Menu
Reply
SONY007
  • 38
  • 0
  • 4
On our wavelength
2,431 Views
Message 1 of 16
Flag for a moderator

Virgin Media Trust Pilot Reviews

All I can say is 'WOW'. How bad does the feedback need to get before Virgin start to right all the wrongs their customers have had to endure. It's not just on here, various other forums which I won't mention where their members feel 'soiled' after having to deal with Virgin. Trust pilot reviews about Virgin proportionately are negative. Maybe at best 1 out every ten review has a something good to say about their experience with Virgin, and I think I'm being extremely favourable with that ratio. 

Take a peek: https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.virginmedia.com?aspects=broadband&page=2

To any Virgin Media staff on here: Internally within Virgin at a senior level, are all these negative reviews a concern that something tangible is being done or is in the pipeline to be remedied? Or maybe you just see the negative reviews as only a small drop in the ocean with all the households and businesses that you serve. 

I would be really interested to see if you could provide a link to a forum or somewhere else, where folks proportionately are happy with the experience that they have received from Virgin.

 

Personally, I think if there was more competition for virgin and especially with broadband, customers would be leaving in their droves.

goslow
  • 5.38K
  • 726
  • 1.94K
Superstar
2,417 Views
Message 2 of 16
Flag for a moderator

Re: Virgin Media Trust Pilot Reviews


@SONY007 wrote:

<snip>

Personally, I think if there was more competition for virgin and especially with broadband, customers would be leaving in their droves.


You are correct. I have just had BT's 'Full Fibre' FTTP installed after it was set up in the street during the first lockdown. I have watched a series of neighbours having it installed since then.

When the tech was up the telephone pole, I asked him how many people were plugged in to the new service. He said I was no. 7 to be connected (which is half the houses I can see from my own house and also about half connected to that pole). Most will be former VM customers as the FTTC in the road was not that great.

As FTTP becomes more widespread, VM's customer base will start to be rapidly eroded I think.

0 Kudos
Reply
jamesofmerton
  • 1.87K
  • 137
  • 532
Super solver
2,393 Views
Message 3 of 16
Flag for a moderator

Re: Virgin Media Trust Pilot Reviews

wow, sky has even worse reviews. wow so do bt.

they are all poor. virgins bad rating is the best of the three.
TresFrustre
  • 107
  • 1
  • 35
Up to speed
2,384 Views
Message 4 of 16
Flag for a moderator

Re: Virgin Media Trust Pilot Reviews

Trustpilot reviews ratings are open to interpretation. One has to delve a little deeper than the headline star rating.

Trustpilot is currently showing Virgin Media has 56,000 reviews.  BT has 10,000.  Yet BT has far more broadband customers than Virgin.

See market share guide here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273412/market-share-of-uk-telecoms-operators-since-2007-by-fixed...

Over the past year

BT has received 1,900+ reviews; 85% of which were poor or bad, 1% average, 14% good or excellent.

Virgin has received 35,000+ reviews; 63% were poor or bad, 16% average, 21% good or excellent

So why the discrepancy in number of reviews submitted to Trustpilot? Well, it looks to me as Virgin Media went on a campaign in Summer 2021 to garner positive Trustpilot reviews. However, the campaign resulted in 3 bad reviews for each excellent review, so wasn't continued. 

95%+ of BT's reviews are what Trustpilot call "organic". That is, the reviewer has decided to write the review on his or her own initiative without any prompting/invite from the company. Only 15% of Virgin's are organic - the rest are by invitation of the company. Now the company could decide to be selective in who they invite. Why not limit invitations to new customers who are pleased with the great deal they've just arranged?  I don't know if Virgin have done this. All I'm saying is that companies can seek to manipulate Trustpilot review ratings by invitations. Manipulation of organic reviews would I think be negligible.

At least Virgin Media respond to 99% of negative Truspilot reviews - the names responding suggest the very same team as on this Community Forum.  BT's response rate is 69%.

Hope this is of interest!

 

Tags (1)
SONY007
  • 38
  • 0
  • 4
On our wavelength
2,338 Views
Message 5 of 16
Flag for a moderator

Re: Virgin Media Trust Pilot Reviews

@goslow: Agreed.

@jamesofmerton: Valid point. It's not just Virgin Media offering a disgusting customer experience to so many.

