Virgin media are whack jobs

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RyanW

The abominable Bikeman
Location
Ashford, Kent
Im moving out soon, the 12th to be exact. Work this out,
if i disconnect on the 13th of july i get charged £16 + 16 early fee,
if i disconnect on the 25th, i get charged £1.99 BUT i will have moved out, so they cant collect the equipment ,

but, if i arrange it now to be on the 25th, i get charged £6 for an early disconnection fee, because they have a 30day notice, even though i notified them 10 days ago, and they told me to call up sooner to disconnect as "there system" (Computer says no?) wont let them do it earlier, in order to cancel on the 25th, i have to call up on the 25th but i will have moved out!! so instead they charge me an extra £16.

So basically to sum up.

Virgin Media charge me £30 to end my contract early, because they cant end it on time due to there system......

If i did end it on time, i would be charge £1.99 but i cant because i have to first call up on the day, which i cannot, and as its not 30 days surely i would be charged a disconnection fee and then for teh equipment i cannot give back...


Confused?

I am.

Summary VM sucks my inner tube

god am i annoyed.....
 

Fnaar

Smutmaster General
Location
Thumberland
Go and do a poo on their doorstep. :blush:

No, it's silly... if they truly had the consumer's interest at heart, they'd sort it for you. I'd adopt the 'can I speak to your supervisor' approach, and just keep taking it higher, till someone realises the company's folly

(if you have time/inclination, though I often can't be @rsed to do this myself...) :laugh:
 

karan733

New Member
I had a conversation over an hour long with a supervisor when I left VM. When we moved flat, we werent told we needed to send anything back, so put the stuff away or in bins. A month later we get a letter saying we need to send the box back, or pay a £30 fine. I phone up, saying I dont think we've got it but ill have a look.

Have a look, cant find it, so phone back to pay and we're now told its £75. Amazed, I query how they have managed to pick that price out of thin air. They say thats the cost. So I search on ebay for a cheap second hand box to send back, but to no avail.

Finally, I phone up to pay and end the matter, and im told the cost is £125! Hence hour long conversation, reading and rereading the T&C's, arguing over how they can keep changing the price. I tell them to send me a formal invoice and I will deal with it when it comes in - two years later still nothing.

I swear they make it up as they go along. Never going back to VM again, whatever the offer!
 
OP
OP
RyanW

RyanW

The abominable Bikeman
Location
Ashford, Kent
I tried that, got no where. I know from experience "can i talk to supervisor" gets you put through to the person sitting next to them.

Luckily i remebered something a lovely irish lady told me last week "If you cant get any sence out of the other guys, go though and say you want to upgrade, you get put through to the english call centre. Then just get them to sort it out"

This is what i did, i must add almost at my witts end, the chap who answered is possible the best VM guy i have ever spoken to (well apart from the chap who told me how to get round the D/L limiter type thing)

He basically said "She was talking out of her $rse, and because of that i will just put it in you cancelled it 6 days ago because she was being an idiot, ending on the 25th of july, get everything picked up on the 12th" (no need to call or anything) and because he could, he would remove any charge.

im sorry, but any company with non-uk call centres needs to be, IDK, spanked or something.

Its amazing how if you want to add to your contract, sign up or "thinking about leaving" you get the UK call centre, if you want to do anything else, including leave you get a foregn call centre.

Im not saying they are bad, im sure they do the job. Sadly "doing the job" doesn't equal good customer service.


Regards
 
OP
OP
RyanW

RyanW

The abominable Bikeman
Location
Ashford, Kent
karan733 said:
I had a conversation over an hour long with a supervisor when I left VM. When we moved flat, we werent told we needed to send anything back, so put the stuff away or in bins. A month later we get a letter saying we need to send the box back, or pay a £30 fine. I phone up, saying I dont think we've got it but ill have a look.

Have a look, cant find it, so phone back to pay and we're now told its £75. Amazed, I query how they have managed to pick that price out of thin air. They say thats the cost. So I search on ebay for a cheap second hand box to send back, but to no avail.

