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brightonjohn's avatar
brightonjohn
Fibre optic
2 years ago
Solved

Why I'm strongly considering leaving

Tonight I have been sent a new bill - not a new contract. The monthly fee is being increased from £107.50 to £141.00 so that will be an extra £402 per year. I can't sign in to manage my account as the system for changing your password requires a phone call and the 150 number is not working. The link in the bill to virginmedia.com/currenthelp returns the screen Oh, crikey. We can't find that page.

Then I phoned 0800 064 3854 (on the oh crikey page) and spoke communicated with the robot again. It again sent me a text that I can open but which has no service allowing me to change my password. 

As has often been noted before this is a communication company which has no understanding of the word communication at all! 

14 Replies

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  • MeMongo's avatar
    MeMongo
    Joining in
    2 years ago

    My advice is leave. I've been with Virgin Media since the Cable Corporation / Blueyonder days (25 years ish) and the service has gone to the dogs. The final straw for me was when I was calling to discuss possibly leaving, due to the price hike, and they dropped my call. It's not the first time. Your tale of going round the houses to talk to someone is a very familiar one to me and I'm frankly sick of it. BT broadband is being installed tomorrow - faster speeds, more TV, less money. Despite me having 350Mb Broadband with VM, it only ever delivered 150Mb max. 

    BT have UK based people that you can actually talk to and they can resolve things. Offshoring support was the worst thing VM ever did. 

    I'm ecstatic to be leaving. I always felt like VM had a monopoly on fast broadband, but thankfully there is an alternative for me now.

    • Richard1959's avatar
      Richard1959
      Dialled in
      2 years ago

      I agree that outsourcing the call centres to outside the UK can create difficulties but I do think your being a bit harsh on them regards retentions.

      When I got my last price increase I had decided that enough was enough and doing my research on alternatives I was going to leave VM and go to sky using their "Sky Stream and their broadband which although not as fast as VM would have been sufficient for me and that package (with landline) was not expensive. When I got through and discussed my reason for leaving the person (overseas) tried his best to help and did cut my package price but not enough to change my mind, however he then put me through to someone in Scotland who had a bit more authorisation and although still a bit more than Sky he got my pricing  down enough. 

      You mention BT as having UK based call centres, I don't know if that's a recent change but in the past they used overseas customer support as well and the experiences that I had with BT Openreach through my business were not good at all.

    • dcweather's avatar
      dcweather
      Dialled in
      2 years ago

      Same view here pretty much. It will be a wrench to leave because i go back even further to the takeover of Telewest. They were brilliant in the early days and way advanced with the competition. Everything has got worse since then and others like BT, as you say, have caught up. My biggest concern is that they may only allow my email to continue for 6 months but I think Offcom are on their case with that one. I have also heard that it may be possible for Gmail to pick up virgin mail somehow? Anyway, if they put mine up that much I'm off as well.

      • RHogg's avatar
        RHogg
        Tuning in
        2 years ago

        Would love to know about gmail picking up virgin mail if that's possible... my email being switched off and I think it's akin to the shop owner going round the premises unscrewing the lightbulbs to save ££.

        Sinking ship.

    • martinz's avatar
      martinz
      Tuning in
      2 years ago

      Same for me, after 23 years I'm currently revolving in the VM Circle of Hell

  • dnpark38's avatar
    dnpark38
    Knows their stuff
    2 years ago

    @MeMongo

    How did the activation go, did your phoneline get transferred?

    I await my activation to ZEN using Openreach FTTP, they too have CS in England and have phone people here and e-mail addresses.

  • jpeg1's avatar
    jpeg1
    Alessandro Volta
    2 years ago

    VM will not let you move your VM email address over to gmail for the very reason that you want it to - that would make it easier for you to leave!

    This is a suggestion that when VM do decide to give up email altogether they may hand it over to another operator to continue with the email addresses, but that remains to be seen. 

    The best thing that anyone using any of the VM address names can do is to move to another provider now while they can do so relatively comfortably.

  • Ally57's avatar
    Ally57
    Joining in
    2 years ago

    I cancelled my services back on 3rd September 2023 and they are hounding me for a bill of 204 for a service I cancelled, phoned them and they admited mistake but still want the money useless company 

  • ILuvNips's avatar
    ILuvNips
    Rising star
    2 years ago

    I cancelled and moved after something like 27 years. Losing the email was a biggie but I just got a new gmail address and over the month notice period slowly moved it all over to the gmail address. Does sound daunting at first but I’ve used BitWarden for years so it was a case of searching for the ntlworld email stored in BitWarden, logging on to each site, changing the email and then verifying, it was a chore but having a record in BitWarden it turned out to be easier than I thought it would be. All have now been transferred except 2 which are airline membership cards, no idea what is happening with these to be honest. 

    I now have a service that doesn’t drop WiFi 5-6 times a day which my Virgin service was doing. Only advice from Virgin for the connection dropping was to cable up, pretty damn difficult to cable up all our mobile phones, tablets and laptops!

    • ukracer's avatar
      ukracer
      On our wavelength
      2 years ago

      Who did you switch to.

       I too have been with virgin in all its previous incarnations.

       Blueyonder user group as well but to be fair they have never been good at communicating.

      All i want now is fast broadband and voip but dont see why i should pay landline prices for voip especially  as we are being forced onto it.