Poor customer service

[T05h1b4]

just wondered if anyone else has had poor customer service through the virgin team across the board? 

I’ll explain my situation….

Lost service due to a damaged fibre cable on 08/09/2022,

engineer visited on the 09/09/2022 (great service to be honest was very impressed with how he presented the virgin team) 

was told an engineer would come out to fix on the 10th, didnt show, then 11th, didnt show then 12th again didnt show….

rang up on the 15th to see what is going on…. Was told next appointment is booked for 06/10/2022…. Absolutely disgusts dad by this as was told by first engineer that these things usually get fixed within 48 hours…. 

anyway I thought ok I’ll wait and see… I rang up on the 21st to see if they had any cancellations and the guy told me someone is coming on the 22nd I thought ok great! Guess what… nobody arrived.. then was told 23rd…

so today is the 23rd and I get a notification message to say I’ve had an engineer come out and access the situation (even though I have already had this 2 weeks ago??) and that someone is coming tomorrow…. 

to my patients running out i ring virgin up and after 30 mins get through to the cancellations department which I explained my frustrations and demanded I get the compensation quoted from their website… (£8 a day for no service and £26 for every cancellation) so going off my quick maths I calculated I was owed around £220… the lady on the phone I spoke to said I can have £45 😂 

as politely as I could I explained that it’s not right what she is quoting and goes against what they quote on the website, so I demanded to speak to her manager…. Apparently there was no manager around and that I would get a call back tonight….

i have had 0 calls tonight so thought this would be my vent as I truly can’t believe how badly I am being treated. 

I’m hoping to have this resolved properly without having to take this further as im sure there are people that would have a field day over something like this!

[goslow]

Sadly, your story is mentioned often on here.

In many cases, there is zero communication between VM and the sub-contractors used for the cable installation work. VM's systems keep automatically churning out dates but those dates have no relation to the actual activities of the sub-contractors who seem to operate on their own schedules.

You are correct that you will be owed compensation for the outage (assuming you didn't cause it yourself and fit the other conditions of the scheme).

OFCOM explanation of the minimum requirements here

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0026/216962/Industry-Code-of-Practice-for-Automatic-...

VM's version here

https://www.virginmedia.com/help/billing-and-payments/automatic-compensation

Support staff on the phone often have no idea how the scheme works and regularly invent some kind of low compensation offer based on monthly subscription costs.

You may well have to fight to get any compensation applied correctly for anything you might be due.

Steps to doing that would be a formal complaint to VM via its complaints process. The VM response may well be a fob-off in which case you ask for a deadlock letter (or in any event when 8 weeks have passed) then go to CISAS arbitration

https://www.cedr.com/consumer/cisas/complainnow/

(Incidentally, do you know what the nature of the cable damage is? A clean break above ground to coax cable, where some cable slack is available, is often repaired with a connection box joint. Sometimes some VM 'confusion' arises in getting this done and repairs get bumped down the line instead for a cable re-pull. Would have thought VM tech no.1 would have done this repair if possible though. Fibre optic cable is renewed, not repaired, AFAIK.)

[T05h1b4]

thank you very much for your message this is very helpful and it seems like you said this is a re occurring thing with virgin, they need to sort their support centre because as for the likes of me will start looking elsewhere!