Christopher Hamilton

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.