Finally, I phone up to pay and end the matter, and im told the cost is £125! Hence hour long conversation, reading and rereading the T&C's, arguing over how they can keep changing the price. I tell them to send me a formal invoice and I will deal with it when it comes in - two years later still nothing.

I swear they make it up as they go along. Never going back to VM again, whatever the offer!


HAHA my parents had a similar thing, they were given an old analogue box, when they left they were told to "keep it or whatever" dad being a klepto put it in the garage, 2 years later we got a call saying we owed £105 for the box, we told 'em to come and get it, booked a guy out, he came, picked it up and took it away. 2 weeks later, another call "you owe us £105" go though it all. in the end we call Trading standards (well consumer direct) get a help / case number, next time they called, quoted it never heard from them about it againn untill we went back to them (No matter how bad VM is Sky is ALOT worse, (charged us £40 for unplugging a multi-room box) all of a sudden we have £10 extra on our bill for "secondary box rental" ..... we dont have a second box..... Hold on a minute THEY WERE CHARGING US FOR THE FLIPPIN ANALOGUE BOX. One call, a threat to take em to SCC and it soon get refunded. guy was so appologetic and explained how the system sometimes just makes things up.


So to sum it up.... Stick with freeview, and possible BT..... ok maybe not
 

karan733

New Member
I think your point reflects how businesses work, rather than any cultural problems. When you phone India, you get someone who cant change anything because their boss tells them what to say, despite how ridiculous it is. When you phone England, they have more freedom (if only a bit) and can do what you are asking them to.

Ive worked in both types of call centre unfortunately, and its night and day as to whether you can help a customer or not.
 

Bromptonaut

Rohan Man
Location
Bugbrooke UK
karan733 said:
I think your point reflects how businesses work, rather than any cultural problems. When you phone India, you get someone who cant change anything because their boss tells them what to say, despite how ridiculous it is. When you phone England, they have more freedom (if only a bit) and can do what you are asking them to.

Exactly like that with Santander. It's a great relief when an english or ulster accent answers (bit of a lottery which you get).

The message for customers is to complain at every opportunity about foreign call centres.
 

marinyork

Resting in suspended Animation
Location
Logopolis
VM often do the leave the box/we want it back routine. With a lot of the standard boxes it's fairly pointless now as they've kicked off all the pirates and they are fairly worthless, almost not worth picking up. One would have thought when they centralised the 3 different billing systems of late things would have improved but they still seemed to have enormous difficulty over the smart card deployment.
 

Crankarm

Guru
Location
Nr Cambridge
RyanW said:
HAHA my parents had a similar thing, they were given an old analogue box, when they left they were told to "keep it or whatever" dad being a klepto put it in the garage, 2 years later we got a call saying we owed £105 for the box, we told 'em to come and get it, booked a guy out, he came, picked it up and took it away. 2 weeks later, another call "you owe us £105" go though it all. in the end we call Trading standards (well consumer direct) get a help / case number, next time they called, quoted it never heard from them about it againn untill we went back to them (No matter how bad VM is Sky is ALOT worse, (charged us £40 for unplugging a multi-room box) all of a sudden we have £10 extra on our bill for "secondary box rental" ..... we dont have a second box..... Hold on a minute THEY WERE CHARGING US FOR THE FLIPPIN ANALOGUE BOX. One call, a threat to take em to SCC and it soon get refunded. guy was so appologetic and explained how the system sometimes just makes things up.


So to sum it up.... Stick with freeview, and possible BT..... ok maybe not

Crooks as well. Avoid.
 

lazyfatgit

Guest
Location
Lawrence, NSW
Whatever the iissues with VM (and ive had several over the tv packages), they are still my preferred ISP.
In 7yrs, ive only had 2 issues with the broadband service, and one of those was a failed router which was replaced within 48hrs.

I'd probably go for mobile broadband before ever using BT again.
 

marinyork

Resting in suspended Animation
Location
Logopolis
lazyfatgit said:
Whatever the iissues with VM (and ive had several over the tv packages), they are still my preferred ISP.
In 7yrs, ive only had 2 issues with the broadband service, and one of those was a failed router which was replaced within 48hrs.

