – but I gambled anyway. I lost. 🙁

So now, I have to undo all the installation stuff they did and reinstate previous cabling. What a PITA. 🙁

1.5/10

Darcy, I’m a little disappointed to be honest. That was both coherent and rational, with little or no attempt at constructive profanity use, nor at excessive punctuation. You can do so much better than that, and you know it.

Meh. In fairness, I didn’t set it up as a rant.

Now, if you’d heard me storming around the house like a child in a tantrum – you’d have given me douze points 🙂

I had an absolute nightmare setting ours up when we moved into our new home, it took over 2 months of continuous complaining for them to finally sort out porting over our telephone number.

To cut a long story short, we got there in the end and were amply compensated.

They’ve redeemed themselves since too, quite happy with them at the moment – something I never thought I’d say after the start we had!

They’ve redeemed themselves since too, quite happy with them at the moment – something I never thought I’d say after the start we had!

Oh well, you win some, you lose some. Glad to hear you didn’t get shafted after all. I was looking forward to the TiVo thing too. I imagine it must be a nightmare to work for them – there doesn’t seem to be any joinedupness internally.

Ive never had a problem with their customer service, but then I did have to have someone come around to do all the paperwork as I own a listed building.
On the other hand Sky were the biggest bunch of monkey around Absolute bunch of thieving bar stewards (yes they did steal money from me)

I suppose all companies have their good and bad customer care stories

Our move overseas is what finally killed our relationship with Virgin Media. When I gleefully called up to end it, the benighted person at the call centre tried valiantly to give us a chance to change our minds and wouldn’t really accept that we really were moving overseas. For some time, via forwarded mail to Australia, I still received their plaintive overtures to come back to them. How I laughed!

Now, if you’d heard me storming around the house like a child in a tantrum – you’d have given me douze points

Toys 1 – Pram 0
🙂

I made the foolish decision to report a fault last week, must have been outside of their UK call centre hours & was routed to a chap in India. The poor chap could barely string a sentance together so quite how he was supposed to diagnose & fix a broadband fault I’ll never know. I hung up after he informed me he would be “doing good resolutionings to my problematical arrangement”.
To be fair to him, he then called back & managed to tell me he had booked an engineers visit. The engineer turned up on time. I, unfortunatley, did not; but he did leave a card with his mobile no on, for me to call him.
I found seeking help on cableforums was a help. I posted on there after the debacle that was their initial installation. I then recieved a call at work, from the UK CS Director, apologising & he had two engineers at my house who were told not to leave until I had called this chap to let him know all was ok. My experience of them has been good, but as shown I think there are too many regional variations in CS. Shame. Great product when its working.

Have been with Virgin for ages – back when it was Cabletel! Just moved to the Phone/BB/TV since fell out with Sky. Generally their CS has been ok. Was not helped with three modems dying in the space of 3 months. But to give their due I did get compensation and the final engineers visit included checking the Virgin box at the end of the road.

Only problem now is the BB is almost unusable from about 5 pm till late!

As i cycle round i see about 4 virgion tv boxes on the street with no covers, last week a dogg decided it was a good place to widdle on one, loking into the box, it looked as if it had some sortof transformer, so was the dog safe from electrocution, and what hapens when it rains.

No real problems for me but I agree about their lack of “joinedupness” – guess it’s a hangover from their build up from Telewest and all the other companies.

Had the same problems with phone numbers and whatnot – initial install was OK, but the phone line never worked. So had to take a day off work – two youfs turn up purporting to be phone technicians and spent two hours slagging off the original installer, stomping through the house and shouting to each other down the street.

Then they ran off to their next job (without saying anything), having ripped up half the wiring and still no phone. Spent a few more hours on the phone to India trying to work out what they had done before they said they’d send out another engineer if I could take another day off, and by the way they couldn’t port my number. Thought about it and cancelled the whole thing instead.

Best decision I ever made – Got O2 broadband and a freeview plus box instead. It wasn’t that hard to send it all back, and the best thing is that Virgin paid my £65 cashback – suckers!

Moved to O2 last week. Two days later got an email saying the price was going up by 20%. Not with them any more.

Ahh the old moon on a stick requests – cheap as possible and no complaints please……

I pay BT a smidge more than others but as yet they’ve been an example of excellence.

Ahh the old believing that paying more inherently gets you a better product…

😉

Ahh the old moon on a stick requests

Not bad, only fifteen posts before a miserable bastard turned up.

yeah, guess that’s a tenner I owe you, dd. I could have sworn we’d make it to 20… 🙁

I like their complete lack of organisation, been getting an arbitrary £9 monthly discount for the last couple of years now 🙂 might be the reason I only get about 50% of the advertised broadband speed mind 🙁

Am I the only person that’s happy with the service? Apart from a minor problem on the install everything’s been fine since.

Admittedly the broadband technical support was useless when the modem failed (apparently the modem never breaks but 3 different computers and a router could all simultaneously stop working) – an hour of badgering and they sent me one to get me off the phone and low and behold problem solved so not that bad compared to queuing for some ‘services’.

Compared with the largest opposition, 18 months of unusable phone line due to noise, broadband speeds worse than dial up and more than one month long service outage that they wouldn’t give billing credit for. Nor would they allow us to break the contract and you get no compensation until they fix the fault – where’s the incentive to repair then!

Admittedly we have no choice now as the fault on the BT based line means we can’t use any service that runs down BT cabling (as they can’t find/fix it or possibly it’s not economically worth it to do so)

I don’t know if the different legacy regions have different levels of service but I’m in Stafford, used to be NTL, now it’s excellent and their Indian call centre people are in my experience first rate, know their stuff better than me, and are logged on to my system before I finish giving my account number. They answer calls quickly too.

If you’ve been cheated email Branson. You should get it sorted out.

At least you have a choice of providers …

I found it’s completely dependent on who you get to speak to.
I had problems getting our line reconnected when we moved house – 2 people fobbed me off, the 3rd checked a database he shouldn’t really & found the real cause of the delays & sorted it there & then for us & was really apologetic.

I made the foolish decision to report a fault last week, must have been outside of their UK call centre hours & was routed to a chap in India. The poor chap could barely string a sentance together so quite how he was supposed to diagnose & fix a broadband fault I’ll never know

Ironic.