New customer offers VS Existing customer offers are ridiculous

[manemzjum]

So I'm out-with my 12 month contract and I have had a look at Virgins website they are currently offering the VIP package for £79 for 12 months.

I contacted them about this offer but as usual this is for new customers only. Their counter offer was the same package only with 200mb broadband instead of the 350mb you get with the VIP package and I could get this for a great price of £105 EH NO THANKS.

As I am outwit my 12 month contract I can cancel my account at anytime so I'm just going to cancel my account give them the 30 days notice then I'm told I have to wait another 30 days I can then open a new account and get the 12 month contract for £79 or get my wife to open an account in her name sooner. 

Saving myself £312

TRY LOOKING AFTER YOUR EXISTING CUSTOMERS RATHER THAN SELLING US OUT FOR NEW ONES. 

1. Hello sir you have been with us loyally for 15 years we are prepared to offer you a saving of £10 per month as a good will gesture how does that sound.

2. Oh hello new customer who has never paid us a penny come join us we will give you our very top package at a saving of £52 per month we will just put the prices up on our existing customers to balance out our shortcomings. 

[JitteryPinger]

I think a lot of the anger when its comes to VM customer is due to the feeling trapped, Virgin still have the monopoly on speeds in most areas and in a lot of areas still the choice is between Virgin's up to XXX or then x/xx from Openreach.

Personally I'm glad I have access to a services over 30mbps at most of my account addresses however there is one in an area monopolized by Virgin as there is nothing more than 3mbps on a fixed line service and 4G services are poor to no existent coverage.

As the competition heats up with other connection methods the anger should settle.

[koozwaa]

Indeed, I' m eagerly waiting for the disrupter.

I cancelled Virgin Media and was then called by a retentions again a few days later who reconnected me but still a few pounds per month over a new customer.  I'm probably gonna call him back and get him to downgrade me.  I reigned and upgraded from 300mbps to 500mbps.  Unfortunately the speed upgrade is SLOWER.

I used to get a consistent 380mbps with a download speed of sustained 46MB/s.  I now have 563mbps with a top download rate of 65MB/s which is great but the typical download speed is 32MB/s for NO GOOD REASON.  Overall is SLOWER.  Not only that, stupidly they sent an update to my Hub 3 re-enabling Intelligent Wi-Fi which an engineer disabled when he was here when I upgraded to M300 originally.  I have too many devices on the router Wi-Fi for intelligent Wi-Fi to cope with.  I can't get back into my router to disable it and really don't want to do a hard reset on it.

Once BT offer FTTH/FTTP virgin will be a little stuck.  We have a couple of companies in Newcastle who are now laying new fibre in streets which means they will soon be able to offer gigabit speeds which Virgin here can't do.  Once that happens I will be switching at the end of every contract because I don't use TV which makes things a lot simpler.

[Ng16spinz]

so 2years  and Virgin’s it’s not sustainable to offer everyone the sane deal is still in business offering”discounts” I’d love to know what margins you work too. So your statement was not totally true. Virgin like everybody else has a profit/budget matrix  per customer based on total spend, so staff can and do flex when customers call up to cancel. Retentions normally  9/10 always meet my demand, for example three for years have given me a new iPhone every year free when I ask because of my overseas calls bill is huge when I’m working abroad ( I don’t even pay the bill, work do lol) so someone on the oompah package out of contract will always get the best deal if they are polite to the team at other end of the phone /chat. Unfortunately when price matching against competitors virgin are shocking they cannot get anywhere near sky who also offer higher spec devices at far cheaper prices which is why they have lost 3 phones and 2 iPads in my household  to sky (and you can still Get the best deal again once contract finished.

[simon1112]

Totally agree. I have been withVM for over 30yrs now, and every 12-18 months I have to have a battle to get an improved deal, pointing out that if I was new I would get treated quite differently.  It is a large saving each month. Currently £40 on my price. Really poor customer service.

[craftyjacksparr]

So what you are saying is that if everyone switched suppliers at the end of there contract as expected that your business would fail?

[BenHawkeye]

Advice to VM.  Offer a fair completive price to all customers, so you retain the share of the market you require.

Then offer an permanent incentive to customers who are loyal. Arbitrary example;  2ys -5%,  3yrs -7%  etc. 

The current system is not sustainable. So I pay twice the price for 18 months...  again!I   have been with ntlworld / virginmedia a long time. 

A phone call is imminent.

[jamesofmerton]

'The current system is not sustainable'

for business it is. used in many places. groom customers in with a great deal, bump the prices up knowing full well only a few will later moan about it. of those few, some will stay when they get a small reduction. the rest go elsewhere to be replaced by others coming from the opposite direction ie bt/sky in this case.

most cannot be bothered to switch, that is why the business model works and why there are so many 'loyal customers' with their respective company after 10/20 years.