@emassey wrote:
Thank you Jem - what a wonderful response to read. Thank you.
Thank you, but really no, it’s a depressing response, and I am starting to get a bit tired now of repeating it over and over again! Which, I’m sure is exactly what the forum managers here would want to hear ‘good hopefully he’ll clear off and stop showing the company up’. On the other hand we all need a hobby, mine being ‘calling out incompetent communication companies’, but still! 😉
Now none of this really should be necessary, but the truth is that this actually is the reality of how VM’s senior management must have made a deliberate decision as to how they want the company to function! And I’ll be honest, probably the vast majority of customers have no problems, it all works and happy days; probably most installs go off without a hitch. But these may well be more by luck than judgement!
It’s when it goes wrong that the cracks appear.
I tend, maybe optimistically, to think that most people are understanding, so if a glitch happens, and something gets delayed, as long as that is honestly communicated, the reasons for it, what is being done, what might also go wrong, what timescales to expect etc. then most will understand and accept it. It’s the total lack of ‘joined up thinking’ which seems to pervade VM at the moment, the rubbish excuses, the outright lies, the promised timescales when the person making it, actually has no ability to know if that is gong to happen or not, the lack of communication, all tends to lead to the conclusion that VM as an entity, not necessarily individual employees, actually have utter contempt for their individual paying customers. Well what we have at the moment, works (just about) for the vast majority of our customers, in as much as they aren’t complaining - but if it has failed YOU, well tough!
From reading through years worth, and many, many thousands of posts on here, I suspect I get how VM have made a conscious decision to run the company. Regarding installations and cable laying, it’s all outsourced, which in itself is fair enough, except VM do seem to have completely abrogated any control over or knowledge of what their contractors are doing, or maybe not doing.
So ‘emassey’ wants to be a VM customer and get connected up. The job is passed to a contractor and then VM simply wash their hands of it and wait until said contractor reports that the job is done. And should this contractor have other jobs to do which may be more lucrative for them, well sorry ‘emassey’, we’ll get around to you when we see fit. Meanwhile VM have absolutely no idea what the contractors are doing, call VM up and you will inevitably be told ‘it will be done today’, because they don’t know anything else. Neither the poor sap on the other end of the phone, nor indeed the CEO actually knows when and if their contractors will get around to connecting you up - because VM don’t want to know and don’t have any mechanism to find that out anyway!
So you might try to call the contractors yourself, and that’s if you find out who they are, well except you as an individual have no contractual relationship with them, their relationship is with VM, so they probably they won’t talk to you. Or maybe they are less customer-phobic and will talk to you, but you probably won’t get any more useful information.
And that’s about how it all works, or doesn’t in your case! You might or might not get a response on here from a member of the forum team (I suspect that you won’t though, on the ground that anything they say is likely to corroborate my observations above), but always bear in mind that the individuals concerned literally don’t know, nor do they have any ability to find out, what is happening about your connection. Also consider that they are VM employees and as such will need to be, well circumspect, in their responses, although, I do suspect they are contractually obliged to make a certain number of posts per day/week/month, whether said responses are in any way helpful, is a lesser consideration!
In evidence, m’lud, may I point to all the posts from VM forum team members along the lines of ‘I see you have spoken to ‘the team’ (please spare me), what did they advise?’
Why don’t you already know?
If a customer has already spoken to what passes as a customer service provision ‘the team’, why hasn’t that been recorded, have notes not been made, if notes have been made, then why are they not accessible to the forum staff? Or is VM’s CRM systems so dysfunctional and broken that information isn’t shared - or possibly, and this is a bit controversial, maybe, when you do speak to VM’s customer service, if it isn’t anything that can be solved with a ‘turn it off and on again’ - type response, then actually they make no notes, don’t escalate it, make up some spurious ‘promise’, if necessary outright lie, basically anything to get you off the phone, chalk up another ‘closed call’ and they move on the next victim, sorry valued customer?
Oh and you did know that the first line customer services are all outsourced to generic call centre(s), staffed by people on, probably, what passes for minimum wage in whatever part of the world it is, and I’d be slightly astonished if they have even seen a VM hub, let alone how it all works.
Just saying - but then again, what would I know?
John
