Anyone else had a bad time with Virgin Media customer service?

I have not had Virgin Broadband since last friday. to cut a long story short, the tech guy comes out yesterday morning and confirms its an exchange problem. I ring up yesterday afternoon and am assured by VM it will be fixed yesterday evening and I will get a phonecall. I get home tonight still no broadband. Now promised by 9am tomorrow. I speak to customer services to ask about compensation, half day off work for engineer when they knew afterwards it was an exchange issue as others down in the area, unable to do internet banking, loss of earnings as I use it for my business. grief from kids without msn! no skype.
She says the most they can give me is £10 compensation as thats more than ample for the few days I have lost for what I pay per month for internet use.
I question if thats all? she says yes, I say thats not good enough for what I have lost out on inconvenience and cost and being a valued customer for over 2 years, she wont budge so I say I’m going back to Sky. She doesnt even say a word. I’m waiting thinking she must offer me something to keep me? ‘waits’ nope not even a goodbye.

Sorry for long rant but cant believe that their customer service is so bad in this day and age with Sky the only real competition.

Smudge

they just gave me 15 quid back after 14 days with no internet, kept blaming area fault til i got cross on the phone. next day engineer came out and swapped modem and hey presto fixed . would bin them but sky are just as crap if not worse

They are hundreds of times better than when they were NTL, and now it’s almost a pleasure to deal with them.

But when you have one of those nasty intermittent faults that’s probably an amplifier up the road from you with a problem, and it just so happens that there’s never an outage when you call in, I agree you can be in the lurch for a couple of weeks or more.

I’ve had this sort of thing twice and had about £7 back each time.

But considering they’re operating with pretty new technology, from time to time there are going to be issues that confound their routines.

It’s not as bad as having a charger that somtimes decides the battery isn’t discharged low enough for it to kick in and start charging…

…oops. 😉

They’re utterly shocking. I found the chief exec’s email with a few google searches and wrote to him when his staff couldn’t sort out my internet connection (ad said 20mg, reality 0.5mg). He replied, saying it was not good reading and got someone on his head office team on it. 4 weeks later of going round in circles having different people tell me the same thing again and again, total inability to get an engineer out when I;m actually going to be home, I gave up and left. And they’re still sending me emails telling me what my next bill will be.
And not a dicky bird from the chief exec.
The actual internet service has been a total shambles, customer service too. Avoid

My experiences with them have been very very good, maybe I’m just one of the lucky ones 8)

Worst customer service I’ve ever had to deal with.

BigJohn, if you have a problem with one of my batteries/chargers please let me know so I can sort it out for you asap.

Brooess, I have gone above the chief exec and emailed Richard Branson direct, I know he still has a share in VM. I will keep this post updated on the results if there are any.

I spoke to customer services after talking to a guy trying to sell me sky and ended up with a £20 per month reduction in my bill.

Can’t say that’s bad. 🙂

My experience is that their product is outstanding, but customer service is utterly shocking.

When we signed up I booked a day for the engineer to come over, taking the day off work to be in. They called the day before to confirm they would be over, and then never came. It turned out that due to some roadworks down the street, they would be unable to complete the work, and they had known about this for at least a week and mumbled an apology about how it was all very regrettable that I had taken a day off work completely pointlessly.

3 weeks later (the next available slot) they installed our service, but spent the next 3 months billing us about twice what the contract said (they provided and billed a bigger package than we ordered). Spent hours on the phone to some bint who seemed to take pleasure in interrupting me in order to ask me not to interrupt her, and never let me finish a question before providing a sarcastic answer (later kicked myself for not complaining to her supervisor immediately, no way she would have kept her job if someone had heard the recording of that call).

However, since then, we have had 2 years of extremely fast & reliable internet, good TV channels and free phone calls, for a much lower price than anyone else can offer.

Yes, they are hell to deal with but in my experience it has been worth it.

Ive had tv, internet and phone line with them for 6 years in my current house and years before that. My broadband is near as damn it as fast as they advertise, and until a couple of weeks ago when my phone went dead, Ive never had a fault.

Called their free phone number from my parents house, answered almost straight away and didnt have to wait in a que. Came out the next day and fixed my phone line which was a problem in an exchange box at the top of the road that I’d seen a BT engineer in the day before.

I’m not saying they’re perfect, but sometimes they get it right.

