June 2008

Since the “manager” that was supposed to call me hadn’t, I decided to call Virgin Media again before I went out for a meeting. After being bounced around for a little while I was finally put through to someone in their faults team called Collette.

For the very first time in the last three weeks I was speaking to someone who was actually willing to take ownership of the problem and get it looked at. I was a little sceptical at first as it wouldn’t be the first time someone has said they’d get it sorted for me.

I told my story again, but instead of getting annoyed at their incompetence, I was calm and polite. Collette apologised for all the hassle I’d been having and said she would have to speak to various other departments but would call me back in 15 minutes. Again, I’ve heard that before, but before I could point that fact out to her she said, “And if for any reason I haven’t called you back within 30 minutes, here’s my full name,” which she told me, “and here’s my extension number” again she told me. “If you call the main number and ask to speak to me on that extension you’ll be put straight through.”

It was beginning to look like she actually meant what she said.

The 15 minutes passed with no call and I thought “here we go again”. Then just as I was resigned to being ignored again my mobile rang.

“Hello, Mr Hamilton?” I heard down the phone. “This is Collette from Virgin Media. Sorry it took me this long to get back to you.” Now I’m still waiting for the first person who said they’d call me two weeks ago to get back to me, so five minutes over the time she estimated was quite speedy for them.

“Your issue is a little complicated, and there’s a few other things I need to co-ordinate with other departments, but here’s where we are.”

She proceeded to tell me that my account had been disabled and set to pending, so the engineers wouldn’t be able to do anything with it while it was in this state. It had to be set to active for them to work on it, but it couldn’t be set to that because of the bill. She told me that she was going to speak to the Credit Services team to get my account reactivated, the bill removed, and then the engineers could look at it. It was going to take her a little while to get that organised but she’d call me back as soon as she could.

I was expecting all this to take days, so you can imagine my surprise when she called me back half an hour later. She had the account switched back on, we booked an engineer to come out on Monday to check out why this had happened in the first place, and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Then she said she’d call me on Tuesday to make sure everything was in order and to let me know what had been done. If I needed to call her to discuss anything then to do so whenever I wanted. About five minutes later I had an excited text from one of my flat mates to say it was working.

So after almost three weeks, all it took was for one person who actually cared enough to take ownership of the problem, and then just over an hour to get resolved to the point where we can use the internet again. There’s still work to be done, but thankfully we’re finally moving forward. Now when I write my rather large letter of complaint, there will be a special section of it praising Collette and the way she got everything working so quickly. If only everyone else that I spoke with was even half as helpful.

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It appears my faith in Nick at Virgin Media was completely misplaced. We are still offline.

I called them up again last night to find out why we hadn’t been reconnected and discovered that absolutely nothing had been done. I spoke directly with someone in their Credit Control team, and once again, told them the full story. I’m getting a little tired of the fact that no-one seems to be able to write details down in a central record of some kind. This time I managed to get her to remove all of the call charges from our bill which totalled somewhere around £400, and I thought that would be the end of it. You would think I’d have learned by now that I was going to be wrong.

Once the call charges had been removed I was informed I still owed £99. WTF!!

It turns out their finance department is just as shite as their customer service. She wanted me to pay the installation fee, and the first three months for the broadband again. At which point I rather angrily told her that these had already been paid and I had the bank statements to prove it. I was only going to pay the current months service charge, which considering it’s been nearly three weeks without internet I probably shouldn’t pay either. At which point she did what everyone else has done.

“I’ll have to pass this to my manager, and she’ll give you a call.” Is the response I’ve had about six times now. I’ve never had a single phone call back from them in the three weeks this issue has been going on.

I’m going to give them until 2pm to call me back, otherwise I’m going to get on the phone again, and continue calling today until they put me onto a “manager” and get my internet back up.

I’m sick and fucking tired of Virgin Media.

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It’s been more than two weeks and I’m still without internet access at home.

It was Saturday the 7th we were locked out of our Broadband service because some total asshat managed to get hacked into our phone line, and ran up a huge bill calling Luxemburg and Super Premium numbers. Since that day I’ve spent more hours than I’d care to think about on the phone to various departments at Virgin Media. They even had an engineer come to our house to confirm it wasn’t us that ran up the phone bill, (we have a number but no physical line installed. It was a bundle that gave us cheaper internet, but since we didn’t want the phone we just didn’t have it installed).

Even with the engineers confirmation a week ago they still decided that we had to pay the bill before our services could be reconnected. I politely told them to fuck off at that point. I was asked to leave it with them as a senior manager was dealing with it.

To be honest I had no hope that anything would be done, so I waited a few days and called again on Saturday. At which point I was told we were disconnected for not paying our bill, and I would have to speak to their credit control team. I explained the whole situation to the girl on the phone… again but she said I would have to speak to them to get anything done. 

Do Virgin Media call centers have any way of keeping track of customer details? Being a call centre you would think so, but every time I called them, every.fucking.time. I had to go through the whole story from the beginning.

So, I demanded she transfer me to them since I wasn’t going to call up and go through the frustration of having to explain who I needed to speak to, and why. She transferred me through to a guy named Nick in Credit Services, who I’m ashamed to say I got a little bit ranty with before he had the option of fobbing me off. After I explained my story to him a little too forcefully, and then apologised to him personally because it clearly wasn’t his fault, no matter how shitty the company he worked for is, he told me to give him a minute to look at all the info and asked if he could put me on hold. I agreed.

After about five minutes, he came back to me and for the first time someone told me over the phone that it looked like it was their fault. I was a litle gobsmacked. He then explained that he’d get the account credited with the money required to get everything working again. Then he said he would raise a second complaint for me at that point, and once he’s spoken with a member of the faults team he’d raise a third complaint.

‘So…’ I asked, ‘When should this get switched back on?’

‘Because of the size of the bill, a senior manager will have to sign it off.’ He told me. I was holding in a groan, because I was expecting him to say a week or two. ‘It’s shouldn’t take any more than three working days for that to happen Mr. Hamilton.’

Well colour me stunned.

‘Plus we’ll obviously reimburse you for the downtime you’ve experienced.’ He told me in the silence that the last statement had left.

‘Thank You Nick.’ I said, and really meant. ‘Your the first person who has been even remotely helpfull in the last two weeks.’

Of course I’ve heard all this before, but I have a good feeling about old Nicky Boy. I think he might actually have meant what he said. So they have until I get home from work on Wednesday. If it’s not back up and running by then I’m going to go completely fucking apeshit at the first person I speak too. I doubt that will get me anywhere but I can honestly say I’ve never dealt with a company that has such a completely inept customer service wing of their business.

Once we get back online I’m going to be writing a rather strong letter of complaint to them. I have a few choice phrases that I wanted to use over the phone, but since I want my broadband to work I’ll wait and put it into letter form.

If I can offer one piece of advise to anyone after this entire saga, it’s this: Don’t use Virgin Media for ANYTHING! As soon as this contract has run it’s course I’ll be leaving them and going to another ISP.

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Due to the Virgin Media issues we’ve been having recently, and the fact that I leave to go on holiday later this afternoon, it means I’m going to be completely unplugged until late next week. While it may be a good idea now and again to get offline, being in that state for over a week leaves me a little… freaked out.

I know the first few days are going to be great. Sitting in the sun, drinking beer, and reading whatever book I take with me. Although I can see me getting to Sunday, and then starting to get itchy to get online and check my email, catch up on the feeds I’m subscribed too, and basically just waste time surfing around the web.

I hate to think the state I’m going to be in come next Thursday. It’s not going to be pretty.

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It seems that my home Virgin Media telephone has been hacked.

we bought the telephone/internet bundle, which is cheaper than buying cable internet from them on it’s own, but had no real need for the phone. So after agreeing with the engineer that we would stick with that bundle but just not have a phone line installed. That would mean there would be no extra charges each month, and we would only have to pay the set price for using the internet.

Last month, however, the bill was a little more than normal, and upon investigation we found that someone had been making calls from our number. I spoke with Virgin Media customer service and the problem was resolved, and all the extra cost was removed from our bill.

I thought everything would be fine from that point, until Saturday evening when our internet went down. I was spending most of the weekend out of the flat so I didn’t really get around to calling them until Monday morning. Just before I called them, the monthly bill came through the door and was a whopping £135. WTF!!

I called them up to find out what had gone on and to have the charges removed. It was at this point I discovered that another £300+ had been added to our account since the bill was sent out, and the reason our internet access was down was because our account had been suspended due to what looked like suspect activities.

Needless to say I was not impressed. I logged a formal complaint, since I was assured that it wouldn’t happen again after the last time, and also because as of this moment we still have no internet access. They have to run an investigation to see what’s actually happened, and how and why our phoneline has been hacked.

The timing is crappy. I’m off work on holiday at the moment, which means I’ve been spending the last few days at home completely off line. It’s very frustrating. Then because I head off on holiday to Lanzarote tomorrow afternoon, if it’s not resolved before then I have to leave all the details with one of my flatmates to take care of, which may cause problems if there’s anything they ask about that only I would know.

Here’s hoping they figure out why this has happened as quickly as possible and get us back online. Then hopefully we won’t have any dodgy Luxemburg or Super Premium numbers showing up on a phone bill of ours again.

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