Failed house move / cable pull not done

[welchrna]

I notified VM that I was moving house on 9th Nov and told them that we also needed a cable pull as it's a new build (there's even a conduit with a draw string from the grass verge inspection hatch to the house.

When VM turned up on 28th Nov - the day of the move - they said they could not do it as they don't do cable pulls. The guy rebooked it for a months time and left. I was left battling to try to get this done. Been on the phone over 6 hours to VM - got nowhere. Nobody can, or will, help.

I'm left paying for a service I'm not receiving and also £25/month for an emergency 4G SIM.

VM just saying that cable pull is by contractors and they have no control.

Can I contact the contractors directly? Is there anything I can do to resolve this?

[Jonny-M]

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@welchrna wrote:

How can they make such a pigs ear of it?

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It's because they are incompetent but still attract customers as many people have no other option for faster than 100Mbps services. As FTTP becomes more widely deployed VM will quickly find themselves being the consumers' last choice, at which point they might decide to do something about their customer service.

[goslow]

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@welchrna wrote:

Thanks for this detailed advice. I'm definitely going to take this further as I'm fed up with VM's lousy handling of this whole affair.

I had no idea about the ofcom compensation and will read it thoroughly. I didn't really accept the £50 per se, but had it applied to my bill as a credit, and at no point was I ever advised about their own scheme, let alone that there was an ofcom scheme. I feel thoroughly angry that they've just fobbed me off like this. 

<snip>

How can they make such a pigs ear of it?

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They do quite a lot of practice (as you will see from the many similar topics on here, unfortunately)!

The OFCOM compensation scheme description is the baseline set of requirements from which suppliers are meant to put together their own scheme which complies with the OFCOM minimum requirements.

[jem101]

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@welchrna wrote:

Snip…

How can they make such a pigs ear of it?

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Look, now be fair, it’s not easy to be this completely incompetent, it requires a special breed of senior managers to get there, plus, I’m sure daily all-staff meetings to inform them of what lies to tell customers today!

OK, yes, I’m joking (or am I?), but VM’s reputation for customer services is so far down in the gutter that sunlight has never penetrated so deep. And this is entirely due to the way that VM’s management has decided to run the company - lots of services are all outsourced, which in itself isn’t necessarily an issue, but what is, would be that VM then seem to completely absolve themselves of any responsibility or oversight as to what their agents (or ‘The Team’ as they are now referred to as) are actually doing, or not doing as the case may be.

I’ll give you an example, the people, you speak to when you call customer services are mainly based offshore in a third party, outsourced call centre, Philippines or India, I believe. Now how knowledgeable do you think they are about the technology they are supporting? Do you think they are a) fully and expensively trained up front and entirely conversant with how the VM systems work; or b) minimally trained to simply read from a script in front of them and when you have an issue which they can’t find a predefined answer for, they either outright lie or simply put the phone down* 

The people responsible for pulling cables to new customer’s houses or re-pulling in the event of a break, these are all outsourced, call VM to ask what is happening and they simply don’t know, there’s no mechanism for them to know.

Have a quick look through some of the threads, find posts from VM forum team members which mention ‘I see you have recently been in contact, what did ‘The Team’ suggest?’ Why don’t they know, why are they asking you, the customer, what another part of their own company has suggested - is their CRM system really that pathetically bad? Maybe, when you see a post along those lines, just think to yourself, ‘actually why are they asking that…..?’ 

* Now there are numerous posts on here from customers reporting that this is exactly what happened to them, sometime it is refuted by the forum staff, who, remember are VM employees, who make statements along the lines of ‘absolutely our agents wouldn’t deliberately hang up a call’, which implies that they are insinuating that any customer (paying customer, I might add) who reports this as happening to them are, well simply lying, or maybe VM use the world’s least capable phone system, and as this has been going on for some time, it would appear that they aren’t too bothered to fix it.

I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which of these is the most probable!

