Complaint about contract renewal
Having spoken to customer services several times on the phone, and submitting the following complaint below on the website, I’m still getting bills of £150 when they should be around £90. If I don’t get some sort of response/acknowledgement shortly I will have no choice other than to contact the ombudsman and block my direct debit, neither of which I really want to do – and hope that someone can look at this with some ‘realistic eyes’ to see what’s happened.
Knowing that our current deal was due to end in February, I logged into my VM account on 8 January, and fully signed up to another 18 month contract (up from £83 to £87 but I was okay with that). The new deal had an expiry date of July 2026, and as we are pretty well organised we made a note that we would need to start looking at new deals in May 2026.
On 12 February, I received an email from VM with a reminder that my contract was coming to an end on 17 February, and my new bill would be £154.96 a month. Obviously something was not right here, so I rang VM customer services and explained the situation. The adviser asked did I have an email confirmation of the new contract, so I searched in my inbox and I could not find one. I assumed that something must have happened when I signed up the new deal (more on this later) and perhaps it was me that hadn’t done it properly. The adviser said she would need to put through me to a specialist agent, so she transferred me and after waiting in a queue I was cut-off as soon as I was connected. I rang back hoping to that someone would be able to read the notes the previous adviser had put together, but no I had to run through the whole background again, and the advise ran through a few things and offered me a price of about £118 to renew. I wasn’t happy with this price (especially seen as I renewed weeks earlier at £87) and she put me through to a specialist adviser. The specialist adviser couldn’t reduce the price any further so I agreed to terminate. Very annoyed that I’d have to give a full month’s notice at £155, and that February’s bill would be £120.
As the VM website was playing up a bit (it kept saying that an offer wasn’t available to me when I went to my account and automatically logging me out) I thought I’d see if I could have any better luck on the VM app, just to see what my account status etc. was now. Within the app, there was almost the same offer that I’d taken up in January, however it was for £88.96 which I would have been happy with. So I clicked on it, and as you can see from the attached screenshots (can provide via private chat maybe?) it was a deal to renew now and keep my VM plan without losing anything. I’ve got an order ref etc. and the screen said ‘Done! You’ve changed your package’ and ‘Good things are coming your way soon’. Exactly how I remember it saying in January. However, it also says I’ll be sent a contract via email and this never came. This seemed unusual, so I googled the issue and it appears that this has been happening quite a lot, with numerous customers raising the same issue on the community section of your website! So I’m 100% sure that I renewed my contract in January, and the reason I didn’t get an email (and ultimately the changes didn’t take effect on my account) is because there’s a technical issue with the VM online service. There are lost of examples of this exact same thing happening to other customers over the last couple of months (freely available to see on the VM website).
**Update 20/02/25** I’ve today received an email with my bill for March which is £154.96, so it would appear that nothing has been done either about my contract renewal which I signed up for in January, nor having re-submitted a contract renewal through the app on 12 February (which interestingly has resulted in a new hub being delivered to my house this week, but nothing in terms of the new contract/billing. I've also received a new Hub 5 this week which coincides with me signing up to a new deal, however still no updates on my contract or bills.
