A tale of woe

[Nessandandy]

Where to start with this tale of woe.

I have registered a complaint but to date I have yet to receive a call from anyone at Virginmedia. 

it started before Xmas when my parents tried to call me and couldn’t get through and I noticed there was a line error on my phone. I booked an engineer to come and he duly arrived on 03/01/23. He identified the problem was my connection in the box in my street and he was unable to fix it. He assured me that he had spoken to another technician and they would be attending later that day to fix it. They didn’t. The technician asked me if I had considered swapping my phone line to my router as at some point in the near future all phone lines would be swapping over. He even gave me the adapter to save another technician attending in case I decided to make the switch  

I waited a couple of days and called customer service because my landline was still not working. I should add at this point that I was having to call from my non virgin media mobile so I was being charged a premium rate for the call. After spending 40 mins on the phone I was informed that no technician had been booked so I decided to take the plunge and migrate my landline over to my router as I thought it would be quicker. How wrong I was.

On 19th Jan then spent nearly 5 hrs on the chat line on WhatsApp (whilst working from home) trying to get somebody to respond as I still had no landline. I was told that the landline had been migrated and there was clearly a problem with my router so they booked another technician to attend on Tuesday 24th Jan. I had to take time off work as this was the only slot available.

Tues 24th came and the technician failed to attend. I called customer services again and was told they had no record of a technician being booked despite the fact I had the time and date in a WhatsApp message directly from Virgin Media. And to top it off they had no record of the phone line being migrated over, despite having been told in previous calls and chats that it had. I spent 70 mins speaking to three different people trying to resolve the problem and was eventually put through to the dept that dealt with the migration and was told that it would be sorted immediately and it would be migrated over the next day and I would receive a confirmation message.

Completely fed up I registered a complaint on 24th Jan. I received messages asking me to call them on my landline to resolve my complaint. I kid you not. I e-mailed the complaints dept and asked them to call me. They already had my mobile no.

Yes you guessed it, 2 days came and went, no message and still no migration. So I called again on Thurs 26th and spent another 30 mins on the phone and was told that whilst migration had been booked it wouldn’t be taking place until 13th Feb.

I haggled and managed to get them to book it for 2nd Feb. I specifically pointed out that I wouldn’t need a technician to attend as I had the adapter which had been given to me by the technician who had attended earlier in Jan.

I also asked someone to call me to resolve my complaint. I was told someone would call me later that  day.

I have made over a dozen phone calls and countless hours trying to resolve this problem and incurred nearly £100 in premium rate calls on my mobile, I’ve had to take time off work twice and I have had no landline for nearly 2 months.

It’s now 31st Jan and still no one has called me to resolve my complaint. And guess what I received a message telling me a technician would be attending 2nd Feb to complete the migration and I had to be in. This was despite confirming in my previous call on 26th Jan that technician would not need to attend and the migration would be complete remotely.

I was not prepared to incur any further cost in mobile calls to cancel the technician so I have had to take more time off work and will have to wait until 2nd Feb to call them on 150 when hopefully my landline will be working again.

This is without doubt is the most appalling & incompetent customer service I have ever encountered and nobody at Virginmedia seems to care.

As soon as this is rated I will take my custom elsewhere  

It would also be nice if someone would just apologise as well. But I won’t hold my breath. 

[Travis_M]

Hi @Nessandandy

Thanks for posting on our community forum and sorry to hear about the issue with your service

I am going to drop you a private message now to collect some information and investigate further, please keep an eye on your inbox for a message from myself.

Regards

[Nessandandy]

Update.

The phone line was eventually sorted last Thursday and I was contacted the resolution team on Fri and was informed that I would be refunded the cost of 2 mths of landline payments and a frankly insulting £10 compensation for my inconvenience.

I was informed that the cost of mobile calls which amounted to nearly £80 would not be refunded because apparently I should have known not to call the 0845 no and should have called the 0345 no instead. Nevermind that when you ring 0845 you get exactly the same automated message as when you ring 0345 and there is no warning message when calling 0845 that you will be charged a premium rate and you should ring 0345 instead.

To say I was unimpressed is a serious understatement. 

Currently waiting for the deadlock team to call me as I refused the £10 compensation offer.

[goslow · Accepted solution]

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@Nessandandy wrote:

Update.

The phone line was eventually sorted last Thursday and I was contacted the resolution team on Fri and was informed that I would be refunded the cost of 2 mths of landline payments and a frankly insulting £10 compensation for my inconvenience.

I was informed that the cost of mobile calls which amounted to nearly £80 would not be refunded because apparently I should have known not to call the 0845 no and should have called the 0345 no instead. Nevermind that when you ring 0845 you get exactly the same automated message as when you ring 0345 and there is no warning message when calling 0845 that you will be charged a premium rate and you should ring 0345 instead.