@TresFrutre: It was of interest. Why I specifically referred to Virgin Media in my initial post was mainly due to my own overall experience with them and when seeking advice here and elsewhere I couldn't see much positive feedback. But as jamesofmerton and yourself have alluded to, it looks like all the other main providers are just as bad.

I've currently got a complaint open with Virgin Media and they want to offer me a £25 credit to close it. Now that £25 may seem like a fair outcome to some, but trust me when I say this, you wouldn't believe what I have experienced....Then again, maybe some of you would!!!
0 Kudos
Reply
Natalie_L
  • 6.6K
  • 236
  • 510
Forum Team
Forum Team
2,319 Views
Message 6 of 16
Flag for a moderator

Re: Virgin Media Trust Pilot Reviews

Hi SONY007,

 

Thank you for posting to the Community. 

 

Feedback is always welcome as this does help us to identify any issues or concerns our customers may have. 

Generally and like most businesses in our sector, customers tend to usually contact us when there is an issue they need to address but we do get occasions where our customers take the time let us know about their positive experiences. 

 

All feedback is passed on to the business to review and over the years, this has helped us to grow and adapt. 

 

If you are currently experiencing any issues that you would like addressed, please do let us know and we will do all we can to help. 

 

Thank you 

 

 

Nat
0 Kudos
Reply
Andrew-G
  • 11.14K
  • 1.73K
  • 5.32K
Alessandro Volta
2,307 Views
Message 7 of 16
Flag for a moderator

Re: Virgin Media Trust Pilot Reviews

For a different take on the same question, there's always the editor's pick over at ISPReview.  Or Ofcom's complaints report.

Fundamentally not much changes when you read those - big companies are all poor (although VM seem to be notably poorer than the average of large ISP), they are all high-marketing spend, economy customer support (at least BT is UK based), and use heavily discounted offers to attract new business.  When any of these companies' service works (most of the time for most people) then there's no difficulty, and we rarely hear from customers whose service meets their expectations.  When things go wrong, that's when you discover what customer support means, and it is almost entirely those customer interactions that are being graded in all of these things. Relatively few customers do their research and make a considered decision on all available data - instead they get swayed by fancy and repetitive marketing, and that is why the big players all spend £100m+ annually on marketing, use UK based sales call centres, and then (mostly) have crap, offshore-based dumpster-fire support, and how-can-we-drop-this-call-quickly inbound telephony. 

If you want good service, you pay a bit more, and pick from one of the companies on page 2 of the ISPReview editor's pick.  Even for those, there's complaints - the point is there's a lot more happy customers taking the trouble to review smaller ISPs than with the big companies.  I've dealt with Zen on a number of occasions and would happily recommend them, but there's still complaints from some customers.  It's worth reading the reviews on AAISP, in particular if service is more important than price, but note the smallest ISPs sometimes have different commercial offers, - a very few have charges for tiers of data use, some don't provide a router, at least one doesn't even (by default) price in a VDSL modem.  Approach reviews like you would on Amazon - does the complaint reflect the reasonable responsibilities and performance of the company concerned?  Are there trends of repeated themes?  Insofar as it can be judged, does the reviewer appear to know what they're talking about?   Does a review with poor ratings seem justified by the accompanying text?  These filters apply as much to VM, TT, BT as to smaller company reviews. 

In the case of Openreach VDSL, a supplier can't move a customer closer to a cabinet - so disappointing speeds for that customer can remain a fact, without being within the gift of the supplier to fix.  In all other respects, just because Openreach ISPs all use the same local loop, it doesn't mean the service is the same. Many people think that it is the case, as it is with electricity, but with ISPs, there's a lot more variability than is seen - different backhaul, different traffic routing, different capacity decisions, different default DNS, as well as a vast difference in the willingness and ability of the ISP to get the best possible outcomes from Openreach.  

