Automatic compensation refused
Following an outage been 24th Sep and 3rd Oct, which I notified via the app on the first day, I called up today to check the status of my automatic compensation.
I was advised that the outage didn't qualify (among various other reasons and obfuscation) because it was due to causes out of Virgin Media's control and the best they could do was a gesture of goodwill of £10.
Extremely frustrating for two reasons:
1. I've checked the T&Cs since the call (specifically paragraph 36) and that statement is an outright lie.
2. I know that others (since this was an area outage) have been offered more than £10 in compensation for this specific incident.
Surely the whole purpose of automatic compensation is not to have to deal with a drawn out, adversarial complaints procedure?
Can anyone help with next steps? I refused the £10 on the call and asked what the escalation procedure was - guess what, I was told there isn't one.
The scheme applies to a total loss of service of phone and/or broadband. If I have understood your timeline correctly ...
If you reported on 24/9, VM gets all of 25/9 and 26/9 to fix the fault. If VM failed to do that by end of 26/9 you get an initial payment of £9.76 (the payment trigger time) for the first few days of the outage.
27/9 to 2/10 inc. is 6 days so that is 7 payments @ £9.76 = £68.32 you are owed if the service was restored on 3/10
VM's general support agents have a long history from past topics on here of trying to fob customers off with a low 'goodwill' payment instead of auto comp.
The VM forum team may offer to resolve for you instead of the routes you have already tried. If not the process is a formal complaint to VM first of all (a required first step but very likely to result in a further fob-off and a nonsense 'resolution'.
https://www.virginmedia.com/help/complaints
From there it would be an escalation to the ombudsman via the timescales and processes below
https://www.commsombudsman.org/our-process
If you have to go that far, you may want to request a 'Time and trouble' award as per
https://www.commsombudsman.org/what-to-expect
After all, as you say, the automatic compensation scheme should be ... automatic!
You are unlikely to receive a reply from the VM forum team here in ‘Community Natter’. A VIP or moderator might move your topic to a better forum, such as ‘Managing Your Account – Cable’ to get a VM reply.