To say I was unimpressed is a serious understatement. 

Currently waiting for the deadlock team to call me as I refused the £10 compensation offer.

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Read the compensation scheme for a 'total loss of service' of your phone.

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

https://www.virginmedia.com/legal/fibre-optic-services-terms-conditions/automatic-compensation

at £8.40 per day, from two working days after you report to VM by phoning in or running online tests. And £26.24 for each missed appointment where VM fails to give you 24 hours notice of a cancelled visit.

Details are everything in working out what compensation you might be due, so map out your own timeline of events and VM's failures and come up with your own calculation of a total according to the compensation scheme. It will be quite a chunk of change if applied to the events as you have described them above.

[jem101]

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@Nessandandy wrote:

Update.

The phone line was eventually sorted last Thursday and I was contacted the resolution team on Fri and was informed that I would be refunded the cost of 2 mths of landline payments and a frankly insulting £10 compensation for my inconvenience.

I was informed that the cost of mobile calls which amounted to nearly £80 would not be refunded because apparently I should have known not to call the 0845 no and should have called the 0345 no instead. Nevermind that when you ring 0845 you get exactly the same automated message as when you ring 0345 and there is no warning message when calling 0845 that you will be charged a premium rate and you should ring 0345 instead.

To say I was unimpressed is a serious understatement. 

Currently waiting for the deadlock team to call me as I refused the £10 compensation offer.

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The 'deadlock team', assuming that there actually is such a thing and it wasn't just one of VM's 'quickly make something up to get this person off the phone', absolutely won't ever, ever call you - just not the way they work. Initiate a formal complaint, wait for it to be fobbed off and then escalate it to the industry adjudication service.

[Nessandandy]

Thanks for that info. Very helpful as I will be calling them today to resolve this as I haven’t heard anything for a week

[Nessandandy]

goslow - Just to add I have already got all of the details mapped out and and have made a formal complaint which is where the offer of £10 compensation came from.

Based on your info I should be due over £300!

[goslow]

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@Nessandandy wrote:
goslow - Just to add I have already got all of the details mapped out and and have made a formal complaint which is where the offer of £10 compensation came from.

Based on your info I should be due over £300!

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There are regular reports on here of VM staff on the phone trying to downgrade the amount of compensation paid out and convert it into some (lesser) amount based on monthly subscription costs. The automatic compensation scheme is clear enough and is what should be applied for a total loss of service of your phone line arising from a fault.

If you have made a formal complaint to VM, then VM has 8 weeks in which to resolve the complaint. If they issue a 'resolution' (often a gobbledegook reply which makes no sense, based on examples which have been posted on here) you can reject the resolution and request a deadlock letter. Reports on here suggest VM is also rather unreliable at providing the deadlock letters.

Once you have gone through the above (8 weeks from your complaint or a deadlock letter) you can escalate to Ombudsman Services for adjudication.

https://www.ombudsman-services.org/

That doesn't cost you anything but does cost VM when a case is taken on.

If you get lucky, one of the VM forum staff may deal with it on here. If not, just take the case forward to arbitration.

Your description sounds like a regular case of VM incompetence in failing to repair your line to begin with and then bungling the conversion to a phone connection via the VM hub.

[Nessandandy]

Well unsurprisingly this hasn’t been resolved and I have now registered another complaint about my first complaint as it has been marked as resolved when it wasn’t.

I was informed the deadlock team would contact me within 5-10 days of my call on 02/02/23. Still no response. I called again on 10/10/23 and informed them of the basis of my claim based on the statutory compensation scheme and was informed someone would call me, never happened. I received a text on 14/2/23 asking me to call VM. I called again today and spoke to a different person on the resolutions team and I was informed that they couldn’t deal with it as it had been passed to the deadlock team. I was informed it had been passed to them on 06/02/23 and they would contact me within 15 days.

What is the point of asking me to call them if they can’t deal with my issue? 😤

I was also informed today that the statutory compensation scheme only applies to total loss of both Broadband AND Landline not one or the other. This is despite the website stating it was loss of Broadband OR landline. Even when I read out what it said on their website I was told that their manager had confirmed that the statutory compensation scheme didn’t apply. 

Apparently I now have to wait for the deadlock team to contact me by phone or they might send me a letter which I then have to respond to. 

I feel like I’m stuck in some Orwellian nightmare 🤬

[Travis_M]

Hi @Nessandandy 

Thanks for your post and sorry to hear about the issue with the deadlock letter.

I'll drop you a private message now to collect some more information for you and I'll have this resolved for you myself

Regards