Chris_Myers wrote:
I have just received an email from the CEO's office (signed by "executive Team") that says " as advised in the deadlock letter sent you on 15 Mar 2023, you have now exhausted our internal complaints procedure and as such no further investigation will be carried out in relation to your complaint.
Initially raised with VM over 9 months ago. Raised as a complaint and reraised as successive complaints opened and closed. Resorted to Community for help, and raised complaint to executive team. Following deadlock letter, case accepted by Ombudsman, but told can only deal with procedure regarding individual case, and cannot deal with technical issues. Website says still under investigation and next update due 3rd Jun. Today called the Ombudsman and asked who I can escalate the technical issue with as VM have written to tell me they have finished dealing with any investigation regarding my case and the ombudsman do not cover this. The net result amounts to "the only option is to leave VM". So still no solution, delivery plan and timeline, no apology, and no compensation, and now "radio silence". I'm feeling particularly unloved!!
Well, I would say that is all fairly definitive, VM seem to have acknowledged that the issue does exist but that they are simply not going to fix it anytime soon, if, indeed ever, presumably it is only impacting a minority of customers and, their attitude is apparently, sorry, but if you are affected, then, well, sucks to be you, no?
The question now is this ‘what will you and everyone else effected by this do’? It does seem that there are only two choices, either leave VM, and, I suspect that anyone still within the 18 month minimum period, would be allowed to go with no penalty - or, simply ‘suck it up’ and accept that this is the way it works now!
In the latter case, you might well want to take that into consideration when wondering whether to stay with VM or not?
This does have all the hallmarks of a ‘systemic’ issue, which is really, really hard to fix, especially if there wasn’t robust testing before deploying the Hub 5. I can, sort of, understand VM’s reluctance to comment further on this thread, as there is a good chance of simply inflaming the situation and, inadvertently, giving ammunition to opposition lawyers, should, push come to shove - as they say!
Bear in mind that the forum team are VM employees, they are legally ‘agents’ of VM, they are employed in a customer facing role, and hence anyone reading this thread might well, reasonably (and Courts do like the term ‘reasonably’) conclude and assume that they were speaking on behalf of the company itself. So if a member of the forum team claims that this issue, ‘is being actively worked on’, then it really should be - or else! Now the fact that it has been going on for so long, would naturally raise the obvious question of; is this issue really, really being addressed, yes or no? If yes, then what’s the hold up? Have VM assigned the work-experience trainee to it, just to show that they are in compliance?
Or is it much more fundamental issue to do with the underlaying infrastructure, particular batches of hubs and how it works with certain phones? If this is the case, then it really isn’t going to ever be fixed for everyone - well at least not without spending an eye-watering sum of money, anytime soon!
