If I have jump through hoops every 18 months to renew contracts I’ll be leaving Virgin after 20 years

[Michael99]

I renegotiated my contract a couple of weeks before it was due to expire and talked with an agent and accepted the deal they offfered which was £80/ month despite my phones now being billed separately on O2, as the old contract expired and moved into the new contract period I was then then billed £50 over the amount I was expecting and I just assumed it was because of the two week transition period. Now I’ve received this months bill and it’s £157 and am having to work my way through the phone system *again* to sort that issue out and they’re now “trying to find me a better deal” despite having already accepted the deal they offered. This whole process has taken an hour so far and I’m still on hold waiting for the second same offer to be finalised giving me the time to write this essay. By the way, I ended up having to choose the phone option that I’m thinking of leaving because all the other options just led to a useless text message with. “Information”. It seems Virgin now pull every trick they can to stop you talking to someone. Your customer service is a far cry from the service I originally joined back in the NTL days and it’s just no longer worth the stress. The moment an alternative fibre provider is available here I’ll be dropping everything and moving everything over to alternative providers. I’ve never said anything like this and even recommended Virgin to friends but it’s now intolerably bad.

p.s. the above inflation price increase was just the icing on the cake.

[RT123]

If you’ve got proof of the contract agreement, try messaging the  Virgin Media account  on X or Facebook (they are a UK based team who are a bit more helpful than regular CS)

You could also look at other options since it doesn’t appear that you are actively in a contract (it hasn’t been added to your account). I’m hearing of some days with web orders but three weeks? 

[knight4999]

Hi

Who did you sign up with please?

Matt

[archercj]

My last contract renewal was back in Feb 2023. It went like this:

- received an email stating a renewal price which was cheaper than what I was paying (£80)

- rang them to confirm it was like for like as there was no mention of Netflix. Was told 100% it was the same just different bundle name. Agreed to renew yet within 30 minutes one of my two set top boxes had been disconnected and I had lost several channels on the remaining one. It took them 3 weeks to reinstall the STB (engineer had to visit). In the meantime:

- further telephone conversations to renew went on the lines of 'that email is incorrect the actual price is £140pm'. And when I escalated it they quoted £157. It took, I reckon a total of 30 hours of telephone calls and online chat over a period of 28 days to sort it out.

So why did I renew - because at that time they were the only true fibre supplier and I have three adults in the house regularly working from home and needing to Teams meet most the time. 

Contract renegotiations start again next January and now City Fibre is available I will be moving to a fibre provider plus probably going with Sky Stream. Sad really because the actual Virgin service (broadband + TV) has been rock solid over the several years I have been with them. And, like many who have experienced similar experiences, all because Virgin use an off shore call centre, give them no ability to negotiate or sort your issues out and you have to battle through the escalation process, at great cost to your own time, to get someone based in the UK who has the ability to sort you out. I wonder how many people have jumped ship because of this.