I just purchased a new home and need high speed internet to work from home effectively. BT Cabinet is a good distance off and will give me at max 30Mb, so I check Virgin and ding - it can be done. 200Mb. Happy days.
I'm organising things at the new house and see a Virgin van pull up outside. "Great" I think, I can see if I can cheekily ask this guy a few questions about lead time and the nature of external works. Turns out he is literally there to visit me as I'm on an 'interested' list. He offers a deal marginally better than what I saw online for 200Mb broadband so I sign up, am promised email confirmation and an install date of 22nd May.
When I get no email confirmation I actually start wondering if I've fallen for a very sophisticated confidence scam, and I make my first call to the call centre. Three minutes of button pressing before I can even join the relevant queue. I have no password as it's the first call, but we use some other verification (including email address) and eventually we determine that I HAVE made an order and that an email confirmation and welcome blurb will be issued. Nothing comes.
I make another call to chase a written confirmation and offer some guidance on the pre-install work, specifically that the cable can be laid in a certain place to gain access to an existing grommit and hole used to get Sky cables into property. On a later visit to my new property I see some stuff scrawled on the pavement outside my boundary so assume things are ongoing/done/whatever.
Fast forward to today, by which point I had assumed I should have received some kind of reminder or timeslot regarding the engineer visit tomorrow. I get on a web chat and am told that my order is 'on hold' because of some kind of 'construction' issue and that the wait time would be 6-8 weeks. I'm given some numbers to call to follow up. I call them, first I get through to someone on a generic call handling line, she identifies that the field sales guy put in the WRONG EMAIL ADDRESS so I've been getting no communication, corrected that and then passed me to pre-install team. They tell me that there's no 6-8 week delay and that engineers are out today (21st) to complete a pre-pull. I should call later to confirm that's been done and arrange the internal engineer visit.
So I do that, starting at around 8:00 and get through to some guy who rolls out the same 6-8 week 'construction' story. I have no idea what that means or what the problem is, and no one who works for you that trots that out seems to be able to tell me either. I've lived in plenty of places where Virgin have rolled in and ripped the whole place up for weeks.. what are these engineers doing if further work is then required? Anyway, 6-8 weeks wait time (which already sounds like it's probably a lie) is not going to fly so I tell him unless he can expedite that I will need to cancel.
"Well that's your decision to make sir, I transfer you right now to pre-install cancellations"
He did indeed transfer me, into a number that was already closed, and then when I called back the whole call centre was closed. How's those KPI's looking mate?
I've contacted the field sales guy that originally sold me the package to give him the chance to sort something out before I get chance to cancel in the morning, but.. wow. So far, this has been the worst customer experience of my life so far. I've still had no email contact of any kind from Virgin, and have no way to access any information prior to actually having an account (which I don't REALLY know if I have or not) except to call the call centre, which seems designed to make you give up.
Virgin, if you've sold too many packages and won't connect ones that require an iota of effort, have the good grace to communicate that to your potential customers. Can someone contact me to explain what the problem is at the property and an actual timeframe to have this resolved?