Still waiting for a faster modem since the speed upgrade here (can only do 7Mbs). Gave up in the end. At least in the end with the smart cards and a similar number of calls and begging they did finally.
 

mark barker

New Member
Location
Swindon, Wilts
Aah, Virgin Media.... Gotta love them! My parents have their tv, phone & bb package, and were quite happy for the past 5 years. When I tried to use the i-player on the pc I had a message saying the connection speed was too slow. Seemed odd as vm are advertising a minimum speed well in excess of the i-players requirements. A quick call to vm showed that their package hadn't been updated over the years, so even though they were paying more than the standard package price they had slow internet connection and less channels than everyone else! VM refused to update their package, so in the end my parents had to cancel the current contract and wait 24hrs to be reconnected with a "new" package. All the equipment was left, and no engineer was needed! Now they've got a reasonable connection speed, more channels and pay £3 a month less than before!
 

karan733

New Member
mark barker said:
Aah, Virgin Media.... Gotta love them! My parents have their tv, phone & bb package, and were quite happy for the past 5 years. When I tried to use the i-player on the pc I had a message saying the connection speed was too slow. Seemed odd as vm are advertising a minimum speed well in excess of the i-players requirements. A quick call to vm showed that their package hadn't been updated over the years, so even though they were paying more than the standard package price they had slow internet connection and less channels than everyone else! VM refused to update their package, so in the end my parents had to cancel the current contract and wait 24hrs to be reconnected with a "new" package. All the equipment was left, and no engineer was needed! Now they've got a reasonable connection speed, more channels and pay £3 a month less than before!

This story has reminded me of another one of VM's golden nuggets in my last flat. About 6 months after we moved in the flat upstairs realised that we couldnt both watch telly at the same time, and their internet speeds were lower than usual. Lo behold, it turns out the two flats were sharing the same connection, and paying for everthing each. We didnt find out sooner because they both worked night shifts and we did normal hours.

Suffice to say, VM didnt entertain why we were asking for a split refund as they had shafted us :evil:
 

gavintc

Guru
Location
Southsea
Virgin Media have a real problem with closing the account and moving house. We closed the account having given ample notice, but they would not send the packing to send back the box until the account was closed (the day the moved out). But, we were moving to Italy so we had a real problem getting the packing stuff sent to my parents house. It resulted in call every day for about 10 days - they really could not understand the concept of moving house and moving abroad. They simply wanted to send the packing stuff to our old house. Inept!!
 

Brains

Legendary Member
Location
Greenwich
Some years ago NTL were cabling up the streets in our area and were offering free internet connections for 2 years plus they would wire in two phone extensions

As we had the house in bits at the time (floorboards up etc) we took up the offer, guy duly turned up and laid a cable from the street into the living room, the kitchen and the bedroom. We then switched our internet modem (as I said, this was a few years ago) over to the new free NTL line.

Every so often the one phone we had plugged into the NTL line would ring, it was always NTL trying to flog us their TV packages (I don't think we even had a TV at the time), eventually we unplugged the phone to stop it ringing and carried on with the internet.

After two years NTL sent us the 1st bill - We compared the price to BT, NTL were considerably more expensive and did not have broadband and BT were now offering free routers and broadband, so we ditched the modem and went broadband with BT, and told NTL to cancel the line.

NTL sent us a bill, and more bills, and yet more bills, they tried to get us to upgrade to the TV package, they tried to offer us broadband "very soon", they threatened to cut us off (err... "we have cancelled so yes please"),

Eventually they "temporised" our line, every 3 months they would send us a bill and the whole process would start again, it was two years before they actually could offer broadband, and they were still more expensive than BT, The process only stopped when NTL were bought out by another provider and someone obviously went through the list of NTL customers and realised that there must have been thousands of us that were not actually paying customers and they had bought a pig in a poke. We still have the wiring, never used it since.
 
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