I have always defended virgin... But...

Substance · 23 Jul 2008 at 22:54

*warning rant alert*

So....

7 days ago my internet, phone and digital television all died,

I phoned up virgin and they said it was being worked on and would be fixed in 48 hours,

So I waited 48 hours and rang then again, they said i would have to wait 3 days for an engineer and then wait in between 12-4 and if the engineer turned up and if I missed the engineer they would add £10 onto my bill,

I booked the day off work and waited in and no engineer turned up, so i phoned them and they said that because it had been escalated (again) to an area fault (which it wasn't) that they had cancelled the appointment without telling me (why can't i charge them the £10) and they said it would be fixed by 7pm and they would ring me to make sure,

I waited for the phone call (that I didn't receive) and phoned up, spoke to the manager, he said it would definitely be fixed by the morning,

I woke up and it still didn't work so i phoned up and they booked (another) engineer for the day after (another day off work) and it has finally been fixed today,

I pay around £70 a month for my services and have had to take 2 days off work that aren't my usual days which means I need to work my usual days off this week, and they have basically treated me like crap, just passing me from person to person with no real solutions,

Does anyone have any idea what I can do about this? how would I go about complaining?

tl;dr virgin media suck and i want something back

Thanks for reading

queamin · 23 Jul 2008 at 23:15

Leave them that what i am doing this week, phone them,150 is retentions or what ever it called

Hutch · 23 Jul 2008 at 23:30

Yeah ring retentions mate,at the least they may offer you some discount..

I rang them to ask about cancelling when they started with the traffic shaping crap some months ago. I only pay for 20 meg broadband with them and nothing else so wouldnt be much hassle to switch to someone else.

Anyway the guy i spoke to set my price to 19.50, and ive been paying that ever since.. However many months it is

Would definately say you deserve some form of compensation for taking the unnecessary day off work..

philjohn · 23 Jul 2008 at 23:46

Very calmly, but firmly, demand a pro-rata refund for the period you were without service. You'll get much farther with something like that if you keep your cool and if the person you are speaking to won't budge politely requesting a word with their supervisor.

If that gets you no joy (and with that bunch of cowboys it very well may not) tell them (in writing) that you're at an impasse and now wish to raise a dispute through CISAS. They will balk at this as it costs them several hundred pounds and it could be the "impetus" they need to see sense and reward your loyalty.

ElectroBlaster · 23 Jul 2008 at 23:56

Can this be applied to BT aswell?

arknor · 24 Jul 2008 at 00:14

i must be lucky because ive always had really good service from TeleWest/virgin media and ive been with them for around 7 years with barely any outages in that time.

sometimes there cabinet gets to hot in the summer though because its in direct sunlight which causes the signal levels to rise slightly and gives me problems but ive always had an engineer out to fix it within a 24hours.

never use phone support with virginmedia! always goto the newsgroup! there far better and understand how the network works

ps3ud0 · 24 Jul 2008 at 02:25

philjohn said:
Very calmly, but firmly, demand a pro-rata refund for the period you were without service. You'll get much farther with something like that if you keep your cool and if the person you are speaking to won't budge politely requesting a word with their supervisor.

If that gets you no joy (and with that bunch of cowboys it very well may not) tell them (in writing) that you're at an impasse and now wish to raise a dispute through CISAS. They will balk at this as it costs them several hundred pounds and it could be the "impetus" they need to see sense and reward your loyalty.

Pretty sure thats the least they can offer you - Id ask for 2x the amount of days due to inconvenience...

P.S. Unless you can demonstrate speaking to VM and lodging a fruitless complaint with OFCOM, referring to CISAS isnt going to get anywhere to trained ears...

ps3ud0 :cool:

MikeTAD · 24 Jul 2008 at 09:16

arknor said:
...never use phone support with virginmedia! always goto the newsgroup! there far better and understand how the network works

I've been (mostly) happy with Virgin, but their service has let me down a couple of times...however, I had not thought of using the newsgroups...good tip...Cheers.

philjohn · 24 Jul 2008 at 09:47

ps3ud0 said:
Pretty sure thats the least they can offer you - Id ask for 2x the amount of days due to inconvenience...

Problem is Virgin Media provide a consumer service and as such you don't have the backing of a strong SLA. The contract probably states something along the lines of "if the service is down, well, sucks to be you and we'll try and remedy it as quickly as we can". I would be surprised if they have to give anything - so asking nicely for a "goodwill payment" may work, or may fall on deaf ears (especially if the poster's contract is still in force and he really can't go anywhere).

ps3ud0 · 24 Jul 2008 at 10:27

Im pretty certain that they will refund the period when the fault was acknowledged by themselves (and therefore actively being trying to be fixed) to when it was fixed especially if he was totally out of service.

They may not offer that refund, but if you ask and advise the above Im sure they will do it - anything above and beyond that is goodwill so is luck and some charisma

.

At the end of the day you are paying for a service for a period of time, if you cant access that service and they are aware of it, its very hard for them to conclude that they can still charge you for that period. Its gets harder when you are talking about partial loss of service (slow BB speeds) though...

ps3ud0 :cool: