Virgin Media

[Arizona11]

DAK how to escalate a complaint? If I phone I just get sent round a merry go round of numbers to select. They have emailed me to say they will deal with my complaint within 28 days but nothing happens.

Any advice would be appreciated. Don’t really want to go to OFCOM, just want to talk to a senior person who has some sort of authority to get things done.

[ReformedCharacter]

DAK how to escalate a complaint? If I phone I just get sent round a merry go round of numbers to select. They have emailed me to say they will deal with my complaint within 28 days but nothing happens.

Any advice would be appreciated. Don’t really want to go to OFCOM, just want to talk to a senior person who has some sort of authority to get things done.

If you can find the name of a suitable boss then email them, in the past I've found a free account at RocketReach to be a very helpful way to find the personal or non-advertised contact email addresses for such people:

https://rocketreach.co/

RC

[mc2fool]

DAK how to escalate a complaint? If I phone I just get sent round a merry go round of numbers to select. They have emailed me to say they will deal with my complaint within 28 days but nothing happens.

Any advice would be appreciated. Don’t really want to go to OFCOM, just want to talk to a senior person who has some sort of authority to get things done.

https://ceoemail.com/s.php?id=ceo-9632&c=Virgin%20Media%20Limited-Chief%20Executive

[AF62]

Any advice would be appreciated.

Leave for a different supplier.

Unless a company is selling a unique product or it is a ‘give me my money back’ situation then life is too short to bother to deal with entities where the management must know they are delivering a poor service and are too lazy or incompetent to fix it.

[richlist]

My own experience with Virgin was absolutely awful.
I raised my issue on 'Resolver' which is available thru the Martin Lewis Moneysaver Expert website.
It was resolved.......eventually.
But my advice would be steer clear of Virgin if you can.

[Itsallaguess]

DAK how to escalate a complaint? If I phone I just get sent round a merry go round of numbers to select.

They have emailed me to say they will deal with my complaint within 28 days but nothing happens.

Any advice would be appreciated. Don’t really want to go to OFCOM, just want to talk to a senior person who has some sort of authority to get things done.

Is there a particular reason that you don't want to escalate via OFCOM?

I only ask because I've had very good success in the past with an amount of money owed to me by Vodafone, where I was getting no progress over a number of months, and escalating via OFCOM was very pain-free and provided a relatively quick outcome, with my cash returned within a number of weeks.

If you've got email evidence of you attempting to solve the issue via the official Virgin Media routes, and still getting nowhere, then I'd perhaps re-consider allowing OFCOM to look at it -

Make a complaint -

Ofcom may be able to help you complain about or report issues relating to phone, broadband and postal services, TV, radio and on-demand programmes, interference to wireless devices, or something you have seen on a video-sharing platform.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/complaints

One thing I learnt going through the OFCOM route with my Vodafone complaint was that OFCOM monitor and log the numbers of complaints they have to deal with regarding all the various companies, and there's separate procedures such as additional fines etc., that OFCOM can enforce with these companies, with a view to encouraging them to fix their own internal complaints procedures so that OFCOM don't have to get involved, and I think that alone should encourage us to use the official OFCOM escalation channels where required, so that eventually it might be hoped that the companies themselves start to get their act together in these areas...

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[richlist]

That sounds like wishful thinking to me if you think Virgin Media are going to take any notice of Ofcom and improve their customer service. Ofcom have been around a long time and I suspect they've been dealing with Virgin Media complaints for all that time. It doesn't seem to have had much effect on customer service so far.

[Grumpsimus]

Virgin Media are legendary for their poor customer service and appear to hold their customers in complete contempt.

I used to work at what was the CAB and the very last problem I had was about Virgin Media, the client had cable TV and a telephone service from them which stopped working. The cable TV was quickly restored but not the telephone service. The client keep phoning, promises where made, but nothing ever happened and the telephone service was not restored, altough Virgin continued to charge for it. By the time the client came to see me he was nearly in tears with the endless frustration of trying to deal with Virgin Media.

Another favourite with Virgin was for extra services to be added to the bill without the customers agreement. If you queried it it would be removed. It was said to be a mistake. Otherwise they would keep collecting the extra money. However, it happened so often it seemed to be almost a policy.

