Christopher Hamilton

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.