Wish to raise a compliant regarding VM treating their customers like idiots!

[PaulinLeeds]

Last Friday my broadband service failed completely. Hub 5 went into a loop showing solid white light, flashing white light, flashing blue light and then flashing yellow light (not necessarily in that order). Its still doing that 4 days later. Have tried the +60 second pinhole reset and this did nothing, indeed, it didn't reset the hub as its not recognising the password on the hub itself.

Service status said fault in area, engineer on his way(!) and will be fixed by tea time Saturday. No neighbours reporting problem - one said they lost broadband for 15 minutes at the same time mine went down but then it came back on again. Next update arrived on Saturday saying engineer was on his way and problem will be fixed by next Wednesday 20th at 6pm. Yesterday, Sunday, I queried all this with the team on Whatsapp and was then assured it would be fixed within 24 hours ignoring the official(?) update that talked about Wednesday. Also assured that Hub 5 behaviour was consistent with the fault in my postcode area. This morning I received a further update saying engineer was actually on site and problem would be fixed by 6.00pm. It wasn't fixed and then I got another update stating that an engineer is on his way and it will be fixed by 4pm on Wednesday.

These insulting messages only serve to wind customers up so it baffles me why VM persist in sending them out unless its just a ploy to buy them a bit of time. If they haven't a clue what the problem is and don't know when it will be fixed I'd rather they came clean instead of insulting my intelligence. I am in the process of raising a complaint because I'm not prepared to tolerate this insulting behaviour any longer.

[goslow]

If the complaint is about a fault in the area, which VM is acknowledging is present, then there is not too much else you can do other than wait for it to be fixed.

If you are experiencing a 'total loss of service', make sure you have registered that as such by phoning it in to VM to report the TLS.

You should be eligible for compensation for a TLS but the scheme does not cover intermittent faults if that is what VM is trying to claim the issue is as a means to avoid paying

https://www.virginmedia.com/help/billing-and-payments/automatic-compensation

[PaulinLeeds]

I wish it was an intermittent fault, unfortunately its been completely dead for almost a week now. Yes I'm registered for compo but that's not my main concern. What drives me insane is the utter contempt VM have for their customers. Every single day since the problem arose I've had at least one and sometimes more status updates from them which I'm convinced are randomly generated just to persuade you to think that they haven't completely forgotten about you. The trouble is, instead of saying "sorry, your service is still knackered and we'll fix it when we can be bothered" they treat you line a 5 year old and assure you that an engineer is either on their way or on site and it'll be fixed by some date and time seemingly plucked from thin air. I blame successive governments for putting regulators in place to give them impression that they are there to look after customers interests when in truth they are totally ineffective. 

[PaulinLeeds]

... and today's supposed fix time has come and gone with no change. New update arrived 2 minutes ago and we're looking at the 26th again. Absolute scandal

[PaulinLeeds]

A further twist...

Internet still off but for the first time since last Friday the status checker is saying there is a problem in my area but just says to check back later, there's no box to opt in to update messages. It also let me book a technician visit which I've done but it's a way off. Now I suspect this is a glitch in the status checker and the technician visit will almost certainly get cancelled by VM but I'm hoping it's not VM trying to wriggle out of the loss of service compensation. 

[PaulinLeeds]

Well, you were absolutely right, got a response to my complaint which is as you predicted. On Whatsapp now to try and find out why the Status Checker is now saying something different after a week of saying there's an outage in my area.... Don't understand why a VM rep hasn't reached out to me after seeing my posts, I've been without broadband for a week now which looking on here isn't rare but I still expected them to spot me..

[PaulinLeeds]

Just noticed that this thread has somehow been marked as Solved when it definitely isn't, still no closer to getting my broadband service back on. Have flagged it to Moderator but if there's something I can do to "unsolve" it then someone please advise.

[jpeg1]

Try clicking again on the tag at the top. 

[PaulinLeeds]

Managed to speak to someone in the faults team and he suspects my Hub5 is to blame so engineer visit goes ahead on Monday. I suspected that was the case from the start but because there is an issue in the area VM won't go down that route. 

[Alex_RM]

Hi PaulinLeeds,

Thanks for posting and sorry to hear you're having some connection issues.

If a fault has been found in the area we would usually wait for this to be resolved first, as any booked engineer visits may be cancelled due to the area fault.

So I can get a few more details regarding your complaint, I've popped you over a private message.

Alex_Rm