Phone disconnected without warning

[ijc]

Account holder is in her 90s, on her own and is vulnerable.  No access to mobile, hence no unable to call emergency services.  Phone disconnected without warning on 14th June.

I contacted Customer Services on 14th and was told that they would submit a request to reinstate which could take up to 48h, but would most likely only take a few hours.  Additionally, a technician would be sent to her home between 12pm and 4pm on 15th to carry out a migration to full fibre.  I was with her for the whole of the period and no technician arrived.  Later on 15th, contacted Customer Service, went through the whole story and was told that no appointment had been booked.  At this point, I was cut off and had to repeat the process with another advisor.  He confirmed that no appointment had been booked for that day.  He tried to manually reconfigure the phone service, but failed, so put in a request form for reinstatement.  Said that he would contact me at 11.30am the following day (16th) to update me.  I received no call and the phone line had not been reinstated.  Tried texting VM and received "Hi, I'm Toni, Virgin Media's Chat BOT........." followed by a message thanking me for messaging, but it might be quicker by WhatsApp.

It's now over 80 hours since she was disconnected and still she has no phone and no Carelink which depends on it.  Lots of promises from Customer Services but no delivery.  Time for VM to dust off its Code of Practice for Vulnerable People and get the phone line reinstated.  PLEASE!

[Reece_MH]

Hi @ijc,

Thanks for your post, and a warm welcome to our Community Forums.

I'm really sorry to hear that the landline has been disconnected unexpectedly. I'm going to pop you a PM to gather some more information and assist in getting this fixed. Please look out for it in the top-right of the forums in the purple envelope.

Cheers,

[ijc]

Hello Reece.  Thank you for all of your efforts that you have put into this.  Hopefully, the problem will be resolved soon.

[Reece_MH]

Hi Ian,

I'm really glad that you're willing to let me help out with this. Although a phone call is not something we tend to do, I'm more than happy to give you a ring as I feel this would be easier for both you and Iris to confirm the best date and time.

Depending on availability and time of day, I may be able to get an Engineer out within 4 hours of the reconnection and our phone call - I can explain more to you over the phone in regards to this.

There hasn't been an update yet, but I will continue checking until the end of my shift today (4PM) and first thing tomorrow morning.

Thanks,

[Reece_MH]

Hi Ian,

Thanks for much for taking my call this afternoon - it was great to speak with you. As we discussed, I've gone ahead and booked a Technician to attend Iris' property between 4PM and 7PM tomorrow, you asked for me to leave it in this timeslot rather than to see if it can be brought forward to prevent any confusion - which is completely fine.

When the Technician attends, they will install the landline and an Emergency Back-Up Line (EBUL) at the property. As we also discussed, I'm going to look into the landline number issue and try and get this resolved.

I'll be back in touch once I've had an update for this. Please let me know how you get on tomorrow.

Cheers,