@spell wrote:
I suggest upping from £150 to much more - this is massively serious and it remains to be seen if anyone at VM has the nous to recognise it as such
Well, to be fair, after the original post it came out that VM do have until 20th October to do this. So they haven't failed at all so far, and I'm sure the forum staff will do their utmost to make sure things do get fixed before that.
Regarding the point about serious problems and whether anyone can recognise them, it's fair to say either nobody with authority at VM even knows, or if they did they certainly do not care. The staff in this forum do a sterling job trying to save VM's sorry backside from a zillion failures of customer service elsewhere, but they have no voice in calling out the problems the rest of the organisation routinely create. The management of the forum (whether people believe it or not) have made big strides to make the forum more effective in resolving problems. But both forum staff and management operate under the dead hand of Virgin Media's corporate policies and corporate refusal to improve broken processes, failed systems and failed outsourcing. And the forum staff and management are not going to risk their jobs screaming that the emperor has no clothes, when VM's groupthink really is that their customer service is both adequate and improving. Better a moderately well paid job that is Groundhog Day, than speaking the truth and finding themselves out on their ear without making any difference to the standards VM operate to. Put yourself in their position and this will seem eminently sensible.
In regard of VM senior management nous, well there is none. Quarter after quarter, year after year, the company bounces along in the bottom quartile of the Ofcom complaints, occasionally managing to be the single most complained about company in all four award categories (broadband, landline, TV, mobile), although lately the title of crappest company is seeing some strong competition from the imbeciles of Shell Energy. The company will have their own complaints data, they'll have an ocean of data on things like customer inbound support call numbers, calls per customer, call wait times, calls dropped, complaints, reasons for leaving etc etc. There's the joy to be had reading Trustpilot*. So we can see that all the data's there, and if senior management wanted to know, they'll know. And therefore the appalling standard of service can ONLY be because either the board don't want to know, or because the board don't care. Let's see what the latest Ofcom complaints data shows when published next Tuesday. I'm optimistically guessing for a small improvement over previous Q1 data. That complaint data's only to the end of June, and judging by this forum things appear to have materially worsened since then, so my expectation is a dead cat bounce for the data on Tuesday, before reverting to form for Q3 and Q4 data.
* Ignoring the shameful "invited reviews", which are an embarrassing and obvious attempt to fiddle the scores, and consist of idiots posting "Five stars: I foned vigin and them sold me a package upgrade it were good. Fanks to Bobby fer takin my munny it were gret service". Who are you kidding VM?