[welchrna]

I have a quick question which I suppose might be obvious but just wanted to check. So let's say you have not received service for a month because the service stopped working on 1st of the month. As I understand it, I could claim compensation at £8.40 for each day after the first two days which should amount to £243.60 (i.e. £8.40 x (31 - 2)) though I would still be paying my subscription fee, so if that was, say, £50 per month. I just wanted to check whether that would still have to be paid, and I guess it does because otherwise I would be in breach of contract even though it seems crazy to continue paying for a service I'm not receiving.

[Paul_DN]

Hi welchrna,

Thank you for reaching out to us in our community and welcome back, when you have a total loss of service the Auto Compensation is added once the fault is fixed, in the meantime the bill will be generated as normal.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Regards

Paul.

[welchrna]

Paul,

Why has nobody mentioned the automatic compensation to me in any phone conversation, email or text?

Where does it say I have to wait to receive compensation until the issue is fixed? Look at what it says:

We’ll automatically credit your bill for fixed phone line and broadband issues, no matter if you’re a new or existing customer. Here’s how much we’ll credit you for the following service issues:

£8.40 per day for a total loss of service after 2 full working days from registering the loss of service to us

I see nothing about waiting until its fixed. Why do I have to wait for VM to fix the service while they charge me monthly for a service I've not received?

How is that logical or fair?

[Paul_DN]

Hi welchrna,

Thanks for reaching back out, as noted in the information you sent, We’ll automatically credit your bill for fixed phone line and broadband issues, which means once fixed any due credits would be added.

Regards

Paul.

[-tony-]

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@Paul_DN wrote:

Hi welchrna,

Thanks for reaching back out, as noted in the information you sent, We’ll automatically credit your bill for fixed phone line and broadband issues, which means once fixed any due credits would be added.

Regards

Paul.

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more reaching!!!!!!!! - to the OP - if you want the compensation amount as a cheque then demand that - it does not have to be a credit to your bill - hell if that was the only way then some of the paid amounts would pay the bill for years into the future - 12 months at £5+ a day being one case

[jem101]

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@-tony- wrote:

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@Paul_DN wrote:

Hi welchrna,

Thanks for reaching back out, as noted in the information you sent, We’ll automatically credit your bill for fixed phone line and broadband issues, which means once fixed any due credits would be added.

Regards

Paul.

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more reaching!!!!!!!! - to the OP - if you want the compensation amount as a cheque then demand that - it does not have to be a credit to your bill - hell if that was the only way then some of the paid amounts would pay the bill for years into the future - 12 months at £5+ a day being one case

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And, this is entirely true, the OFCOM regulations which VM signed up for, don't actually specify that compensation HAS to be in the form of bill credits - you can insist that it be supplied as a cheque (how quaint!). Now, of course, VM would rather that lump sum be in their bank account rather than yours, hence a reluctance (shall we say) for anyone who is a VM employee to deviate from what the company would, no doubt, rather you believe is the only way! Doing so can be a somewhat career limiting move - no?

As for the offshore, outsourced, customer services staff, well, honestly, I'm sure that they do their best, but they are not entirely, 'incentivised', shall we say to cost their client any money, but let's be kind and just assume that they haven't been fully trained to know the regs and advise accordingly - yes?

[welchrna]

Even so, the OFCOM guidelines only oblige providers to pay up within 30 days of either fixing the fault or the contract being cancelled either by the customer or by the provider; meaning that if I really want VM, I'd have to just keep paying monthly for no service until VM decide they are going to install me. Sure, the  compensation bill goes up, but they've not given me any guarantee that they will honour it anyway. I think this is wrong. Compensation should be credited on a monthly basis, on par with billing, by whichever method the customer indicates.

I spoke to OFCOM this afternoon. One of my questions was, why are there two rates: one for new installations and a higher one for loss of existing service. Unfortunately, they weren't able to tell me.