Virgin Media Community

[Hixxsy]

I placed an order on 7th January to have the installation for 1gig broadband completed on 18th January and I am now back to the beginning of the process once again.

I had a pre-install visit to see if this was OK, which was confirmed as doable, and to get a Wayleave agreement signed as I have a shared driveway. My neighbour duly signed the agreement without an issue. I have the termination point at the end of the drive - it's just the cable through the driveway and to my property. 

This is where the problem starts. 

I have had a succession of contractors from Kelly Communications rock up only to say "We only get paid £20 each for the job by Virgin Media. This is an all dayer!" But they confirmed the work could be done as involved lifting some bricks from the drive and relaying them, but they would need to ensure they were properly remunerated. 

I then got the go-ahead that this had been sanctioned, but since them I have had a stream of contractors showing up and citing problems with blocked conduits in the street, or just complete no-shows. Virgin then call me and roll the install date into the future. 

I was supposed to have the outside work finally done today (Monday 7th) in readiness for the indoor connection on the 8th March. I wasn't expecting anyone to turn up based on my experience so far, so wasn't surprised when nobody came to the house. 

I am now in an endless loop of rebookings and no-shows. 

What is irritating as I was offered a appealing Volt package which provided an O2 sim for £12 a month with the broadband. I didn't need it, but changed mobile provider for my daughter's phone as she was on a SIM only plan. 

I am now out of contract with my current broadband provider (BT) and are still no further on with Virgin than when I started this process two months ago. Calling the helpline is just a script, which seems that Kelly Communications can effectively do what they like and there is no escalation process to resolve this. 

I would appreciate some help from Virgin on this as this is now beyond the pale. 

Thanks in advance.

[goslow]

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@Hixxsy wrote:

<snip>

I have had a succession of contractors from Kelly Communications rock up only to say "We only get paid £20 each for the job by Virgin Media. This is an all dayer!" But they confirmed the work could be done as involved lifting some bricks from the drive and relaying them, but they would need to ensure they were properly remunerated. 

<snip>

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Sorry to hear about your installation situation. Sadly, the same story has been repeated many times over on here.

First time, that I can recall, anyone has mentioned any comments about issues of payment to the sub-contractors. If correct, your comment on lack of adequate payment to the sub-contractors for 'difficult' installations would go a long way to explaining why so many of these jobs end up delayed in a big pile of 'pending' and unactioned work.

Hope VM get their finger (and wallet) out and get it installed for you.

[Hixxsy]

Thanks for the reply. 

The last guys who turned up said this was now sorted, but having wandered around for a bit, both on the driveway and in the street, they knocked on the door with a can of spray paint in their hand saying that there was a blockage in the conduit in the street which would need digging up. I noticed they had put a couple of green X's on the pavement, presumably where the blockage was located. 

I then had a call from Virgin a couple of weeks later saying the blockage was cleared and that the pre-pull was scheduled for today, with the final in-house installation tomorrow. To date, those green X's are still there and there has been no digging up of the street, so not sure what that is all about in that whether it was an excuse, or was resolved some other way. 

[Hixxsy]

As if by magic, I have literally just now received a text stating "We need to do some extra work outside before we can get your broadband up and running. This means we've had to move your installation to 21/03/2022. 

No doubt that date will come and go and we go on the merry go round yet again....

[goslow]

The default pattern from past topics has been the customer receives the fateful text message and a new date is added 3 weeks into the future. For some, that pattern just keeps repeating month after month.

If the pavement digging is still required, the next excuse will be that they are waiting for a permit from the council to dig up the pavement. Some customers on past topics, of a proactive disposition who have experienced this, have taken to ringing the local council to find if any requests have been made, only to discover that no permit requests have even been submitted long into the process.

Very occasionally the VM forum team have succeeded in escalating individual cases and have reached someone on VM who could push through the work. Unfortunately though the forum team are tied by the same broken processes so often can do very little.

One of the VM forum team should reply here in a day or two and advise if they can do anything.

[Andrew-G]

The majority of Virgin Media's business strategy is segmenting each task into fragments, and then seeking bids for each fragment, taking the lowest bidder, negotiating their already improbably cheap bid down further.  Then they congratulate themselves and outsourcing the function on that basis, without thought on what will be the consequences for customer service, without thinking about how and where the contractor will make money, and without any systems to link together the different tasks or communicate between different teams.  This is why pre-installation, pre-pulls and re-pulls, civils works, first line customer service, CPE logistics, email operations, and customer complaints are all performed to the same standards of speed, quality and performance that Virgin Media are world famous for.  In fact, even the brand is outsourced to the lowest bidder, because Virgin group have nothing to with Virgin Media other than licencing the Virgin brand to Liberty Global for (I guess) around £35m a year.  And at VM Towers, outsourcing is the gift that keeps on giving, because lately VM announced plans to add customer retentions to this list. 

[goslow]

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@Andrew-G wrote:

<snip< And at VM Towers, outsourcing is the gift that keeps on giving, because lately VM announced plans to add customer retentions to this list. 

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At which point, no doubt, the forum will see an upturn in those topics which detail how that cancellation call is mysteriously dropped just at the very point of the cancellation being put through or cancellation requests are inexplicably turned into contract renewals or some of the other incredible CS phone antics which are described on here.

[Andrew-G]

@goslow As you've seen, the future's already here.

Unsurprising, really, that staff lose commitment when they're told that whilst last week they were a valued employee, this week it turns out they're in fact just a commodity wage-slave, whose job can be done more cheaply if turned over to an outsourcing gangmaster. 

[Tjmaclean]

This is an exact mirror of my situation. I have never had the misfortune of dealing with such an incompetent company

[Tjmaclean]

I have those lovely green markings and now some yellow ones on top, but no one actually completes any work