My advice would be to steer well clear Virgin Media.

[rhialto]

Any advice would be appreciated.

Leave for a different supplier.

Unless a company is selling a unique product or it is a ‘give me my money back’ situation then life is too short to bother to deal with entities where the management must know they are delivering a poor service and are too lazy or incompetent to fix it.

Sadly in many places Virgin do offer a unique product. Where I live Virgin are the only company offering adequate internet speeds for my household. And they know know it.

[AF62]

Any advice would be appreciated.

Leave for a different supplier.

Unless a company is selling a unique product or it is a ‘give me my money back’ situation then life is too short to bother to deal with entities where the management must know they are delivering a poor service and are too lazy or incompetent to fix it.

Sadly in many places Virgin do offer a unique product. Where I live Virgin are the only company offering adequate internet speeds for my household. And they know know it.

Not questioning you, but Virgin tend to only operate in urban areas where I would have expected BT/Sky/Plusnet/etc. to offer at least 80/20 FTTC through Openreach.

If you need faster than that then Virgin may be the only option, but Virgin know that ‘speed sells’ and often manage to persuade people that they need the fast speeds they offer, even though in reality they often don’t.

Even with numerous household members all using the internet to surf, stream, etc. that will rarely max out an 80/20 connection, and the only thing I have found that does is gaming consoles downloading the huge size games - but those are one offs only done occasionally.

[UncleEbenezer]

Sadly in many places Virgin do offer a unique product. Where I live Virgin are the only company offering adequate internet speeds for my household. And they know know it.

Not questioning you, but Virgin tend to only operate in urban areas where I would have expected BT/Sky/Plusnet/etc. to offer at least 80/20 FTTC through Openreach.

My Virgin experience started in 2013 when I moved to somewhere with no apparent alternative, and had no reason to suppose there was a problem with Virgin. It was an urban area (in Plymouth) but some way from the exchange, and the BT/Openreach coverage checker showed my best connection there as 0.25Mb/s ADSL - and that only if I was lucky.

In 2014, when Virgin was failing so badly as to be unusable (the ADSL would've been far preferable), I found there was an alternative when I got a 4G service from EE. Also during my time at that address, an Openreach box for FTTC appeared nearby, so someone moving there now has wired options.

[AF62]

My Virgin experience started in 2013 when I moved to somewhere with no apparent alternative, and had no reason to suppose there was a problem with Virgin. It was an urban area (in Plymouth) but some way from the exchange, and the BT/Openreach coverage checker showed my best connection there as 0.25Mb/s ADSL - and that only if I was lucky.

In 2014, when Virgin was failing so badly as to be unusable (the ADSL would've been far preferable), I found there was an alternative when I got a 4G service from EE. Also during my time at that address, an Openreach box for FTTC appeared nearby, so someone moving there now has wired options.

My experience was not wildly different.

Until around 2010 Virgin was the only game in town for me as ADSL would have only given me 3.5Mb/s due to my distance from the exchange, but then Openreach boxes for FTTC spread all across the town.

Virgin had generally worked for me, and had done since it was NTL’s 64k broadband service, but when it did go wrong their call centre was absolutely hopeless. And then there was the annual dance where they would double the price and you had to threaten to leave for them to bring it down to something sensible.

And weirdly once the Openreach boxes appeared and they no longer had a monopoly those annual price negotiations became more difficult. Eventually around 2014 I got fed up and swapped over to the Openreach service, initially through Sky’s NowTV broadband and then through BT.

Openreach are now rolling out FTTP across the town so Virgin’s remaining advantage of faster speeds is fast vanishing.

But as for the speed, the only time I find the 80 Mb/s limiting is downloading new games to an Xbox when some are up to 200GB, but for everything else it works perfectly.

What I did find more limiting with Virgin, and which they are unsurprisingly reticent to mention in their adverts when boasting about download speed, is the upload speed. Their upload speed is only 10% of the download speed, not 25% as with the Openreach service. And that makes a big difference when uploading stuff to cloud storage, or multiple people using video conferencing, etc.

[Arizona11]

I am pleased to say that having contacted the CEO by email, they have sorted the problem. It pays to go to the top, but you need help from LF to find out how to do that.

Thanks to all.