Had an issue a few years ago, but after posting on cableforum it was picked up by the then CS director who had two engineers there at my convenience. Everything was sorted no problems. Since then service has been faultless, likewise the CS when I’ve contacted them.
I’d recomend posting on cableforum as I gather its monitored by people at VM.
Cableforum

I was with them for broadband for about 5 years. Decided to leave last year but they offered a great discounted deal for me to stay on a years contract. 4 months down the line I realised that they were charging me full price, after challenging them they admitted the mistake and adjusted the price to what was agreed. After the year was up I decided to go elsewhere but was firmly told that I was still under contract, they said that because there had been a change to the account 4 months in (correcting their pricing error) a new full year contract had started from then. Emails and complaint letters went unanswered, They even had the cheek to call sometime later to survey me on how I felt they dealt with my problem. Anyway finally got shot of them a couple of months ago despite other issues with invalid MAC codes and them still continuing to charge me for 2 more months.
Will never use Virgin again , ditched my mobile contract also because of the shoddy service I received.

I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to get the wireless thing to work. I admit I’m an utter numpty at these things and after several very long emails, calls etc we’ve now all worked it out it’s a security password thing. The explanations they sent me were for a different make of router that they sent – it took a weekend to work that out. What is really frustrating though is that you can never get through to tech support on the phone (someone from sales picked it up once – handy), the chat thing is not working and now the emails just tell me to call.

And breathe. I am hoping to have wireless set up in time for 2020 new year’s eve, but I do need to do it soon as the modem they sent is bust and works intermittently.

I’ve been with them for three years & can’t fault them!
Only had one problem when I couldn’t get a connection, engineer out next day, said the fault was at a local exchange, fixed & up & running within an hour.
Don’t work for, or have anything whatsoever to do with Virgin, but I do need a good, relaible connection as work from home & it’s the best there is around here IMO.

They’re better than sky. I got upgraded to films, 5 pay per view movies and upgraded internet. Just threaten to end your contract as theyaren’t fullfilihng their end of the bargain.

That was once over a period of severeal years with them

Taff, I threatened leaving last night and she didnt even put up a fight much to my horror.

Update, re promised by 9am this morning, nope! but by about this evening back online

What they didnt say is it had now defaulted all my wifi settings so took another 1 1/2hrs to realise what the problem was as I couldnt understand why my passwords wouldnt register.

Infact communication has been non existant and for the girl on customer services last night not to even try to keep my with VM really pished me off to the point of tweeting Richard Branson. As a result he has tweeted me back a couple of times and I have sent his staff a email covering he last few days poor service.
I’ll keep you updated.

Big Richard is just the face of VM sadly its run by NTL staff

Finally, finally, finally got a wireless connection! Only took 3 months…..The moral of the story is don’t bother with Virgin tech support, just ask the IT person at work and they can set up whatever a “hexadecimal password” is in about 10 seconds! Also any instructions supplied with the Virgin kit will be guaranteed to be totally different from what you actually see.

Mental trauma now over. And no more phone cable trailed across the kitchen floor for tripping purposes.

Smudge – that wasn’t a go at you – it was a self-deprecating battery related reference to my own stupidity. I seem to have gone all summer thinking I was recharging my battery when only the green light was coming on, not the red.

I’m glad my virgin connection has been perfect so far after reading some horror stories on here.

Overall my experience with Virgin has been ace. The guys turned up exactly when they said they would, installed very quickly, ran a second cable to a different room in the house no questions asked, the router is mine to manage, the connection is blisteringly fast and the telly works great.

My only tiny gripes would be that the HD box will gets it’s knickers in a twist about once a month. Power reset sorts that, the hard drive is too small and you have to pay for all the porn channels.

Virgin Media Customer “Service”

…Isn’t that an Oxymoron?!

I’ve been with them for seven years. At first the service was great. However, moved house this summer and had to deal with them for first time in a long time. They were a shambles. Lots of finger pointing between them and BT about who was at fault over the frankly shocking amount of time it takes to get service up and running, and at the frequent service outages. Having said that, TalkTalk (who I investigated as a replacement) were one of the rudest sales teams I have ever dealt with. So – bottom line from my POV. They used to better than most. They are now the same as most, but not as bad as some. Presume there is someone out there who can offer a decent service – next time I move house I will likely try and find out who that is…

How they can run a system with the doors missing off their black junction boxes in trhe street like outside wher i live for the last 3 months.

We’ve had an intermittent fault on our Virgin cable over the past year. It’s been a proper pain, and we’ve had 3 or 4 engineer visits to try and solve it. Turns out that some nonce drove a car into the cabinet in the street and it’s not been repaired, so the local chavs break into it and knacker the wiring.
That said, it has been significantly nicer to deal with them than BT…