Coming back to the question of do VM listen across different sources for feedback, the answer is an unequivocal yes.  They will have a team who do a round up of all social media content and external newsflow for the company and for competitors.  The company also have something we can't see, the extensive data from support and service calls, from cancellations discussions, and from their own customer surveys.  Those will provide about 100x the volume of data visible in all public review sites.  From this the company know full well what customer experience is like, and it seems an inescapable conclusion that they know current standards of service are often poor, but not sufficiently damaging to financial performance that they see a need to make a material change.  There are things VM are improving - reducing non-fault call out costs, ending early disconnection fees for customers moving out of service areas, keeping in bundle roaming rates for mobile, the great Volt offer, there's been a modest increase in UK support staff, and the (long term) plan to convert the VM network to FTTP is very welcome.  On the other hand first line support is still too slow and difficult to access, and often poor when customers get through, and DOCSIS remains an ageing and problem prone technology. 

As always, VM is great when it works and you don't need to contact the company.  My heart sinks at any time I need to contact Virgin Media.  By comparison, any time I have to speak with Privilege Insurance (or other companies of the Direct Line Group), I think "great, my call is going to be quickly answered, by a friendly, competent UK agent who will quickly resolve the issue I'm phoning about".  Comparing insurance to and ISP isn't the same thing, but in terms of business magnitude, average customer value, and customer contact structures they're very comparable.  VM could offer better, UK based service, it would cost less in the long term due to faster call resolution, better retention, improved reputation, and fewer repeat calls.  But the considerable pain, short term costs, and difficulty of transforming from sh*tehawk to swan is the barrier here, along with the mediocre US management who evidently believe all the crap spewed by management consultancies about "wage arbitrage" and the advantages of offshoring and outsourcing. 

mmj
  • 226
  • 5
  • 15
Up to speed
2,288 Views
Message 8 of 16
Flag for a moderator

Re: Virgin Media Trust Pilot Reviews

They need to change their business model to stop shafting long term customers with continual price rises to subsidise cheaper prices for those who play the game and keep changing providers and/or threatening to leave. Stop acting like Facebook and subtly trying to gather all manner of private information when customers are forced to call and "negotiate" a lower price because they're being ripped off and instead just do what the customer wants accurately. After all of the hassle we've had with had with them just in trying to downgrade our package and trying to resolve the conflicts between what we're being told on the phone and what is actually done/what we see in emails/my virgin media, that when they turned off our main box and left our secondary box enabled (we joked this would probably happen based on recent weeks) we felt it was easier to just lose all of our recording than have to deal with them again. I'm sure they'd find a way to disable both our boxes leaving us with no TV at all in trying to fix it.
FrazerG
  • 11
  • 0
  • 5
On our wavelength
2,257 Views
Message 9 of 16
Flag for a moderator

Re: Virgin Media Trust Pilot Reviews

Hi Andrew, 

 

I agree with your view of how Virgin and other big businesses tend to treat their customer base new and old. Older customers that are looking for bill or account support do need to go through the runs to get to any conclusions and by and large don't do what they say they are going to do. A vast number of mistakes are made in the process, in my case incorrectly being placed into a contract when my call specifically was to end it. 

 

I've experienced these practices a number of times with different companies too, overselling under-delivering support centres trying to sweep your issue under a rug, lengthy wait times etc. The fastest number is seemingly for a new customer. It's all to effectively push you away and make you give up. 

 

In my own business, we spend a lot of time and money trying to keep all of our customers on an equal playing field, for instance, when a discount is sent out we ensure subscription customers also receive the same codes. We don't want our customers having to get in touch to cancel or to feel like they are being pushed to the side and marginalised over a year or so. It's more profitable for us long-term to use this base of happy customers to act as our sales team in themselves as they are getting such good service.

 

As you say, VM has been a great consistent company to work with over almost 10 years with few to zero issues. Like other companies, you only see issues when you have to talk to someone at the company about an issue that has happened, in my case contractual. The big issue they have like others is business practice and customer retention. You just need a few bad spots and the customer base that you won before won't want to touch you again. 

 

A good read there 🙂 

 

 

FrazerG
  • 11
  • 0
  • 5
On our wavelength
2,253 Views
Message 10 of 16
Flag for a moderator

Re: Virgin Media Trust Pilot Reviews

SONY007,

 

These reviews are worse than I thought too. Man alive. 

 

Though in comparison with 87% negative is Vodafone

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.vodafone.co.uk

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.sky.com

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/ee.co.uk

 

It appears that wholesale broadband providers typically don't worry about reviews. In saying that many of these reviews will be as Andrew-G said related to specific complexities with broadband connectivity.